The Antigravity Underground

by Clive Thompson

It's time for liftoff, so I pull on my thick, elbow-length rubber gloves and put the fire extinguisher within reach.

This is probably overkill, but I'm a little jumpy. I'm not accustomed to unleashing massive amounts of voltage in my cramped apartment. I do one last check of my DC transformer, which I bought online from a guy who specializes in energy systems that are illegal in several states. He put a sticker on this one: DANGER: ANTIGRAVITY IN DRIVER.

So this is it - my antigravity craft. The device itself is perched on a plastic filing cabinet in my living room. It's an equilateral triangle, 8 inches per side, composed of thin sticks of balsa wood. There's a ring of copper wire from RadioShack strung around the top and a strip of Reynolds Wrap held down with Krazy Glue around the bottom.

When I throw the switch, 20,000 volts will course through this bundle of sticks and foil - and it will levitate. It has no moving parts, no rotors, and no wings. But it will, I've been told, lift itself into the air.

Hence the name. This thing is called a lifter and is the peculiar obsession of a grassroots movement of antigravity fans. Hobbyists swiped the concept from the long-lost work of Thomas Townsend Brown, a fabled electrogravitics inventor of the early 20th century. They began trading designs online, and by last year a lifter subculture was in full swing, with basement scientists hotly debating "field to field gravity effects" and competing to build ever huger, more bloated devices. In January, one French tinkerer assembled a lifter strong enough to fly a mouse - named Orville, after the Wright brother - making it the first documented passenger of a UFO.

Sure, it's kooky. Except that scientists and entrepreneurs are beginning to explore the phenomenon. Last summer, NASA was granted a patent on lifter technology and began investigating it as a way to propel satellites. Several companies announced they, too, were racing to bring lifters to market - with an aim of perhaps minting those Buck Rogers hovercars we've been promised for so long. "This is bigger than cold fusion!" one businessman told me jokingly.

Conspiracy theorists have always insisted that antigravity was being developed "in the black" by covert government commissions and military units. It's the secret engine in the B-2 bombers, man! They're testing them at Area 51! What makes lifters different is that they're no secret at all. Fans post home videos of themselves grinning as their devices hover above their kitchen tables. Last spring, three Detroit high school students won the city's science fair by floating a giant lifter, and the teachers sent out an exuberant press release ("BEAM ME UP SCOTTY," they gushed). With stuff like this, who needs black ops? This is antigravity for the masses.

Mike Lorrig

There is, however, one screamingly obvious question: What's keeping these things in the air? Antigravity research has coughed up more bogus mumbo-jumbo than just about any other area of science. Are lifters - as debunkers claim - a mere physical hack, a trick of pushing air fast enough to float a toy? Or could this actually be evidence of Einstein's dream, the missing link between gravity and electricity? "They look like toys, these lifters," observes Alexander Szames, a French aerospace writer. "But in 1871, they tested the first airplane, and it was no more than a toy. And people laughed at it, too."

There's only one way to understand this, I realize.

So here I am. I clear my living room. I shove my metal desk as far away as possible to prevent minibolts of lightning. I stuff my cats in the hall closet so they don't somehow get electrocuted.

Then I reach down and turn on the juice.

Lifters go back to the 1920s, with the work of inventor Thomas Townsend Brown. Born into a wealthy Ohio construction family, he was a lackluster student who loved to mess with electricity. While at Denison University under the direction of mentor Paul Biefeld, Brown began experimenting with capacitors - electronic components that can store and release a charge. Brown noticed something odd. When he pumped a high voltage through a capacitor, it would produce a tiny propulsive force in one direction. He'd strap a capacitor to the end of a lever, turn on the current, and it would jump to one side, like the arm on a metronome. He dubbed it the Biefeld-Brown effect.

Brown was better at tinkering than theorizing, so he never developed a rigorous scientific explanation for why this happened. He had plenty of wide-eyed hypotheses, though: In "How I Control Gravity," a 1929 article for Science and Invention, he claimed that his capacitors generated mysterious fields that interacted with Earth's pull. Brown envisioned a giddy, Jules Verne future where his devices would drive the world: "Multi-impulse gravitators weighing hundreds of tons may propel the ocean liners of the future," he wrote. "Perhaps even the fantastic 'space cars' and the promised visit to Mars may be the final outcome. Who can tell?"

While working for the US Navy in the '30s - officially on electromagnetic mine detection - Brown continued building ever larger examples of his capacitors. His experiments culminated in a 1952 demonstration famous in antigravity lore: In front of an audience of scientists and military officials, Brown hauled out two 2-foot-wide metal disks affixed to the end of 10-foot-long rotor arms. When he pumped 50,000 volts through the apparatus with 50 watts of power, the disks spun at 16 rpm - proof of concept.

After that, interest in Brown's work slowly waned. The Pentagon never pursued the technology, and investors weren't interested. Worse, Brown's scientific credibility crumbled when, obsessed with UFOs and their means of propulsion, he founded the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena to hunt for little green men. In 1979, a book on the mythical Philadelphia Experiment - in which the Navy allegedly teleported a warship - cited Brown's participation, cementing his reputation as a crackpot. "I think that's when the mainstream physics guys started saying, OK, this stuff is crazy," says Andrew Bolland, a friend of the Brown family who runs a Web site devoted to Brown's work. For the next few decades, hardly anyone remembered Brown had ever existed.