Case file · Government program
Rock electricity on Catalina Island
From 1970 Brown recorded natural voltages in rocks at a station on Catalina Island and proposed that this 'petrovoltaic' electricity comes from radio-frequency currents in the Earth.
1970 CE · 33.34, -118.33 · status: account
The account
He set out the idea in a 1975 paper and kept recording into 1985, the year he died. He lived on Catalina from 1971 and again from about 1983, with a period in San Francisco consulting on electrostatic fans.
The sceptical view
Natural voltages in rocks are well known (self-potential); his explanation for them was not taken up by geophysicists.
Connections in the atlas
- Thomas Townsend Brown
- The Coolidge tube that seemed to change weight
- 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
- The lifter tests: ARL, NASA and Tajmar
- MIT's ion-wind aeroplane