ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

258 The Hunt for Zero Point
had believed in Hutchison sufficiently to back him financially for a considerable
chunk of the 1980s. And even though they weren't linked in any
business sense anymore, Hathaway still professed to be a fan of his work.
"There are three kinds of people involved in the advanced propulsion
field in my experience," Hathaway had told me over the phone a few
weeks earlier. "There are the professionals, people like Marc Millis at
NASA."
Millis. The guy who ran the space agency's Breakthrough Propulsion
Physics program out of a lonely office at the Glenn Research Center in
Cleveland, Ohio. I cast my mind back. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
"Then there are the Tesla types who have an intuitive grasp of
electromagnetics who come in from the ground up," Hathaway
continued. "And then there's John Hutchison who doesn't fit into either
category."
Hutchison, it was more accurate to say, fitted into no real category at all.
He had been born in 1945 in North Vancouver and had grown up an
only child, surrounding himself with the only things that he seemed to
show any real empathy for—machines. Reading between the lines, it was
clear that he had not fitted in as a kid. He'd dropped out of school at
Grade 10 and had gone on to complete an education of sorts with the aid
of a private tutor (mirroring, I recalled, the schooling regime that
Thomas Townsend Brown had endured 40 years earlier).
Amassing a large collection of machine tools, steam engines, old guns,
chemical equipment and electromagnetic gear, Hutchison became infatuated
from a young age with the theories of Einstein and Faraday, even
though he was not remotely academic. His interest in them stemmed
from his intuitive grasp of science in general and of electromagnetism in
particular. His great hero was the turn-of-the-century electrical engineering
pioneer, Nikola Tesla.
I had done my homework on Tesla, because Bushman's papers had
been peppered with references to him.
Tesla was a Serb engineering graduate from Prague University who in
1884 at the age of 28 emigrated to America in the hope of finding work in
the then fledgling electricity industry. With nothing more to his name
when he arrived in New York than a letter of introduction to the man
widely regarded as the father of the electricity industry, Thomas Edison,
Tesla rapidly established himself in Edison's eyes as an engineer of great
skill.
But while Edison used him primarily as a glorified Mr. Fixit to repair
and refine his power generators, which were by then beginning to proliferate
across the eastern seaboard, Tesla had set his mind on introducing