Case file · Government program
The Coolidge tube that seemed to change weight
As a high-school student in Zanesville, Brown said an X-ray tube on a balance changed weight when it was switched on: the start of his lifelong idea that electricity and gravity are linked.
1921 CE · 39.94, -82.01 · status: claim
The account
The story comes from Brown and later accounts; versions disagree on which way the tube faced and whether its weight rose or fell. A high-voltage tube on a balance can show a force from electrostatic attraction, ionic wind or heating, so the observation was striking but not conclusive.
The sceptical view
No contemporary record of the measurement survives; the forces involved are typical of electrostatic and ionic effects.
Connections in the atlas
- Thomas Townsend Brown
- The 'gravitator' patent and the Biefeld–Brown effect
- Naval Research Laboratory and the S-48 gravity expedition
- Project Winterhaven
- Tests in Paris for SNCASO
- The 'gravitics' boom and the Electrogravitics Systems report
- Brown founds NICAP
- The Bahnson laboratory (Whitehall-Rand)
- The electrokinetic patents
- Rock electricity on Catalina Island
- The lifter tests: ARL, NASA and Tajmar
- MIT's ion-wind aeroplane