Thomas Townsend Brown

Thomas Townsend Brown (March 18, 1905 – October 27, 1985) was an American inventor whose research into odd electrical effects led him to believe he had discovered a connection between strong electric fields and gravity, a type of antigravity effect. For most of his life he attempted to develop devices based on his ideas, trying to promote them for use by industry and the military. He came up with the name "Biefeld–Brown effect" for the phenomenon he had discovered and called the field of study electrogravitics.

Instead of being an antigravity force, what Brown observed has generally been attributed to electrohydrodynamics, the movement of charged particles that transfers their momentum to surrounding neutral particles in air, also called "ionic drift" or "ionic wind".

In recent years Brown's research has had an influence in the community of amateur experimenters who build "ionic propulsion lifters" powered by high voltage. There are still claims Brown discovered antigravity, an idea popular with the unidentified flying object (UFO) community and spawning many conspiracy theories.

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 and his wealthy parents indulged their sons interests, buying him his own experimental equipment. He started what would be a lifelong series of experiments with electrical phenomena and began to investigate what he thought was an electro-gravity phenomenon while still in high school.

For two years in 1922 and 1923 Thomas 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. He struggled with the required curriculum of a freshman 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. Here he demonstrated his ideas on electricity and gravity to invited guests such as the physicist and Nobel laureate, Dr. Robert A. Millikan. Millikan told the freshman 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 as well.

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