Thomas Townsend Brown (March 18, 1905 – October 27, 1985) was an American inventor whose experiments and research on electricity based anti-gravitational observable momentum by ionizing different materials led him to believe he discovered a type of anti-gravity. He believed this was caused by strong electric fields. Instead of anti-gravity, what Brown observed has generally been attributed to electrohydrodynamics, the movement of charged particles that transfer their momentum to surrounding neutral particles in the air, also called "ionic drift" or "ionic wind". For most of Brown's life, he developed devices based on his ideas, promoting them for use by industry and the military. The phenomena came to be called the "Biefeld–Brown effect" and "electrogravitics". He was granted multiple patents. Brown's research influenced some amateur experimenters who build "ionic propulsion lifters" powered by high voltage. There are still claims that Brown discovered anti-gravity, an idea popular with the unidentified flying object (UFO) community and spawning numerous conspiracy theories.
Biography Thomas Townsend Brown was born into a wealthy construction family in Zanesville, Ohio in 1905. His parents were Lewis K. and Mary Townsend Brown. Thomas was interested in electronics from early childhood. His wealthy parents indulged their son's interests, buying him experimental equipment. Brown started a lifelong series of experiments with electrical phenomena and began investigating what he thought was an electro-gravity phenomenon while still in high school. For two years, in 1922 and 1923, Brown attended Doane Academy, a preparatory school associated with Granville, Ohio's Denison University, graduating in June 1923. In the fall of 1923, he entered the California Institute of Technology. Brown struggled with the required curriculum of a first-year student, and to help Thomas in his school work, his parents set up a fully provisioned private laboratory in the family home in Pasadena, California. He demonstrated his ideas on electricity and gravity to guests such as the physicist and Nobel laureate Robert A. Millikan. Millikan told the first-year student his ideas were impossible and advised him to complete his college education before trying to develop such theories. Brown left Caltech after his first year. In 1924, he attended Denison University but left there after a year. In September 1928, Brown married Josephine Beale, daughter of the Zanesville, Ohio, resident Clifford Beale. In 1930, Brown enlisted in the United States Navy as an apprentice seaman. After completing basic training, based on his background in experimental electrical research, he was ordered to report to duty at the United States Naval Research Laboratory on March 16, 1931. He performed the dual roles of a rank-and-file sailor and a research assistant on the Navy submarine S-48 in the 1932 Navy-Princeton gravity expedition to the West Indies. In 1933, he was assigned to the yacht Caroline (loaned to the Smithsonian Institution for scientific work by Eldridge R. Johnson) to operate a sonic-sounding device during the Johnson-Smithsonian Deep Sea Expedition to the Puerto Rico Trench in 1933. Brown was assigned from the Naval Research Laboratory with the primary duties of sonar and radio operator and had little involvement in scientific work. In 1933 Brown lost his job at the Naval Research Lab due to Depression era budget cutbacks so he joined the U.S. Naval Reserve. During the 1930s, Brown worked as a soil engineer for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and then as an administrator for the Ohio Civilian Conservation Corps. Brown and Josephine were divorced briefly in 1937, remarrying in September 1940. Also in 1937, Brown re-enlisted in the U.S. Navy. In 1938, Brown was promoted to lieutenant; in 1939, he was assigned for a few months as a material engineer for the Navy's flying boats built at the Glenn L. Martin Company in Maryland. He was engaged in magnetic and acoustic mine-sweeping research and development under the Bureau of Ships in Washington, D.C., from October 1940 to March 1941. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, he was transferred to the Atlantic Fleet Radar School in Norfolk, Virginia, in May 1942. In October 1942, Brown was discharged from Navy service with Brown requesting to resign "for the good of the naval service to escape trial by General Court Martial" and with his official discharge exam listing "no comment" as to the reasons why. After 1944, Brown worked as a radar consultant to the Lockheed-Vega Aircraft Corporation. After leaving Lockheed, Brown moved to Hawaii where he was temporarily a consultant to the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard due to Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet Admiral Arthur W. Radford's interest in Brown's ideas on Gravitor devices. However, the work was looked at more as a curiosity than any workable device. In 1952, Brown moved to Cleveland, hoping to sell his Gravitor device to the military establishment, but there was little interest in it. In 1955, Brown went to England, then to France. In research testing for the Société nationale des constructions aéronautiques du Sud-Ouest (SNCASO), Brown demonstrated what he thought was an anti-gravity effect in a vacuum with his device. Funding was cut off when SNCASO was merged with SNCASE, forcing Brown to return to the United States in 1956. Brown became involved in the subject of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and, in 1956, helped found the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), although he was forced out as director in 1957 with allegations that Brown was using funds to further anti-gravity research. In 1958, Brown worked as a research and development consultant for Agnew Bahnson's Whitehall Rand Project, an anti-gravity venture at the Bahnson Company of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. That same year, Brown set up an anti-gravity corporation, Rand International Limited. He filed several patents, but his ideas were met with little success. In the early 1960s, he worked as a physicist for Electrokinetics Inc., of Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. He then went into semi-retirement, living in California. Brown died on October 27, 1985.
Anti-gravity research
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