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

260 The Hunt for Zero Point
theory has enabled Tesla proponents to maintain the line that it was
Tesla's "death ray" that caused the blast. Certainly, Tesla himself
seemed to believe he was responsible, for immediately afterward he
dismantled the "weapon" and reverted to other pursuits.
What Tesla and Hutchison shared was a complete sense of ease at
being around electricity. Tesla, for example, knew it was perfectly safe to
pass high voltages through his own body, provided the current was kept
low. Using himself as a conductor, he would stage dramatic demonstrations
aimed at validating the safety of AC power. In one of them, he
would hold a wire from a Tesla Coil in one hand while drawing a spark
from the fingers of the other to light a lamp. The newspapers of the day
would frequently run photographs of him in morning dress, his whole
body alive with sparks. It must have seemed like magic, but was nothing
more than straightforward evidence of Tesla's deep-seated feel for his
subject.
It was the same with Hutchison. By the age of 15, he had already
assembled his own laboratory, cramming it with Tesla machines he had
constructed himself; signal generation equipment, static generators and a
uranium source housed in a copper tube that used a magnetron pulsed by
an old rotary spark plug system to transmit microwaves. During the
1970s, Hutchison set up shop in a bigger, more sophisticated laboratory
in the basement of a house in Lynn Valley, North Vancouver, which
contained racks full of signal generators, low-power radar systems and
phasing equipment coupled to refinements of his earlier devices.
One evening in 1979, Hutchison was in his laboratory, sitting amid the
sparks and high voltage effects of his equipment, when he was struck on
the shoulder by a piece of metal. He threw it back and it hit him again.
This was the ignominious beginning of the Hutchison Effect. In the
ensuing months, Hutchison found that by tweaking the settings on
the equipment, he could get things—ordinary household objects—to
levitate, move horizontally, bend, break and even explode. In the latter
case, this portion of the effect came to be known as "disruption."
In 1980, Hutchison went into partnership with a company called
Pharos Technologies, which had been formed by Hathaway and the
South African Pezarro. Pharos Technologies was designed exclusively to
promote the Hutchison Effect, which in these early days was billed as a
"lift and disruption" system. This, however, barely begins to describe
some of the extraordinary phenomena Hutchison was manifesting in his
Lynn Valley basement.
Using only tiny amounts of power—between 400 and 4,000 watts
via a 110 AC wall socket—Hutchison found he could raise any kind