American inventor who, experimenting in the 1920s with a Coolidge X-ray tube, found that it showed a net force when switched on and “believed that he had discovered a new principle of electromagnetism and gravity”, in the words of a 2003 US Army Research Laboratory report; his British patent 300,311 (1928) is titled “Method of Producing Force or Motion”. The force on a high-voltage asymmetric capacitor is known as the Biefeld-Brown Effect. A physicist’s recollection links him to Bismuth (below). The Hunt for Zero Point takes the claim that the B-2 flies on a Brown-derived antigravity drive seriously, tests it against engineering and against pilots, and dismantles it; what survives is electrostatic charging for radar signature, drag and lift.
Key claim
A physicist at Martin Corporation’s RIAS research institute, Louis Witten, recalled in a 2011 American Institute of Physics oral history: “There’s a guy named Townsend who claimed to have an isotope of bismuth that repelled instead of attracted.”
Modern revival
Charles Buhler, a NASA electrostatics scientist at Kennedy Space Center, runs experiments in Brown’s lineage through his private company, Exodus Propulsion Technologies, not at NASA. By his account the team started in 2016 at Brown’s 150,000 V, now runs at about 400 V, has reached about 50 mN with thrusters stacked, and tests in hard vacuum, which he says rules out ion wind.
Connections
Biefeld-Brown Effect · Bismuth · Charles Buhler · Bob Lazar · Anti-Gravity · Electret · The Hunt for Zero Point · 1956 Antigravity Press Window · Agnew Bahnson · Cady ONR Report 1952