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

20 The Hunt for Zero Point
of flying platform. Glenn Martin says gravity control could be achieved
in six years, but they add it would entail a Manhattan Project type of
effort to bring it about. Sikorsky, one of the pioneers, more or less agrees
with the Douglas verdict . . . Clarke Electronics state they have a rig,
and add that in their view the source of gravity's force will be understood
sooner than some people think. General Electric is working on electronic
rigs designed to make adjustments to gravity—this line of attack has the
advantage of using rigs already in existence for other defense work. Bell
also has an experimental rig intended, as the company puts it, to cancel
out gravity, and Lawrence Bell has said that he is convinced practical
hardware will emerge from current programs. Grover Leoning is certain
that what he referred to as an electromagnetic contra-gravity mechanism
will be developed for practical use. Convair is extensively committed to
the work with several rigs. Lear Inc., autopilot and electronic engineers,
have a division of the company working on gravity research and so also
has the Sperry division of Sperry-Rand. This list embraces most of the
U.S. aircraft industry. The remainder, Curtiss-Wright, Lockheed,
Boeing and North American have not yet declared themselves, but all
these four are known to be in various stages of study with and without
rigs."
Everybody, in other words, had had a finger in the pie.
But where, I asked, was the evidence 40 years on? It wasn't simply that
the results of all this activity had failed to yield hardware; no corporate
history of any these companies that I'd ever read in all my years as a
journalist in the industry even hinted that gravity, antigravity, electrogravitics,
counterbary—call it what you will—had ever been of interest
to any of them.
And then, on page three of the Electrogravitics Systems report I saw the
mention of Thomas Townsend Brown—the "Townsend T. Brown" of
the Interavia piece in the Jane's library.
The report referred to Brown's "Project Winterhaven." Apparently,
Brown had invented a whole new approach to the mechanics of flight.
This notion of electrogravitic lift supposedly worked on the principle
that a plate-like object charged positively on one side and negatively on
the other would always exhibit thrust toward the positive pole, i.e. from
negative to positive. If the plate is mounted horizontally and the positive
pole is uppermost, the object will in effect lose weight, because it will
want to rise skyward.
I was in no rush to judge the validity of the physics. But I'd worked in
the business long enough to know that the military would be quick to