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Chapter 3
Thomas Townsend Brown was born into a prominent family from
Zanesville, Ohio, in 1905, two years after the Wright Brothers, residents
of nearby Dayton, propelled their "Flyer," the first aircraft capable of
sustained powered flight, into the sky at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
From an early age, Brown exhibited traits that would later come to mark
his work as a scientist. As a child, he built a workshop in his backyard and
at the age often was already receiving signals from across the Atlantic on
a homemade radio-receiver. At 16, he was broadcasting from his own
radio station.
For all his prowess as an inventor, Brown appears to have been a
somewhat recalcitrant student. In 1922, he was enrolled at the California
Institute of Technology (Cal Tech), but soon fell into a disagreement
with his teachers over the time allowed by the Institution for laboratory
work, something he lived for. After failing his first year exams in
chemistry and physics, he persuaded his father to sponsor the construction
of a laboratory of his own. With no expense spared, a lab was
installed on the second floor of their new house in Pasadena.
The quid pro quo, apparently, was that "T.T." had to receive home
tuition to boost his grades. Brown subsequently reported that he made
considerable progress in chemistry, while still finding time to devise an
X-ray spectrometer for astronomical measurements. It was at this point
that he began to develop his first theories about electrogravitation. In
essence, Brown believed that gravitation might be a form of radiation,
much like light, with a "push" as opposed to a "pull" effect.
"Word of this got out among my classmates," he related in a document
called "A Short Autobiography," which I found on the Net, "and
although shunned and made fun of by the professors, I was nevertheless
called to the attention of Dr. Robert Andrew Millikan, Director of Cal
Tech and, incidentally, my first physics teacher, who explained to me in
great detail, why such an explanation of gravitation was utterly impossible
and not to be considered."
In 1923, Brown transferred to Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, and
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