Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

192 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
Even hydroelectric power plants use destructive motion, he said; they
pressure water and chop it through turbines. The result is dead water. His
suction turbine, on the other hand, invigorated water. The result, he said,
was clean healthy water.
His stubborn certainty angered academics who assumed superiority
over a largely self-educated man. It is not surprising that he was sometimes
abrasive; the Schauberger heritage included defiant courage. His
ancestors were privileged Bavarian aristocracy with a manor named
Schauburg, and in the thirteenth century this ancient family lost its royal
privileges by publicly defying a powerful Bishop.
IN TUNE WITH NATURE
A few centuries later, about 1650 A.D., a family member moved to Austria
and began a branch of the Schaubergers which specialized in caring for
forest and wildlife. Breathing the scent of sun-warmed pines, generations
of Schaubergers then lived their family motto of fidus in silvis silentibus—
faithful to the silent forests. Viktor's father was master woodsman in
Holzschlag at Lake Plockenstein, and Viktor absorbed accumulated wisdom
of generations of forest wardens. His mother also taught him to tune
in to nature—to listen to its singing in a mountain stream as well as its
whispering through the treetops, and to learn its cycles and rhythms.
The family's closeness to their environment was not only on a spiritual
or poetic level; it was based on practical observations. For example,
Viktor's elder relatives respected a certain vigour which they found in
cool unpolluted water. So, instead of irrigating meadows in warm sunlight
when the water was sluggish, they spent moonlit nights lifting gates on
their irrigation canals so that the liveliest [most life-giving] water would
flow onto their land. It grew noticeably more grain and grasses than did
the neighbouring lands.
From childhood Viktor aspired to be a forest warden like his father,
grandfather and a line of great-grandfathers. As a boy he explored nearby
woods and then roamed farther. He came to know the rumbling rivers and
the musical streams which feed them, just as other young people know
streets and hallways and sounds of their childhood. However, he noticed
that natural waterways rarely flowed in straight corridors. Instead, a river
undulates through the landscape, swerving to one side and then to the
other. Within the larger meandering caused by Earth's turning, water coils
around a twisting central axis as it sweeps downstream. Keeping in mind
this inward-spiralling motion, Schauberger later developed the basis for a
technology in tune with nature.
When Viktor reached university age, his father wanted him to train as