Dean drive

The Dean drive was a device created and promoted by inventor Norman Lomer Dean (1902–1972) that he claimed to be a reactionless drive. Dean claimed that his device was able to generate a uni-directional force in free space, in violation of Newton's third law of motion from classical physics. His claims generated notoriety because, if true, such a device would have had enormous applications, completely changing human transport, engineering, space travel and more. Dean made several controlled private demonstrations of a number of different devices, however no working models were ever demonstrated publicly or subjected to independent analysis and Dean never presented any rigorous theoretical basis for their operation. Analysts conclude that the motion seen in Dean's device demonstrations was likely reliant on unsymmetrical frictional resistance between the device and the surface on which the device was set, resulting in the device moving in one direction when in operation, driven by the vibrations of the apparatus.

The Dean drive obtained a good deal of publicity in the 1950s and 1960s via the columns and conference presentations of John W. Campbell, the longtime editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. At that time, Campbell believed that his magazine had to change society by helping breakthrough research that was rejected by "mainstream" science, and he promoted a series of far-reaching ideas that had dubious scientific basis, like dianetics, dowsing, the Hieronymus machine, and the Dean Drive. Campbell believed that the device worked and claimed to have witnessed it operating on a bathroom scale. The weight reading on the scale appeared to decrease when the device was activated. He subsequently published photographs of the scale with the drive stopped and running. The June 1960 cover of Astounding magazine featured a painting of a United States submarine near Mars, supposedly propelled there by a Dean drive.

Dean, who was trying to find potential buyers for his technology, was secretive about the details of how it was supposed to work, but it was said to contain asymmetrical rotating weights and to generate a great deal of vibration.

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