Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion (9 page)
As described in the report, the vehicle would use spherical pontake off, the craft would ignite its flame jet without electrical excitation (figure 2.12, Stage 1).
The jet would be powered by either kerosene or solid rocket propellants.
The exhaust would set up a positive pressure beneath the canopy that would loft the craft about ten feet above the water surface, allowing the pontoons to be partially retracted.
A gyro wheel in the cabin dome would provide horizontal stability and orientation control.
Figure 2.11.
Prototype aero-marine vehicle powered by a high-voltage flame-jet
generator.
(Courtesy of the Townsend Brown Family and Qualight, L.L.C.)
Once the vehicle was airborne, the flame would be electrically energized by applying high voltage to the incandescent cathode (figure 2.12, Stage 2).
An electric gradient would establish itself along the length of the exhaust plume, with the voltage progressively increasing downstream to reach a potential difference of several million volts.
A potential gradient would similarly build up on the nozzle’s conical collector electrodes, which collect power for the craft.
The exhaust would set up a negative-ion space charge below the craft, and ionizer electrodes on the canopy would create positive ions above the craft.
The positive charges emitted from the canopy would create an ion wind that would move downward and radially inward toward the central cathodic axis, setting up a toroidal ion vortex.
The flow would receive negative charges from the exhaust, which would cause it to accelerate upward toward the canopy.
The large volume of upward-moving plasma would impart upward momentum to the undersurface of the positively charged canopy, thereby helping to loft the vehicle.
Also, the inflowing ion plasma would buck the flame jet’s outgoing gas flow, confining its flow and increasing the lift pressure beneath the canopy.
At this stage, the vortex would be slightly larger than the diameter of the craft.
The craft would have risen to about a 25-foot elevation and would continue to rise as subcanopy pressures induce further lift.
At this point, the pontoons would have completely retracted.
Smoke tests, which Brown conducted on an 18inch-diameter model, showed that this electrode geometry indeed generates a toroidal vortex (see
chapter 3, figure 3.3
).
Figure 2.12.
Stages in the takeoff of Brown’s electrohydrodynamic propulsion
vehicle.
(Courtesy of the Townsend Brown Family and Qualight, L.L.C.)
The report states that as the craft rises, the toroidal vortex would expand to about three (craft) diameters.
The axial upwelling would continue to buck the downward jetstream to add to the jet’s upward thrust (figure 2.12, Stage 3).
At about a 50-foot elevation, the subcanopy pressure would diminish to equal the weight of the craft and equilibrium would be established.
In this fashion, the craft would be able to hover at about this height, its canopy riding upon the vortex, whose aerodynamic pressure would act at all points against the craft’s underside, providing lift.
Electrogravitic forces would also contribute to this effect, as would electrostatic forces between the craft and charges in the surrounding air and charged plasma.
Horizontal thrust in any direction would be provided by altering the symmetry of the electric field and of the resulting vortex pattern (figure 2.12, Stage 4).
This would allow flame gas to escape to the rear of the craft and the forward side of the vortex to exert traction upon the water surface.
The unbalanced canopy pressures would provide forward thrust, and the additional lift of the leading edge would cause a change in the altitude of the craft.
Project Winterhaven also requested funds to develop solid-state electrogravitic motors similar to Brown’s early gravitators.
It stressed the importance of improvements that had been achieved in developing new dielectric materials, noting that the available dielectric constant K-values had progressively increased from 6 to 100 to 6,000 to 30,000 and beyond.
It proposed engineering a 500-pound high-K dielectric motor for propelling a model ship and envisioned that this would presage the development of much larger motors for ships weighing thousands of tons.
Yet another Winterhaven project concerned the investigation of electrogravitic communication equipment that would transmit and receive electrogravitic waves.
Early in 1952, Brown conducted a demonstration in Los Angeles of one such transmitting and receiving system, through which he successfully transmitted a signal over a distance of 35 feet to a receiver located within an electrically grounded metallic enclosure.
20
He used a relaxation oscillator as his transmitter.
This consisted of a high-voltage power supply that continuously charged a capacitor, which, in turn, periodically discharged itself through a small spark gap when its voltage had reached a certain value (figure 2.13).
Just as in his early capacitor experiments, Brown reasoned that electrogravitic coupling would cause the capacitor to radiate gravitational waves.
His receiver antenna consisted of a charged high-voltage capacitor bridge circuit similar to the one he used for his gravito-electric measurements.
Because the grounded Faraday shield that surrounded his receiver antenna was able to prevent the entry of ordinary electromagnetic waves, he concluded that the signal being conveyed was gravitic rather than electromagnetic and that his capacitor bridge was able to detect gravitational disturbances.
Figure 2.13.
Schematic circuit diagrams of Brown’s electrogravitic wave
transmitter (left) and receiver (right).
In a patent disclosure Brown wrote in September 1953, he described another version of this communication device, which was designed to send a signal from an audio oscillator to an electrically shielded radio receiver.
However, instead of capacitors, this device used heavy spherical masses for the transmitter and receiver antennae.
21
His Project Winterhaven proposal envisioned that electrogravitic wave transmission and reception could be developed into a fundamentally new communication technology.
It noted that because of the extreme penetrating ability of these waves, messages could be transmitted to submarines and to underground shelters and military installations, locations inaccessible to normal radio-wave communication.
Brown’s spherical antenna gravitational wave generator bore a close resemblance to devices developed by scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla in the early twentieth century.
How such devices generate gravity waves may be understood in terms of the subquantum kinetics ether methodology (see box).
22,
23
A Gravity Wave Model
As mentioned earlier, subquantum kinetics predicts that a positive charge should induce the formation of a gravity potential well and a negative charge should induce the formation of a gravity potential hill.
Hence, a spherical conductor that is alternately charged and discharged should radiate both an electric potential wave and a gravity potential wave.
These waves would be scalar waves rather than force field vector waves because they would consist of changes in energy potential (i.e., ether concentration), which is a scalar quantity.
That is, a potential wave would have a measurable magnitude at a given point in space but no associated direction.
Electric charges on a spherical monopole antenna would not be laterally displaced to any appreciable extent, as they would be in a conventional dipole antenna; hence, they would induce a minimal magnetic field.
So unlike Hertzian electromagnetic waves, which oscillate transverse to their direction of travel, these scalar waves would induce no forces transverse to a wave’s direction of travel.
They would instead produce longitudinal electric and gravity potential field gradients that would induce longitudinal forces, that is, forces aligned with the wave’s direction of propagation.
Tesla’s ether sound-wave model for describing radiant energy waves fits this energy potential description quite well because sinusoidal variations in ether concentration may be visualized as alternate compressions and rarefactions of the ether medium, analogous to the compressions and rarefactions of air molecules in a sound wave.
A high ether concentration would correspond to a high energy potential, and a low ether concentration would correspond to a low energy potential.
So according to this model, the antenna would be radiating spherical waves of alternating ether concentration.
In the event that the waves were made to repeatedly reflect back and forth under resonance, they could reinforce one another to produce stationary wave patterns characterized by very strong longitudinal forces.
The Project Winterhaven proposal requested that its projects be carried out under a Department of Defense R&D contract administered by a prime contractor.
It advocated a cooperative participation of four commercial corporations engaged in applied research and four academic institutions engaged in pure research.
The four corporations were to comprise Lear Inc.
(for gravimetric field measurements), Jansky & Bailey (for electrogravitic wave communication research), Brush Development Company (for development of high-K dielectric thrust motors), and Hancock Manufacturing Company (for development of the disc airfoils).
The academic institutions included Stanford Research Institute, the University of Chicago, and the Franklin Institute.
The proposal acknowledged that the Pentagon had classified some of Brown’s past electrogravitic research.
It noted that additional data confirming the existence of the electrogravitic coupling effect have been “associated with government research projects of a highly classified status, and publication has been precluded.”
Nevertheless, Brown’s desire in proposing Project Winterhaven was not to keep this technology secret but to accelerate its development so that it could benefit humanity.
Unfortunately, his dream of unrestricted access to electrogravitic technology was not to be realized.
Perhaps unknown to him at that time, highly classified work on electrogravitics then in progress had proceeded to a relatively advanced stage of development.
In particular, out of all the ideas proposed in Project Winterhaven, the electrogravitic wave communicator device came closest of all to this ongoing sensitive propulsion research.