The Man Who Mastered Gravity Copyright ©
2023 by Paul Schatzkin Incorrigible Arts /
Embassy Books & Laundry Incorrigiblearts.com /
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Author / Publisher: Paul Schatzkin Editor: Mike Williams Proofreader: David Rosignoli Cover
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Catalog / Publication Data Schatzkin, Paul
The Man Who Mastered Gravity : A Twisted Tale of Space, Time and the Mysteries in
Between / Paul Schatzkin Paperback: ISBN: 978-0-9762000-2-4
Hard Cover ISBN: 978-0-9762000-3-1


eBook ISBN: 978-0-9762000-4-8
Audiobook ISBN: 978-0-9762000-5-5




Contents
Introduction to the 2023 Edition
Preface
1. White
Prologue
1. The Boy With The Chestnut Hair
2. No Moving Parts
3. A Bitter Pill
4. The Second Edison
5. A Different Well
6. On The Shoulders of Giants
7. A Brute and Awkward Force
8. Impossible, And Not To Be Considered
9. A “Push,” Not A “Pull”
10. The Biefeld-Brown Effect
11. “He Made Things Up”
12. Can We Talk?
13. A Rare Force of Nature
14. We Will Just Sail Away
15. A Pineapple and A Pea
16. A Great Disappointment
17. Wagner In The Trees
18. Anniversaries
19. Tapping Cosmic Energy
20. Gravity & Electricity, Space & Time
21. How I Control Gravitation
22. Closing Ashlawn
23. A Vague and Unscientific Report
24. Opportunities for Technicians and Scientists


25. A Seagoing Sailor At Last
26. A Complete System
27. A Deeper Draft Vessel
28. A Gentle Breeze, A Mattress – and Mr. X
29. The Caroline
30. Intrepid
31. Reflections on Biscayne Bay
32. Dredging The Depths
33. A Deeper Draft (Redux)
34. A Time of Peace, A Tug of War
35. Never Heard of the Guy
36. Back to Ohio
37. Too Big A Word
38. Parallel Lives
39. Remember, Dear...
40. Golden Galleon
41. Shadow Trails
42. Your First Lesson
43. For The Good Of The Service
44. We’ve Lost Morgan
2. Black
Introduction to Part 2: Black
45. The Ghost At The Corral
46. Hey Woodward
47. A Universe Away
48. Man On The Floor!
49. Structure of Space
50. Quantum Germans
51. Foo Fighters
52. Bombers And Parachutes


53. Good For One Fare
54. Werewolves And Mud
55. Pear Shaped
56. Eerily Quiet
57. We Have Much To Decide
58. Mileage, Folks!
59. You Have The Green Light
60. No Need For Formalities
61. Will You Please Come With Us?
62. The Browns of Ka Lae Hau
63. Missing Files and Moles
64. Pearl Harbor
65. Mortally Wounded
66. Flying Saucers
67. Hot Air
68. Good Morning, Sweetie Peach
69. Summer In The City
70. Flying Saucers In the Bible
71. Mostly Absent
72. Winterhaven:A New Age of Speed and Power
73. Like Fish In Water
74. Not A Dream
75. Paris
76. Notes & Ideas
77. Berlin
78. London
79. NICAP
80. Tunnel Diode
81. First, We Build a Fire
82. Something Happened
83. Strange Things
84. Strike Another Match
85. Operation Peacock


86. Into The Sunset
87. I Want A Home
88. Burning Daylight
89. Get A Life
90. Avalon
Epilogue:
Acknowledgements
Endnotes
Index






Introduction to the 2023 Edition
The mystery of Life isn’t a problem to be solved.
It is a reality to experienced.
- Frank Herbert, Dune
From 2003 to 2008, I researched and wrote a biography of a man named Thomas Townsend Brown. Or just Townsend Brown. Or ‘Dr. Brown’ to those who knew him.
This was going to be the follow-up to my first published book, a biography of Philo T. Farnsworth. When The Boy Who Invented Television was published in 2002, I felt like I had found my new calling as a ‘biographer of obscure 20th century scientists.’ The Townsend Brown bio was going to be the first sequel.
Until I was visited by the dreaded ‘sophomore curse.’
In 2009, I abandoned the Townsend Brown project – because after 6 years of research and writing, I still had no idea what I was writing about.
Countless times over the ensuing years, I have had conversations that go like this:
Listener: “You were writing a book. What happened to that? What was it about?”
Me: “Have you ever heard of the Ionic Breeze Air Purifier?”
Listener: “You mean the thing that was advertised in the Sharper Image catalogs?”
Me: “Yes. The one that circulates air without any moving parts....
The listener nods in recognition. And then I start:
“The Ionic Breeze is based on an anomalous electrical effect that was discovered by Thomas Townsend Brown when he was a teenager in the 1920s...”
In my research I encountered what I can only describe as loosely knit network of people who believe that Townsend Brown’s discovery, when applied in a slightly different manner and with different materials, produces what might be described as an ‘anti-gravity’ effect (though Brown himself decried the term).


Let’s just say for argument’s sake that he did just that.
*
In his career-crowning work, The General Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein postulated that gravity is induced by a curvature in the space-time continuum – meaning that massive objects like planets and stars physically warp the space around them.
In the last years of his life, Einstein tried to formulate a ‘Unified Field Theory’ – ‘The Theory of Everything’ – which could make the mathematical connection between electricity, magnetism, and gravity.
Some who are familiar with his work believe that Townsend Brown discovered the physical manifestation of what Einstein could only calculate mathematically: a way of creating synthetic gravitational fields with electricity. If – as Einstein asserts – gravity is a warp in the fabric of the spacetime continuum, then by manipulating gravity, Brown unlocked the door to intergalactic communication, interstellar navigation – and, yes... time travel.
I wanted to believe that, too.
Over the course of six years, I dug into the life of Townsend Brown, drawing on the small archive of papers he left with his family, extensive contact with his daughter Linda, some Freedom of Information inquiries, and an extensive correspondence with at least two individuals who professed to have intimate, first-hand knowledge of Brown’s activities. These sources alluded to deep connections to America’s military intelligence and national security apparatus – and made frequent allusions to unseen forces beyond that.
Eventually I succeed in amassing a manuscript of more than fivehundred-and-seventy pages.
I was operating on the Michelangelo Principal: when asked how he made his masterpiece sculpture of David, Michelangelo replied, “I just got a block of marble and removed all the parts that were not David.” As I saw it, my first draft was my block of marble, and as I got into a second draft, all I had to do was remove the bits that did not drive the narrative. About halfway into a rewrite, I hit a wall: I had no idea what my ‘David’ looked like.


All I could safely say about Townsend Brown was that “he spent half of his life engaged in some kind of classified military research, and the other half of his life engaged in covert intelligence operations – much of it intended to cover up the classified military research.”
In other words, I had written ‘the biography of a man whose story cannot be told.’
*
At this point in my conversations, I typically turn to my listener and say,
“OK, now it’s your turn. I want you to ask me: ‘So, Paul, what’s that book about?’”
With some prodding, I can finally get them to ask me, “OK, Paul. So... what’s that book about?”
“It’s about five-hundred-and-seventy fucking pages.”
*
I started the Townsend Brown project in the spring of 2003.
The first draft manuscript was written over three years from 2005 to 2008. As they were written, the chapters were posted on a website and open to discussion.
I reached my wits end and closed the book in the first weeks of 20091
There was a fair amount of fallout from that abrupt abandonment, and while I didn’t reconsider my decision at the time, I was reluctant to bury the material entirely. Then it dawned on me that given the new media at my disposal – which I had already been using to build a nascent audience for the story – there was no reason I couldn’t ‘publish’ the material myself.
You never really know what the future might hold – so I released the raw manuscript under the masthead of ‘Embassy Books and Laundry’ – a deliberate nod to a period in the 1950s when Townsend Brown said that he was “done with science.2” I suspected I might return to the story at some point, just as Brown never really turned his back on science.
I didn’t think it would be thirteen years. Maybe that’s how long it takes to dry off when you’ve been drenched by a cosmic firehose.
*


One copy of the manuscript fell into the hands of one of my oldest friends, Mike Williams, who I have known since I moved to Nashville in 1994. Mike and his wife Kathy hosted the weekly ‘6-Chair Pickin’ Parties’ that supplied some of the inspiration for the Internet music business3 I started in 1995. When I was fishing for a title for my first book, which I said was about “the boy who invented television,” it was Mike who said, “That’s your title!”
So, it seems fitting Mike would a have role in this undertaking, as well.
Mike had told me many times that he was intrigued by the story, that he was drawn to the mystery and the challenges of the telling. He asked for a digital copy of the manuscript and in 2018 presented me with an extensively edited revision. Mike even went so far as to paginate his edit and present it to me bound as an actual book – the first time I had ever seen my own work in such a physical form.
What Mike’s edit showed me was how horribly over-written my first draft was. Like I was trying to conceal the fact that I didn’t really know what story I was telling by just piling an overabundance of words on it.
But even though it appeared I had abandoned the project, certain essential themes kept nagging at me until they could no longer be ignored.
In 2022 a change in personal circumstances – a clearing of the decks, if you will – propelled this project to the front burner again.
*
This story lives at the center or the Venn diagram where science, science fiction and pseudo-science, conspiracy and reality all intersect. It is often hard to tell one from the other.
An expression I heard often during the course of this endeavor inferred that the life of T. Townsend Brown represented one phase of a ‘multigenerational project’ unfolding alongside the thread of mankind’s evolution.
Twenty years after I first started, it seems my contribution to that story has now entered its second generation.
Paul Schatzkin
February 5, 2023
Regarding Endnotes, Bibliography And Appendices:
Readers can find links to online resources cited in the endnotes at


https:ttbrown.com/footnotes
The bibliography is found only online at
https://ttbrown.com/biblio
Appendices will be accessible from
https://ttbrown.com/apxs


Preface
Down the Rabbit Hole
In another moment, down went Alice after the rabbit – never once considering how in the world she would get out again.
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
This is not a fairy tale, but perhaps it should begin:
Once upon a time, there really was a T. Townsend Brown.
Somehow, all the Big Mysteries of the century past – nuclear physics, relativity, quantum mechanics, UFOs and alien contact cover-up conspiracies, the clandestine operations of the military industrial complex all converge in the life of this one mercurial man.
We know where he was born and where he was raised. We know who his parents were, his wife, his children and even his grandchildren. We know most of the dozens of places where he lived. We know where he died, and where he is buried.
Beyond that, Townsend Brown is a ghost. A zephyr. A myth.
*
In the summer of 2002, I was putting the finishing touches on The Boy Who Invented Television – a biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who, truly, invented television. Every one of the billions of video screens on the planet – including the tiny displays we carry in our pockets today – can trace its origins to a sketch that Farnsworth drew for his high-school science teacher in 1922, when he was just 14 years old. That his name is not more familiar is one of the confounding curiosities of our time4.
I first heard of Philo Farnsworth in the summer of 1973, as I was graduating from Antioch College in Maryland and heading to the west coast to seek my fortune in the TeeVee business. A profile in a publication called Radical Software5 piqued my curiosity, but the harpoon didn’t sink in until I started hearing about his unfinished work in fusion energy – the still unanswered riddle of ‘how do you bottle a star?’
That riddle was first posed to me later that same summer, on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Santa Cruz, California, when an


acquaintance introduced me to the concept6 of nuclear fusion and the promising work toward clean, safe, cheap and abundant energy that Farnsworth allegedly scuttled in the 1960s. Thirty years later that conversation led me to Townsend Brown.
As I wrapped up my Farnsworth biography, I felt like I’d found a new calling: researching and writing ‘biographies of obscure 20th century scientists.’ I wondered what I could do for an encore.
The universe must have been reading my mind when an email showed up in my inbox on July 9, 2002:
T. Townsend Brown was another inventor who is forgotten and swept under the rug. He died on Catalina Island in 1985.
Science in the late 50s said what he did was against physical law, yet the government classified his work. A bunch of government contractors both American and foreign have been working on it ever since.
So where did all the R&D go? If you go out in the desert about 125 miles southwest of Las Vegas at night you will see an object flying around in the distance with a bluish haze around it. That’s where it went. Also Sharper Image is selling an air purifier on cable TV for $60. He never collected the royalties for that either.
That message was signed simply ‘Janoshek’ and the ‘from’ address was untraceable.
I Googled up a website7 dedicated to the life and work of this T. Townsend Brown. From the opening paragraphs I learned that:
Thomas Townsend Brown, an American physicist, was a leader in developing theories concerning the link between electromagnetic and gravitational fields theorized by Dr. Albert Einstein. He advanced from theory to application with the development of solid and disc-shaped apparatuses, which are believed to have created and utilized temporary, localized gravitational fields.
Brown’s work became very controversial due to the similarity between his work and what is believed to be the propulsion method of some observed UFO’s. His name is also often mentioned in the same breath as the so-called “Philadelphia Experiment,” as a


possible candidate along with Nikola Tesla, A.L. Kitselman and Dr. Einstein.
Gravitational fields? Einstein’s Unified Field Theory? That all sounded reasonable. But “disc-shaped apparatus and UFOs”? Hey, I write serious science biographies, not pseudo-science. And I am not easily drawn into conspiracy theories – UFO or otherwise.
I found the email address of the website’s creator and sent him a message. Not wanting to sound too eager, I asked benign questions about how he started the website, and how and why he cared about Townsend Brown.
Then I pretty much forgot all about it.
A month later, somebody named Andrew Bolland replied. He had developed a relationship with the Brown family during the mid 1980s. What he told me got my attention. It sounded similar in some respects to the justpublished Farnsworth story, and also entirely different. I proposed writing a biography of T. Townsend Brown.
Another month went by with no answer. Then Andrew wrote:
I spoke with Brown’s daughter, and she thinks it would be fun to get involved. She was his primary research assistant – building prototypes and whatnot. Let me know if you want to pursue it.
And that, Alice, is how rabbit holes are opened.


Part 1:


White


Prologue
Every Cabbie In Catalina
(1985)
Linda and Townsend on Catalina Island in the 1980s.
“Daddy, you can’t do this! You’ll kill yourself! Mother and I will have to go to San Antonio to bring back your body!”
Townsend Brown packed his overnight bag, a travel-worn satchel, the kind that doctors once took on house calls. He shuffled papers into an equally battered attaché.
“I have to do this,” Townsend said. “I have to take these papers to San Antonio.”
“Daddy, who the hell is in San Antonio? Why can’t they come here? Why can’t you just mail these papers?”
Linda Brown was nearly forty years old. Her father was eighty and in failing health. His left lung had been removed a decade earlier – damaged, physicians suspected, by the ozone and radiation his body absorbed during


decades of experimenting with high voltages and intense electrical fields. Now his right lung was showing similar symptoms.
Townsend and Josephine – his wife of more than 50 years – lived with Linda, her husband George, and their daughter, the five of them sharing a weather-beaten, World War II-vintage Quonset hut on the island of Santa Catalina, off the southern California coast. Father and daughter argued in a tiny bedroom cluttered with electronic instruments and sensors, the last vestiges of his life’s work, investigating the mysterious, cosmic force he called ‘sidereal radiation.’
“You can’t come with me,” Townsend said.
The words stung. For nearly two decades, Linda had been at her father’s side in his lab, moving equipment, twisting the wires in his inventions whatever he needed, whatever he asked of her. Now she was afraid she’d never see him alive again.
Townsend had arranged for a helicopter to fly him to Long Beach, where he would board a private jet. He needed a cab to take him to the chopper. He reached for the phone.
“Go ahead Daddy,” Linda cried. “But remember, I know every cabbie on this island and not one of them is going to take you anywhere if I tell them not to.”
When the cab arrived, Townsend folded his fragile frame into the rear seat. He leaned out the window and took his daughter’s hand. “Don’t worry, Sweetie,” he said with the calming tone that had reassured her before so many similar departures. “Everything is going to be all right.”
Linda let go of her father’s hand and watched the cab disappear.
The helicopter touched down in Long Beach, where a limousine waited to ferry Townsend to the charter. Peering through the windshield, he was pleased to see a muscular man of military bearing behind the wheel – the protégé he had recruited twenty years earlier: Morgan.


1


The Boy With The Chestnut Hair
(1963)
Ashlawn, on the Philadelphia ‘Main Line’ – The Brown family home from 1963-64.
Great Valley High School in the ‘Main Line’ Philadelphia suburb of Malvern opened in the fall of 1963. Its soaring glass-and-steel architecture, long wide corridors, bright fluorescent lighting, and shiny vinyl floors were a space-age departure from its Georgian and Colonial pre-war predecessors. The new school drew on the heritage of the area. Its varsity teams were called ‘The Patriots’ – their mascot a jut-jawed, musket-toting Minute Man, replete with bayonet and tri-corn cap.
Tall and powerfully built, Morgan had transferred into Great Valley for the school’s foreign language program, which offered classes in Russian. Morgan wanted to learn Russian so that he could serve his country in the Cold War. He read a lot of espionage thrillers and amused himself with romantic notions of becoming a spy.
Great Valley High School greeted its first students with the smell of fresh paint and empty spaces along the hallways where the lockers had yet to be bolted in. “We had to carry all our books,” Morgan recalled, “so nobody ever went to the library to get more.” Except for Morgan, who encountered among the stacks a classmate with wavy, chin length brown hair and inquisitive eyes. Morgan watched as Linda Brown ran her fingertips along


the spine of the books like they were old friends. Linda thumbed the pages of a James Joyce novel; The incomprehensible Irish master was one of Morgan’s favorites.
Their eyes met, Linda nodded toward Morgan with a wistful half-smile and returned to the book.
“Hmmm,” Morgan thought, “this one is different.”
Checking into a political science class an hour later, Morgan found himself a seat beside this girl. “Good thing the chair was empty,” he recalls, “because I would have made it so if it had been occupied.”
“He was a good-looking guy, with chestnut hair that he wore in a ‘Princeton cut,’ Linda recalled. “He was very ‘Main Line’ but he was also very different. He was a member of the Chess club but was also a champion wrestler. I found him fascinating.” In the weeks that followed, Linda watched how the other girls at Great Valley nearly fell all over themselves to get his attention.
“I was a bit of a jerk,” Morgan recalled, “but I had an interesting thing going. There was a whole assortment of girls who wanted to sleep with me, and I was carried away with the idea of how much fun sex was. I had no scruples, and that oddly seemed to make me more of an attraction.”
Linda had a steady boyfriend named Howie, but that didn’t stop her from engaging in intellectual food fights with her new classmate. In poly-sci, they debated national security, with Linda asserting privacy rights while Morgan defended the security needs of the state.
“She fought me when no one else would,” Morgan recalled, “and ignored me when I needed to be ignored. I teased her like a brother teases a sister, but neither of us was very good at that kind of thing. I really didn’t know how to do it, and she didn’t really know how to respond, so we just sort of squared off. It took a while before we realized there was chemistry brewing.”
Linda sensed the chemistry too but had a different reaction: “I would kick myself for being so outspoken. I was absolutely positive that I had broken all the rules on how to attract a man!”
Morgan wondered about Linda’s family. “The buzz at school was that her dad, a gentle scientist, was actually a member of the mob. The kids at Great


Valley would say, ‘He seems a gentleman, but his sidekick has got to be a hired killer.’”
The sidekick was a lean, dour, chap named Charles Miller, who drove the limousine in which Linda, Howie and their friends often went on dates. Linda’s girlfriends thought having a limo at their disposal was “just the coolest thing ever,” but Charles was a mystery. One night after a movie, Charles picked the kids up at the theater and dropped them all off – without ever asking any of them where they lived.
When the limo pulled up to his house at the end of a remote country road, Howie wondered aloud, “How did he know where I live? I certainly didn’t tell him how to get out here. In fact, none of us told him where we live, he just drove right up to everybody’s house!”
Linda looked up and caught Charles looking back in the rear-view mirror, with his cap pulled down tightly over his eyes as if to say, “Oh crap, I screwed up.” She covered for him, explaining that Charles had gotten directions when they first started dating. “After all,” Linda said, “that’s his job.” Howie was satisfied and never mentioned it again, but after that Linda realized that Charles knew more about whoever she dated than she did.
Such intrigue only piqued Morgan’s interest in his confrontational classmate. He started shadowing Linda’s movements. When she went on a date with Howie, Morgan would bump into them; when she went walking with her girlfriends, their paths would cross, a tactic that often backfired. When the other girls started flirting with Morgan, Linda just lowered her eyes and slipped away.
The Brown family lived in a stately fieldstone Colonial called Ashlawn, just a cornfield away from Great Valley High. As fall frosted into winter, Linda hosted skating parties on the pond behind the house. One cold afternoon she saw two girlfriends coming through the field; between them was the tall boy with the chestnut hair.
Morgan wasn’t all that interested in ice-skating. When the rest of the party headed outside to the pond, Morgan wandered through the big house. He looked through the door of one wood-paneled room and found Linda’s father tinkering with something on his desk. Morgan watched from the doorway.


Townsend looked up, and in a tone that suggested that he had been expecting this particular visitor, said simply, “Hello there.”


2


No Moving Parts
(1963)
As he entered the study, Morgan found Townsend Brown working on an invention that could move air without any moving parts. Looking much like an oversized window fan, the three-foot-square wooden frame stood perched on a triangular base. Dozens of parallel metal strips and wires stretched like Venetian blinds across the front of the box. There were no whirling blades and no electric motor, yet air poured silently and steadily through the baffles.
Morgan peered through the front panel. He felt the air on his face. He walked around the back, looking for the magician’s secret. How could air be moving through if there was no fan?
Townsend explained that an electrically induced force field squeezed the air, “the way your fingers would squirt a watermelon seed.”
“How cool,” Morgan thought, trying to reckon with something totally foreign to his experience.
Townsend flipped a switch, and suddenly the fan became a loudspeaker. Clear, bright sound poured out, without any cone or magnetic coil to produce the vibrations. “He turned up the volume,” Morgan recalled, “and some kind of bomb went off inside my head.”
Townsend explained that since the machine had no moving parts, there was no distortion, so the frequency could go well beyond the range of any kind of conventional loudspeaker. And if you had a matching pair, one could transmit and the other could receive.
“So, if there’s no limit to the frequency, you could use this as a communications device. You could send a signal with this, and nobody else would be able to hear it, huh?”
Townsend smiled, “Nope.” He put his glasses on and went back to work.
Linda appeared at the door. “Unlike my other friends who had seen the fan in operation, Morgan was asking insightful, intelligent questions,” she recalled. “I could tell that Daddy was pleased. Nobody else I knew had ever come even close to understanding the possibilities.”
“Are you coming skating with us?” Linda asked.


Instead, Morgan “made up some excuse and beat it out of there after a hurried goodbye and a sincere ‘thank you’ to Linda’s father. I just needed to be out in the cold air, to hide in the dark a bit. I was a half-mile down the road when I realized I’d just passed a turning point in my life.”
*
Morgan was accustomed to sizing people up, ferreting out their strengths and weaknesses before he made any moves. But none of his usual seduction techniques worked with Linda Brown.
“I found myself doing strange and stupid things. I’d drive by her house in my brother’s old car, and just sit in the dark, listening to the classical music that poured forth from her father’s study and smelling the wood smoke rising out of the chimney. One time, I even stomped my initials in the snow that covered their lawn.”
Linda didn’t notice.
“I had my classes in order,” Morgan recalled. I was making solid A’s, ruled the roost in most of my classes. I worked hard. I was prepared and in control. I did my homework. But Linda fought with me in class and won. That’s when I decided I was determined to seduce her. I devised a plan that started with calling, just to ask for a date. But rather than Linda, I found myself talking with a stiff, curt man named Charles, who assured me that ‘Miss Brown will be unavailable that evening.’ I was not easily intimidated, but this Charles character scared the crap out of me.”
When Morgan finally managed to talk to Linda long enough to ask her for a date, she declined his invitation, informing him she was going steady with Howie.
Morgan had heard scuttlebutt around school that Howie would be leaving in the spring for basic training with the National Guard.
“Yes, Linda said, “he’ll be leaving in May.”
“I’ll be around,” Morgan offered, certain that he caught an expression of relief in Linda’s slight smile.
Winter melted into spring. Howie shipped out in early May, and word got back to Morgan that Linda had given Howie back his ring. Morgan made every possible effort to make his path cross Linda’s. But as much as he was


thinking about Linda, he found himself thinking as well about the curious device he had seen in her father’s study.


3


A Bitter Pill
(Notes from The Rabbit Hole #1)
“Have you guessed the riddle yet? The Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
“No, I give up,” Alice replied. “What’s the answer?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Hatter.
“Nor I,” said the March Hare.
Alice sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” she said,” than wasting it asking riddles that have no answers.”
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
My correspondence with Townsend Brown’s only surviving child started in the late fall of 2002, five months after I’d first contacted Andrew Bolland through his Townsend Brown website.
Andrew explained Linda’s reluctance to tear the lid off difficult memories:
Being part of the Townsend Brown family has made Linda pretty much a recluse. The public believes that she was killed some years ago, and she prefers that actually. Her father began NICAP8 and became associated with UFOs through his research into gravitational fields. I’m sure you can get an idea of what type of people might want to look her up.
Through Andrew, I sent Linda a copy of my now-published Farnsworth biography, The Boy Who Invented Television. A few weeks later, our correspondence began with a warning that I might have been well to heed:
My inclination is to keep things as they are. Pulling myself into the past I know will be difficult and sometimes painful for me. I hope you understand I have reservations about how much help I will be to you. I was only involved in Dad’s development of what he called the “electrohydrodynamic fan/speaker.” Our family was glued to our involvement in development of ‘The Fan’ throughout


my teenage years and into my early twenties. The fact that we suffered so much for what seemed later to be nothing has been a bitter pill.
A variation of the device that blew Morgan’s mind earned some notoriety in the 1990s as an informercial staple, The Sharper Image Ionic Breeze air purifier. Linda’s remarks seemed to affirm what that first anonymous email had said, that her father’s work had become profitable, but not to the family’s benefit.
My memories are from a twenty-year-old’s perspective. The fact that none of our expectations were realized formed that great bitter pill. How that dead end developed, has always raised more questions than answers.
I wrote back,
I’m attracted to the mysteries buried in the life of T. Townsend Brown in the same way that I have been compelled to explore the mysteries in the life of Philo T. Farnsworth. Somewhere at the heart of those mysteries are important insights into what sort of Universe we really live in.
Therein lie the first steps on a quest I was cautioned early on is part of ‘a multi-generational’ project.


4


The Second Edison
(1915)
The future boy electrician with his parents Mary Townsend and L.K. Brown ca. 1915 (age 10).
In the spring of 1915, a visitor to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis K. Brown in the posh Terrace section of Zanesville, Ohio, observed a lad of about ten years walking along the wrought-iron fence that ringed the estate, casually picking earthworms off the surface of the manicured lawn and dropping them into a bucket.
“What are you doing?” the visitor asked.
“I’m collecting worms,” the boy replied.
“But you’re not digging for them. They’re just wiggling along on the surface!”
“That’s because I’ve electrified the fence,” the boy said, pointing to a battery he had connected to the metalwork. “The electricity in the soil excites the worms and brings them to the surface.”
“So what will you do with all these worms?”
“I’m going fishing.”
*


Thomas Townsend Brown was born to one of Zanesville’s most prominent families on March 18, 1905 – the same year an obscure Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein published a scientific paper on the subject of ‘Special Relativity.’
As the only male of his generation, Thomas was expected to take the reins of a family fortune that began with the boy’s maternal grandfather. Thomas Burgess ‘T.B.’ Townsend was a second generation American. His own parents William Townsend and Harriet Burgess, met somewhere on the North Atlantic, aboard the ship that brought them both to the New World from their native Gloucestershire in England in 1834 or 1835. The couple was married in Pittsburgh, and T.B. was the first of their thirteen children. A hagiographic family history says T.B. Townsend “did not have a dollar when he started out in life.” His formal schooling ended when he was nine years old, “his total attendance at school covering just six months.”
As a teenager, T.B. apprenticed to his father’s brick and stone mason’s trade in Beverly, Ohio. At the age of nineteen he “started out for the distant west.” Traveling by steamboat up the Mississippi River to Burlington, Iowa, he found work cutting and laying stone for the state’s new Governor’s Mansion.
Some years later, T.B. returned to Beverly and took over his father’s contracting business, “...carrying on the business with constantly growing success...his patronage constantly increasing in volume and importance.” He expanded his interests to include marble and granite quarries, and when those business flourished, he moved his operations to Zanesville, which was at the time “the center of operations of wholesale dealers in marble and granite.”
In the final decades of the 19th century, T.B. Townsend supplied the building stone for much of Zanesville and surrounding Muskingum County, including the classically ornate Tuscarawas County courthouse, which stands today as a testament to the extravagance of the Gilded Age.
With the arrival of the new century, T.B. created much of the infrastructure of the area, starting with Zanesville’s first streetcar system. After selling his interest in that enterprise, he began to pave “the greater part of the streets of Zanesville and built most of the sewers.” Furnishing


stone from his own quarries, he constructed foundations for more than a dozen bridges across the Muskingum River.
Among his “other important investments,” Mr. Townsend was most proud of his “extensive and valuable ranch of thirty-six hundred acres in Marion County, Kansas” which raised, among other things “cattle, hogs, horses, corn, alfalfa and sorghum hay.” With a perimeter fence stretching more than 50 miles, Mr. Townsend could count among his assets some 16,500 fence posts strung with more than 200 miles of barbed wire.
T.B. Townsend’s wife, Sybil Nulton Townsend, bore five children, three of whom survived into adulthood: eldest son Orville served as vicepresident and general manager of the Townsend Brick and Contracting Company; daughter Hattie married Rufus Burton, who served as the secretary and treasurer; daughter Mary and her husband L.K. Brown bore the next generation’s sole male heir, Thomas Townsend Brown.
In the expressive language of the day, T.B. Townsend’s 1905 biography extols “...the extent and importance of the business interests which have claimed his attention and the success which has attended his efforts makes his history a notable one... he is a man of distinct and forceful personality, broad mentality and mature judgment and in his ready recognition and utilization of opportunity is found the secret of his prosperity.”
Such were the shoes that the boy who electrified earthworms was expected to fill.
*
In deference to his mother, Thomas chose to be called by his middle name. His experiments with electricity led him to build his first wireless set in 1917, when radio was still only useful for transmitting Morse code. His efforts drew the attention of one of the local papers with the headline, “Townsend Brown Has A Complete Wireless Set.”
Calling him “Zanesville’s second Edison,” the story noted that that he could barely understand the coded messages he was receiving: “Master Brown has paid most of his attention to the mechanical side of wireless telegraphy and is not yet able to read messages with proficiency. He is practicing hard, however.” Another of his gadgets was described as “...a wireless telephone. When he is at play away from home, he wears a


wireless telephone over his ear. Members of the family are able to call him wherever they want to, merely speaking into the wireless transmitter in the house, and he can hear them perfectly.”
The young prodigy’s experiments also caught the attention of the federal government. With The Great War unfolding in Europe, an officer from the Post Office showed up at the Brown’s home to request that he dismantle the antenna he had mounted on the roof. A rumor was circulating that the boy could pick up radio signals from Germany; the authorities were afraid that somebody could also use the apparatus to send messages to the enemy.
That was Townsend Brown’s first brush with national security.
*
Few records survive of the boy’s schooling, with scant evidence of any merit or distinction.
In 1922 and 1923 Townsend attended Doane Academy in Granville, midway between Columbus and Zanesville in central Ohio, a tree-lined village with a church at each corner of the main intersection. Looming from a hill above the town is the campus of Denison University, founded in 1831 by the Ohio Baptist Education Society and named for William S. Denison also of Zanesville – in gratitude for his generous contribution to the school’s endowment.
At the edge of the campus stood Denison University’s most distinctive structure, the Swasey Observatory – a rectangular concrete building with a white, rotating, dome-topped turret. Considered one of the finest academic observatories in the country, from 1911 until 1934 the observatory was administered by school’s Professor of Astronomy, Dr. Paul Alfred Biefeld.
Townsend spent two years at Doane, preparing to enroll at Denison after graduation in 1923, earning mostly B’s and C’s in courses like Latin, Algebra, and English. His only A’s were in Physics and History.
He was more proud of the school’s first radio station, which he built around a DeForest Audion tube that had been personally supplied by Lee DeForest after Brown tracked the inventor down during a trip to New York with his mother. With a mere ten-watt signal, Denison Station 8YM could be heard as far away as California. On Saturday nights the station broadcast a performance by a local band, The Green Imps. When the school tried to


shut off power to the radio station in order to impose a 10:00 PM curfew, Townsend built his own Delco generating station and kept the music going well into the night
In a personal memoir composed years later, Brown sums up his academic career by recalling, “I slept in the Physics room.”


5


A Different Well
(Notes from the Rabbit Hole #2)
“How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: *was* I the same when I got up this morning?”
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
The history of science and invention is replete with stories of study and forethought rushing headlong into accidents and inspiration.
My personal interest in such things traces back to a warm day in the spring of 1960 in Rumson, New Jersey. I was only in the third grade, but my mother was concerned that I wasn’t reading enough, so she hauled me off to the Oceanic Public Library on the Avenue of Two Rivers and told me to pick a book. I pulled a ‘Signature Series’ biography of Thomas Edison,9 and devoured it as quickly as a nine-year-old could. The following year, I portrayed Edison in the fourth-grade class play and delighted my classmates by inventing the lightbulb from the auditorium stage at Forrestdale School.
A dozen-some years later – at another library, in Santa Monica, California – I stumbled on to the story of Philo T. Farnsworth10 – the fourteen-year-old Idaho farm boy who drew a sketch for his high school science teacher in 1922, telling him, “This is my idea for electronic television.” The technology has evolved in the decades since, but every video screen on the planet today can trace its origins to that sketch (which the teacher saved and introduced into patent litigation a decade later). I was fascinated to see photos from television’s pre-history in the 1920’s and 30’s and learn of the inspiration that replaced spinning wheels and mirrors with electrons bouncing around in a vacuum tube.
By then I was already a devotee to the writings of Marshall McLuhan, who wrote that “the medium is the message” – meaning that “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”
This was during the late 1960’s, a time of great turmoil, much of it generated by new technologies like television and satellite communications.


In McLuhan’s parlance, we were living in a ‘global village.’ McLuhan seemed to be saying that the path to mankind’s destiny would be paved with new gadgets and gizmos. By that reckoning, I figured that the people who came up with those new technologies were the ones who really changed things.
That was the beginning of my pursuit of ‘biographies of obscure 20th century scientists,’ which came to its first fruition when I wrote and published a biography of Philo Farnsworth11 in 2002.
Embodied in the Farnsworth story and others like it is the notion that inventors and scientists – as well as artists, musicians, and writers – arrive on Earth with certain ideas and information uniquely pre-coded into their brains. It seems these seminal geniuses are visited by a singular ability to draw from a different well of knowledge than the rest of us. At some point in their lives, typically while they are still teenagers, these uniquely inspired minds tap into this well, and then draw forth the inventions and technologies that alter life on our planet forever.
They have special access to the ‘Universe of Magical Things’ and arrive pre-programmed to deliver what the modern vernacular often refers to as a ‘technology transfer.’
We know where the technology is being transferred to. Of greater interest, perhaps, is where that knowledge is being transferred from.


6


On The Shoulders of Giants
(1687-1923)
A pantheon of giant shoulders. (l-r) Benjamin Franklin, Heinrich Hertz, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Hans Christian Oersted, Michael Faraday, Max Planck.
Modern science finds its origins in the 17th century – the Age of Enlightenment.
In 1687 Sir Isaac Newton published the Principia Mathematica12, his epic articulation of a fixed and stable universe where time was absolute and unbending, ticking away at the same rate for everyone, everywhere.


Principia provided the foundation for an explosion of scientific knowledge in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Every discovery rests on those that preceded it. As Newton himself said, “If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”
By the dawn of the 20th century, the firm foundations of Newton’s universe began to tremble with the investigation of a phenomenon unknown to Newton: electricity. Electricity was not really new; it has always been present in one form or another, in the static discharge from a cold piece of metal, or the violent, radiant outburst of a lightning strike. But it was not until the 18th century that science began to master this mysterious force. Given the extent to which electricity propels the modern world, it’s curious to think this now-indispensable force has only been at our command for roughly 200 years - not even the blink of an eye in human history.
In the 18th century, new giants climbed on to Newton’s shoulders.
In 1752, Benjamin Franklin flew a kite into an electrical storm to capture the discharge from a bolt of lightning. In 1820, the Danish scientist Hans Christian Oersted noticed that an electrified wire could deflect a compass needle – the first recorded observation of the linkage between electricity and magnetism. Another decade passed before the English scientist Michael Faraday inverted Oersted’s discovery, demonstrating that a magnet could induce an electrical current in a metal wire.
In the 1860s, Faraday’s protege, the Scotsman James Clerk Maxwell, compiled the equations that proved that electricity and magnetism are a single fundamental force, electromagnetism.
Maxwell further observed that waves of electromagnetic energy could travel through space at the speed of light – a concept later verified by his own protégé, Heinrich Hertz, for whom radio frequencies are named. Maxwell also proposed that light itself was a form of this electromagnetic radiation – an idea that would ultimately challenge the very principals that had led him there in the first place.
At the dawn of the 20th Century, the German physicist Max Planck postulated that matter absorbs heat energy and emits light energy discontinuously in ‘lumps.’ Planck’s lumps, which he called “quanta,” sparked the new scientific field of quantum mechanics.


The breakthrough that separated the 20th Century from all those that preceded it arrived with the ‘Annus Mirabilis’ – the year of wonders, 1905 when Albert Einstein published not one, not two, but four papers that changed the world.
Einstein’s first 1905 paper analyzed the photo-electric effect, by which certain metals emit electrons when their surface is struck by light13. For defining the relationship between light and electrical energy, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. Einstein’s second paper discussed the behavior of atoms in circumstances called ‘Brownian movements,’ proving the existence of atoms – a concept that was still hotly contested at the time.
It was Einstein’s third paper, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, that rearranged the paradigms of physics into an entirely new cosmology. Here was the Special Theory of Relativity that knocked Newton’s immutable universe off its foundations.
Einstein’ fourth paper, Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content? defined the relationship between mass and energy in history’s most famous equation: E=mc2.
Newton’s enduring calculations on gravity got humans to the moon and back in the 1960s. But the ‘why’ of gravity – where it comes from and how it works – remained unexplained for another decade, when Einstein published his grandest theory of all.
In 1916’s General Theory of Relativity, Einstein defined gravity as a curvature in space, a distortion caused by the presence of a massive object like a planet or a star. Standing on the shoulders of all who had gone before him, Einstein synthesized everything from Newton to Planck, casting mankind adrift in a universe where space could be bent and time was elastic.


Einstein’s explanation of gravity is often illustrated as a massive object like the Earth stretching the fabric of space – like a ball suspended on a membrane, the moon orbiting in the resulting curvature.
*
In the fall of 1923, eighteen-year-old Townsend Brown enrolled at the California Institute of Technology and began setting up a private laboratory at the family’s California residence in Pasadena.
Meanwhile, Albert Einstein was not done twisting the fabric of the universe. Earlier that year, he produced the first of several dissertations that dominated the remainder of his life’s work – his quest for the Unified Field Theory. Having redefined gravity, Einstein peered over the edge of the space-time continuum in search of an equation that would connect gravity with the other fundamental force of nature known at the time electromagnetism.
Einstein had no way of knowing that on the other side or the world, a Cal Tech freshman had found the physical proof of what Einstein could only


express as a theory.


7


A Brute and Awkward Force
(1923)
There is no record of a precise moment of inspiration – no apple falling on Townsend Brown’s head, no lightning striking a sky-bound key, no parallel furrows in a sugar beet field – only Brown’s insistence that whatever he knew, “he knew it all at once.” Something of the experience was described in a short memoir that Brown dictated to his wife decades later:
During the summer or fall of 1923, I not only made considerable progress in chemistry, but in physics. I devised an X-Ray spectrometer for astronomical measurements – specifically the sun – and began to cultivate the thesis that a radiation other than light prevailed in the Universe, independent of our Solar system. I felt that this radiation could be gravitation. That it exerted a pressure (however small) on all forms of matter. This gave rise, in my view, to what could be considered as a new theory of gravitation. Such a theory called for gravitation being a “push” and not a “pull.” This seemed logical in that Nature abhors a vacuum. A mechanism for the transmission of gravitation theoretically was needed.
The thesis that shines through this statement – indeed, the central concept that engaged Brown’s imagination for the rest of his life – is “a radiation other than light prevails in the Universe...”
*
Another biographical sketch of Townsend Brown comes to us from the pen of A. L. Kitselman, known as ‘Beau’ to his friends and a colleague of Brown’s on classified defense projects during the 1940s and 50s. Beau and his wife Betsy were as close friends as the constantly relocating Browns ever had. Kitselman published a scathing critique of the credentialed scientists who had dismissed Townsend Brown, in a pamphlet he called Hello, Stupid14. Variations of the stories contained in that pamphlet have supplied the foundation of subsequent accounts of Brown’s early years.
According to Kitselman, young Thomas Brown looked to the heavens, dreamed of traveling among the stars – and pondered the means of


propulsion by which that might be accomplished. He dismissed rocket power as “a brute and awkward force,” and wondered if electricity could shrink the distance between the stars more efficiently than the controlled explosion of combustible gasses.
Such thoughts simmered as his Cal Tech physics class conducted experiments with an X-Ray tube. While the rest of the class was focused on the tube itself, “Tom” observed that when a high-voltage current was applied, the cables connecting the tube to the power supply appeared to jump with snake-like convulsions. And here, Kitselman says, is where the hopeful space traveler believed he’d found his means of transport through the cosmos.
Unfortunately, Cal Tech was the kind of institution that encouraged its freshman to conform rather than experiment. It wasn’t long before the enthusiastic student with the big ideas was failing in both chemistry and physics. “As soon as I’d get an experiment set up,” he recalled, “the bell would ring and I would have to dis-assemble everything. I could never finish an experiment!”
To compensate for that institutional limitation, the young man’s father installed a private laboratory on the second floor in the family home that was the equal of Cal Tech’s, so that his son could experiment freely.


8


Impossible, And Not To Be Considered
(1923)
During Townsend Brown’s freshman year at Cal Tech in 1923, his physics professor, Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics – making him the first member of Cal Tech’s faculty to be so honored, and an accolade that linked Millikan to the most renowned scientist of the 20th century. Millikan was recognized for measuring the negative charge of a single electron, and for confirming the calculations on the photoelectric effect for which Albert Einstein had been awarded his own Nobel two years earlier.
Millikan came reluctantly to physics. As an undergraduate at Oberlin College, Millikan favored mathematics and classic languages. Not until his professor of Greek asked him to teach an elementary physics class – telling him that “Anyone who can do well in Greek can teach physics” – did his interests begin to shift. With his 1891 Bachelor’s degree in Classical Studies behind him, Millikan pursued physics at Columbia University, where he earned that institution’s first Ph.D in the field in 1895. Doctorate in hand, he followed a professor’s advice and spent a year at the heart of the world of theoretical physics in Germany.
After his year abroad, Millikan accepted an invitation to join the faculty at the University of Chicago as an assistant to Albert A. Michelson – the coauthor of the most famous failed experiment in the history of science15.
In 1887, Michelson and his colleague Edward Morley conducted a series of experiments intended to measure the medium through which light and radio waves travel. Borrowing from an idea as old as Aristotle, James Clerk Maxwell had proposed that electromagnetic waves are conveyed through the ‘luminiferous ether’ in the same way that sound waves travel through the air; the Michelson-Morley Experiment attempted to measure the Earth’s movement through that cosmic firmament. Instead, their elaborate and expensive apparatus failed to detect even a whiff of ether, raising still more questions about the nature of light and energy but assuring both Michelson and Morley an asterisk in the annals of theoretical physics.


Robert Millikan joined Michelson in Chicago despite the modest salary offered, on the promise that Millikan would have ample time to spend on his own research. Instead of blazing his own trail, Millikan found himself preoccupied with academics, authoring several textbooks while Max Planck, Albert Einstein and others transformed the world with their revolutionary ideas about particles and waves. At the age of thirty-eight, Millikan was still an associate professor among a faculty where thirty-two was the average age to become a full professor.
Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis refocused Millikan, who wrote in his autobiography16, “...by 1906 I knew that I had not yet published results of outstanding importance, and certainly had not attained a position of much distinction as a research physicist.” Motivated less by divine inspiration than ego, Millikan set about to make a name for himself. He decided it would be useful to determine the precise electrical charge of an electron, the sub-atomic particle that the English scientist J.J. Thompson had discovered in 1887. Millikan correctly surmised that finding that value would offer valuable insights into the nature of both matter and electricity.
For four years Millikan sprayed droplets of oil out of a perfume atomizer. By finding the precise charge that could suspend the oil particles against gravity, he could calculate the charge in the droplets17. He published the results of these experiments in 1910, calculating the charge of a single electron down to a constant value (about 1.602x10-19 Coulomb if you’re counting...). That same year, he was finally awarded a full professorship at the University of Chicago.
*
In 1917 Millikan left the University of Chicago for a position at Cal Tech, where he played a key roll in making that institution one of the preeminent schools of science in the world. In 1921, Millikan was named the director of Cal Tech’s Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics.
Two years later, in the fall of 1923, young Townsend Brown showed up at that very same laboratory – expressing frustration with the lab’s protocols and procedures. By the following spring, Townsend had endured as much he could of the laboratory’s restrictions. What he needed now was a mentor who would listen to his ideas without passing judgment. He hoped to find


such a willing ear in Robert Millikan – Cal Tech’s recently anointed Nobel Laureate.
Townsend set up his experiments in his home laboratory and invited the students and faculty to see a demonstration. When the appointed hour arrived, there were no knocks on the door at the big Pasadena house. Nobody came to see Townsend Brown’s inventions. Back at school, his classmates derided him and made jokes behind his back.
Among those who ignored his invitation was Dr. Millikan. Townsend set aside his wounded pride and tracked Millikan down in his office on the Cal Tech campus. Button-holed, Millikan reluctantly listened as his student explained the link he had found between electricity and gravity. When Townsend was done, Millikan dismissed him brusquely, saying that what he’d just heard was “utterly impossible and not to be considered.”
“He admonished me to continue my education before I gave any thought to such things,” Townsend wrote later in his brief autobiography.
He did not have long to dwell on his disappointment. Despite the rejection of Cal Tech faculty and classmates, Townsend Brown’s discoveries were about to be revealed to the world.


9


A “Push,” Not A “Pull”
(1924)
Photo from the Los Angeles Evening Express May 26, 1924
One invitee who did show up at Townsend Brown’s show-and-tell was a reporter for the Los Angeles Evening Express. Readers opening their paper on Monday, May 26, 1924, found a headline that read “Claims Gravity Is A Push, Not A Pull:”
Experiments now going on in a private laboratory at Pasadena by a youth of 18 may revolutionize the whole theory of gravitation as first deduced by Sir Isaac Newton.
Townsend Brown, a student of 706 Arden Road, has conducted experiments since last September which have convinced him that while there is a law of gravitation, the force is caused by a ‘push’


and not by a ‘pull,’ and development of this theory by practical inventions will revolutionize industry.
Young Brown has his laboratory at home filled with expensive equipment to pursue his investigations. He is a normal, seriousminded young man with no false illusions about his mission in life, but with a desire to become a pioneer along the line of scientific research that will open the way for startling discoveries and inventions.
STATEMENT OF THEORY
In plain words, his theory is this: That ether waves from outside space push from all directions against the earth, and against other objects and planets in space, forcing objects the way the wave extends, instead of drawing them, according to the old Newton theory of gravitation.
By means of his equipment he conducts experiments with the Xray, which is of the same family as light and the ether wave, and by means of which it is possible to test the theory. By means of this machine, he says, that since the X-ray is deflected, the gravity wave, being of the same family, also can be deflected.
REVOLUTIONARY
If this theory is proved so thoroughly that it displaces the Newton theory, inventions of the future will revolutionize human industry, according to the young scientist. By deflecting ether waves that are pushing against objects, man can control weight to such an extent that his deflecting machinery would enable him to lift a battleship out of the sea and set it on dry land.
After hitting the wire services, the story ran in the Zanesville, Ohio, Times Recorder, reminding local readers that...
Friends of the Brown family will remember that almost from infancy, Townsend has been interested in science and that he was the first person in Zanesville to have a radio, which he installed himself.
The story even made it into the pages of the New York Times, with a photograph of the “Pasadena student experimenting with equipment with


which he deflects the X-ray” and showing Brown holding a Coolidge tube, at the time the most advanced – and expensive – device of its kind, which Townsend’s father purchased for his son. But it was not the ‘X-ray beams’ that Brown was curious about detecting. It was the tube itself – and how it behaved under high voltages.
The Coolidge tube was asymmetrical, built with a big difference in the size of the positive and negative electrodes. As Beau Kitselman wrote later,18 this difference inspired Brown’s experiments:
Brown mounted the Coolidge tube in a careful balance, as if it were an astronomical telescope. His idea was to point the tube in different directions and somehow find a variation in the power used by the tube, the strength of the X-Rays generated, or something. He didn’t find what he was looking for, no matter where he aimed his apparatus, no tell-tale differences appeared. But he did find something he wasn’t looking for; he found that the Xray tube generated a thrust, as if it wanted to move.
He soon learned that the new force was not produced by the XRays, but by the high voltages which they required. Many experiments were necessary to make certain that the force was not one of the known effects of high voltage, and that it is a mass force, like gravity, rather than an area force, like most known electrical forces.
Kitselman said that these experiments with the Coolidge tube were the first indication that Townsend Brown had found a physical link between two elemental forces, electromagnetism and gravity – just as Einstein had predicted in theory.
The story in the Evening Express went so far as to speculate that “...control of gravitation might pave the way for a visit to Mars in a few years.” Though his ideas were being picked up on the wire services and printed as far away as New York, Brown still felt the sting of rejection from classmates and faculty at Cal Tech. At the end of his freshman year, he packed up all his gear and returned to Ohio. The following fall, he resumed his studies at Denison University in Granville, where he sought the counsel of the Professor of Astronomy, Dr. Paul Alfred Biefeld.


10


The Biefeld-Brown Effect
(1924)
Swasey Chapel and Observatory – Denison University, Granville Ohio, ca. 1924
When Denison University opened its new Swasey Observatory in 1911, Professor of Astronomy Dr. Paul Alfred Biefeld was named its Director.
Biefeld earned his B.S. in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin in 1894, after which – like Robert Millikan – he pursued graduate studies in Europe. He earned his Ph.D. from the Zurich Polytechnic Institute in 1900. When Biefeld’s name finds its way into publication, he is often dubiously described as a colleague or classmate of Albert Einstein, though it is unlikely that the two had anything more than the passing acquaintance of students attending a large university at roughly the same time. The only thing that Einstein and Biefeld really had in common was music. They both played the violin.
Einstein failed his first entrance examination for the Zurich Polytechnic Institute in 1894, was finally admitted in 1896, and graduated as a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics in 1900 – the year that Biefeld earned his doctorate. Biefeld remained at Zurich Polytechnic for six years, while Einstein left academia and found work as a clerk at the patent office in Berne, Switzerland. Despite scant evidence that the two


actually knew each other, 74-year-old Dr. Biefeld told a newspaper in 1941 that “When Einstein would forget to go to a class, he would come and borrow my notes to get caught up on what he had missed. He was rather careless in his appearance and made no show of himself. Yet he had strong ideas and wasn’t afraid to speak them out.”
In 1924, Cal Tech dropout Townsend Brown showed up at Denison University chastened by his experience in Pasadena and determined to devise the sort of practical invention that would demonstrate a link between electricity and gravity. He found a sympathetic ear in Dr. Paul Biefeld:
Dr. Biefeld had been interested in the subject of gravitation for many years. This interest probably coincided with Einstein’s interest in the Unified Field Theory and in the new concept of Relativity which was gaining recognition at that time. Biefeld believed in the possibility of some connection with gravitation. As he expressed it, “I am constantly on the look-out for something that might represent an ‘electrodynamic-gravitational’ coupling.”
A pivotal exchange took place when Brown asked Biefeld, “If a coupling did exist, what instrument might it resemble?” Biefeld thought for a few minutes and then answered without equivocation, “The capacitor.”
A capacitor stores and discharges electrical energy. It typically consists of two charged metal plates – the electrodes – that are separated by an insulating substance called a dielectric, which cause the electrodes to absorb their charge without conducting it between them. A typical electrical circuit has anywhere from one to hundreds of capacitors, each capable of storing a different level of charge and discharging that charge according to the requirements of the circuit.
In this telling of the tale, Brown suggests that it was Biefeld who first suggested that the mechanism for the transmission of gravitation might resemble the common capacitor. But Brown had already observed the effect in his Coolidge X-Ray tube, which, with its asymmetrical electrodes, acted as precisely the kind of capacitor Biefeld was supposedly proposing.
In 1977 Townsend Brown wrote in his brief memoir,
The basic Biefeld-Brown effect is quite simple. It is manifested as a departure from the Coulomb Law of electrostatic attraction, in that the opposite forces are not equal. The negative electrode


appears to chase the positive electrode so that there is a net force of the system... in the negative-to-positive direction. 19
By “departure from Coulomb Law,” Brown is referring to the electrical theory that opposite charges attract and like charges repel, as first articulated in 1785 by the French physicist Charles Augustin de Coulomb.20 Under normal circumstances, oppositely charged particles or surfaces of equal mass would attract each other equally. But the behavior Brown observed in his Coolidge tube – where the negative charge is slightly greater than the positive charge – the negatively charged surface is drawn toward the positive. Or as Brown put it, “the negative electrode appears to chase the positive electrode.”
There is not much more in the record about the relationship between Paul Biefeld and Townsend Brown, or how the Biefeld-Brown effect came to be so named. What seems likely is that after his unpleasant experience at Cal Tech, Townsend Brown sought cover for his ideas – by attaching a credentialed elder’s name to a discovery that could just as easily have been named wholly for himself. Calling his own discovery ‘Biefeld-Brown’ may be the first example of a practice that would recur throughout his life: hiding in plain sight.


11


“He Made Things Up”
(Notes from the Rabbit Hole #3)
“Imagination is the only weapon in the war with reality.”
– Lewis Carroll - Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
When I called the campus of Denison University in the fall of 2004 and spoke to archivist Heather Lyle, I was hardly the first to inquire about Townsend Brown. Ms. Lyle did not hesitate to cast aspersions into the vacuum where the details of his life should be found.
“He made things up,” Ms. Lyle told me.
“How’s that?”
“We have files on him. These queries come up frequently, because apparently he was not very truthful in things that he said about himself, and gave the impression of a lot contact here at Denison. He even claimed to have been faculty or staff here when he really wasn’t even a student, and claimed to have worked with Professor Paul Biefeld, who hardly even knew him. I mean, he just made a lot of claims that were false. People are constantly contacting us, so we have a whole file ready to refute these claims.”
I asked if she would make me a copy of that file.
“Oh no,” Heather said. “It’s pretty extensive, so I’m not willing to do that” – at which point I started making plans to visit Granville to inspect the file myself. Before hanging up I pressed a little further.
“The effect that Brown discovered, he named it the Biefeld-Brown Effect. But you’re telling me he had little contact with Biefeld?”
“He made up a lot of things,” Heather giggled as though she was revealing a secret. “That’s the impression that we all have. There is a kind of a detailed history of the various scams that he pulled based on various letters and people that were ripped off by him and that sort of thing.”
“If that’s all in your file, I can hardly wait to see it....”
In the final week of October – as the Boston Red Sox were winning their first World Series in 86 years – I descended on Denison University with Townsend Brown’s daughter Linda, who maintained her anonymity by


masquerading as my research assistant ‘Elizabeth Helen Drake.’ In a conference room at the university library, Heather Lyle let us examine her file on Thomas Townsend Brown.
The file opens with a print-out of an email from former archivist Cara Gilgenback that circulated around the campus in 1999:
Those of you who have been here for some time may have already run into reference questions involving:
-T. Townsend Brown (purportedly a student at DU in the 1920s).
- Dr. Paul A. Biefeld (physics faculty member at DU, 1911-1934, resident astronomer during that period).
- “The Biefeld-Brown effect” (supposedly a joint research project between the two men conducted at DU, which resulted in a significant discovery about anti-gravity).
This year I’ve received three requests for information on this topic, two of them in the past week. I asked the Physics Dept. for help since the archives yield little on Biefeld, nothing at all on T. Townsend Brown, and nothing at all on this so-called BiefeldBrown effect.
I want to let you all know that the Physics Dept. feels that Brown’s credentials as a physicist are suspect. They cannot find any documentation linking Biefeld and Brown either at Denison or outside of Denison. There are no known published papers or monographs within the scholarly arena on the Biefeld-Brown effect. I am compiling the few popular/alternate press accounts I can locate.
Also, I was unable to find any evidence that Brown ever attended Denison. I found lots of information on him on the Internet (mostly on UFO sites), including a biography I believe to be bogus.
The reason I’m telling you all this is so that you can deal with researchers who come asking about the topic. According to Mike Mickelson, the Physics Dept. has received hundreds of requests for info on this over the years, and interest does not appear to be flagging. You could spend a lot of time searching indices and other reference tools on this topic and would find next to nothing useful.


I would suggest that you refer interested persons to me. I’m compiling a file of relevant info that might be useful to these people. I’m also planning to write to the Naval Research Lab (where Brown reportedly worked) to see if they have any records.
Another email in the file from a “former DU faculty member” from August 2001 attests to the scams Heather Lyle alluded to:
[Townsend Brown arrived in Meadville, PA] in 1962 or 1963 to start a company making ozone generators and an electronic levitation system. Supposedly for use by satellites (and purported to be one of the possible systems used by UFOs). He arrived in a shiny black Cadillac equipped with a radio telephone system (very uncommon in those days). He visited a number of Meadville’s wealthy citizens, concentrating on the elderly, especially widows. A number of these individuals invested in his “new venture.” He established charge accounts all over town.
This email describes two devices Townsend demonstrated in his sales pitch, an “ozone generator” and a “levitation device” (“. . . like a large pizza dish . . .”). The email concludes:
A short time after this presentation, Brown vanished, leaving bills at all the places he had established charge accounts, including over $500 at a small grocery store. I don’t know how hard the stockholders tried to find him, but they were unsuccessful.
Also in the file are two letters from another, still earlier Denison University archivist Florence Hoffman, who says Townsend Brown was...
...a student at Doane Academy in 1922 and 1923. Brown is listed as a graduate of Doane Academy in June 1923. The Denison University Catalog lists him as a member of the Freshman Class in 1924/25. He did not return the following year and I do not know where he may have completed his education.
We have never been able to find any evidence of a collaboration by Biefeld and Brown on any project, and Biefeld’s son (now deceased) told us that his father knew Brown only slightly during the latter’s student days but never worked with him at any time.
Other correspondence in the Denison file suggests that Biefeld’s family in the 1940s knew nothing about Townsend Brown or the effect that bore the


two men’s names. In November 1956, UFO investigator Leon Davidson apparently interested in NICAP (about which more later21), wrote to Biefeld’s son Dr. L. P. Biefeld asking about his father’s relationship to Townsend Brown. L. P. Biefeld replied:
My father never did collaborate with Mr. Brown in a scientific sense. Since Mr. Brown was extremely interested in experimentation in the field of physics and astronomy, he hung around the Physics Department and the Observatory quite a bit and talked to father often. My father was not too impressed with his ideas.
L.P. Biefeld also corresponded with science journalist Gaston Burridge22, who speculated in the 1950s about anti-gravity propulsion systems, telling Burridge:
Your mention of the ‘Biefeld-Brown effect’ is news to me. I never heard my father speak of this effect. I am very surprised to hear of this and would be very interested to know where you obtained information regarding this so-called effect.
*
During the time in 2004 when I was digging into Denison University’s unflattering file on Townsend Brown, Linda Brown and I had been trying unsuccessfully to obtain military records for her father’s Navy service that began with his voluntary enlistment in 193023. That quest delivered its first results just after our visit to Granville, when a thick manilla envelope arrived in my mail. Inside were Townsend Brown’s naval records – or, at least those records that were not entirely classified, nor referenced anything that was classified24.
Among the Naval records was an affidavit from someone who had visited Townsend’s home laboratory in Zanesville in August 1930. The visitor had traveled “at the request of Mr. Thomas Townsend Brown... to personally conduct tests and examine certain apparatus and setups thereof and act as witness therefore with respect to the operativeness of said apparatus.”
The visitor then describes equipment that consisted of “two principal or essential parts, a stator and a rotor – a generator-and-motor system based on what is now known as “The Biefeld-Brown effect.” The visitor testifies:


It is apparent that systematic variations occur in the output of the apparatus which are not to be accounted for and not localized within the system itself. Though the phenomenon is not understood at the present time, it is quite certain that the above-named variations are caused by forces external to the system.
The visitor is describing the effect Brown had first noticed in his X-ray spectrometer, the effect which led him to conclude that “a radiation (other than light) prevailed in the Universe, independent of our Solar system” the observation triggered his conclusion that “gravity is a push, not a pull.”
The visitor concludes that what he has observed in the young man’s laboratory...
...is novel and valuable; leading to probable identification and measurement of forces hitherto not recognized in physical science or astronomy.
The visitor signed the affidavit: Paul Alfred Biefeld.


12


Can We Talk?
(1964)
Linda returned Howie’s ring when he joined the National Guard in May. “He is such a good guy,” she wrote in her journal, “and I love his family, but if I stay with him, how long will it be before I get bored? He will want to get married, I know.” The girl who had lived in forty-some different places before graduating high school added, “I just can’t imagine staying in the same town for the rest of my life.”
True to his word, Morgan was “around.” He’d drop by for a visit at Ashlawn, occasionally taking Linda for a ride on his motorcycle. Most of what Linda knew about him, she learned from gossipy girlfriends.
Like the last Friday in August, when Morgan attended the Philadelphia Folk Festival and invited some friends to spend the night on his family’s farm. Next morning, Morgan’s father found several couples in various stages of undress nestled in the hayloft. “I won’t have this sort of activity here,” he bellowed. “You have a reputation to think about and this is never going to happen again!”
Later that same Saturday, the phone at Ashlawn rang. Linda was surprised to hear Morgan’s voice on the other end.
“Can I come over?” he asked – “so sweetly,” she wrote in her journal, “I am sure that I am just an afterthought to him, but he has made me very happy.” Half an hour later, Morgan’s father’s car pulled into the driveway at Ashlawn. Morgan emerged with a guitar, a towel, a toothbrush, and a comb.
“I’m moving in for the day,” he announced to a bemused Linda.
Later that afternoon, Morgan told her about the party in the barn. “I guess my Dad figures that you are a better influence on me!”
Linda studied Morgan as he turned and walked toward the pool, noticing how much fun he was to watch, how tall and handsome he was. “Not if I can help it,” she thought to herself.
As they lounged around the pool, Morgan struggled with the guitar he’d bought the night before – a Gibson J200 jumbo flattop, just like the one Elvis played. They raided a nearby strawberry patch and in her journal,


Linda confessed, “I flirted outrageously with him, but I was so shy I don’t think he even noticed.”
Back at the pool, Morgan swept Linda into his arms. “He was going to throw me into the pool,” she wrote in her journal, “But I hung on so hard he couldn’t pull himself away from me, and I pulled him into the water with me.”
Morgan sputtered to the surface. “Damn,” he laughed, “you are one strong girl!”
Before the sun set, Morgan was gone.
“Damn Amazon!” Linda moped, “that’s what he’s probably thinking! That was the only move he made on me the entire day! Here he is a champion wrestler, and he can’t even rip me loose long enough to keep me from pulling him in the pool with me. He loves to dance, and I can barely do a waltz. His favorite song is Dancing in the Streets and I just can’t seem to keep up with him. He loves that big guitar and I can’t begin to strum it. He can sing, and I am just too shy to even try. I just know that I am so drawn to him that I can barely breathe when he stands next to me. And he hasn’t even kissed me!”
Linda’s journals from the summer of ’64 also reflect on the socio-political climate of the time. Race riots in Philadelphia that summer prompted a curious observation from her father: “Daddy commented that he felt it was humankind’s response to an outside force that is affecting all of us. He says it’s the same type of force that has probably encouraged revolutions and wars... It makes us all feel like fighting. I dunno.... Those are not exactly the kinds of emotions that I have been entertaining lately.”
Sunday morning Linda wrote, “I guess that Morgan has made things even worse. Word from the grapevine is that last evening he took a girl skinny dipping in the farm pond, and then made the mistake of using his Dad’s car to drive back to the main house to get some towels. His Father stormed out of the house to ‘pull the keys,’ only to discover a naked girl dripping wet in the front seat.” All Linda could think of was how jealous she was. “I wondered if I had to stand in line – or didn’t he think of me at all in a sexual way? Morgan and I,” she wrote with sad resignation “live in an entirely different reality.”


Linda expected the last Sunday in August was going to be “a quiet day.” Hattie, the Ashlawn housekeeper and her husband Taft, the butler, had the house “looking wonderful” prior to their departure for a vacation. Taft and Charles – taking a break from his driving duties – were working in the garden; Mother was reading and “Daddy was working at his desk in the study.”
And as for herself, Linda wrote, “I was purely agitated.”
As Sunday evening settled in, the big house was quiet. Linda, still feeling restless, had retired to the rec room to watch an old movie on the TV when she heard an unexpected knock at the door. When she opened it, there was Morgan, whispering, “I know it’s late, but can we talk for a while?”
“A while” drifted on until four the following morning. Lying at the edge of the pool, their legs dangling in the cool water under the hazy summer’s night sky, they stared up at the moon and stars, they spun into an expansive dialog about the planets, the stars, the vastness of space and even the possibility of time travel.
Morgan talked about his family. His parents had drifted apart when his younger sister drowned in a swimming pool accident. His mother never recovered from her grief and blamed his father; Now his older brother was also trapped in an unhappy marriage.
“I just don’t think marriage is in the cards for me,” Morgan said. “I’m never going to take my father’s place in society. I just don’t want the big house and mortgage. I don’t want to have to stay in one place except for two weeks every year.”
Linda could tell that the very thought made him restless and uncomfortable. She smiled at Morgan and looked away.
“What do you want, Morgan,” Linda asked quietly, looking skyward.
Startled at the question, Morgan’s answer came out in a rush. “I’ll go to college,” Morgan said, “and then I want travel and adventure. It’s weird, but I have this very clear vision of myself, I don’t know where, or when, but I’m in someplace that’s mountainous, and really rocky. No trees anywhere. I can see small pebbles on the trail tumble away from my boots. It’s strange because I don’t know of any place like that around here. I don’t even think it’s in this country, and the vision gives me this overwhelming sense of danger and excitement. I don’t know where that picture comes from, but


somehow, that’s the answer to your question. That’s what I imagine for myself, sometime in the near future.”
Absorbing the curious majesty of Morgan’s vision, Linda warmed herself with the thought that these were not the sort of things that he shared with those other girls. She offered a vision of her own.
“You just have to listen to your own soul about these things,” she said, “and somehow, you’ll just know what to do. I have my own peculiar premonitions. Sometimes I can just clearly see myself riding horse-back over golden hills, past strange, gnarled trees. I’ve even drawn the trees in art class, but the teacher says I should stick to reality, that trees like that don’t exist anywhere in nature. I don’t know where that picture comes from any better than you know where yours comes from. But I know my trees are real, and I’m sure your pebbles are real, too.”
“Amazing...” was all Morgan could manage to say.
The spell was broken by the sudden ringing of a telephone. Linda sprang to answer it before the entire household was awakened. On the other end of the line, Linda’s older brother Joseph was calling from Oregon, and he wanted to speak with his mother. Linda set the phone down and whispered to Morgan, “wait, please wait...” Morgan just wiggled his fingers at her, gesturing a silent “goodbye...”
Linda tip-toed into the house to awaken her mother, who took the call on the phone by her bed. By the time she got back to the pool, Morgan had slipped away. In the distance, she heard the trailing rumble of his motorcycle.
Returning to the house, Linda noticed Morgan’s big Gibson, still leaning near the door where he’d left it earlier.


13


A Rare Force of Nature
(1964)
When Linda answered the phone in the greenhouse at 4 AM, there was no friendly “hello” or a polite “sorry to bother you...” The voice on the other end just asked, “Hi, can I speak to Mom?” which left Linda wondering, “who is this??” It had been so long since she’d even heard from Joseph Brown, much less actually talked to him, that she’d almost forgotten that she had an older brother.
Joseph Townsend Brown was twelve years older than Linda, who was a toddler when the family lived in the tropical wilderness of the Hawaiian island of Kauai in the late 1940s. When the family returned to the mainland in the early 1950s, Joseph went off to college and served a stint in the Air Force. Simmering tension between Joseph and his father left Joseph out of touch with the family. As she returned to the main house, Linda figured it had been at least two years since she had heard the sound of Joseph’s voice.
Linda found Josephine hanging up the phone, sitting up among the overstuffed pillows and covers of a four-poster bed that practically filled the room. Josephine patted her hand on the mattress beside her, and Linda climbed onto the big bed and snuggled in with her mother.
“What did Joseph want,” Linda asked her mother. “And why was it so important that he was calling in the middle of the night?”
“He says he’s found the girl he wants to marry”, Josephine said. “He wants to give her the diamond ring I promised him years ago.” Realizing how long it had been since she, too, had spoken to her son, Josephine laughed self-consciously, “It took a diamond to get him to call.” Linda detected the sadness beneath her mother’s good nature. She also knew that even if Joseph’s call had bothered her, she would never have mentioned it.
The ring that Joseph was asking about was a family heirloom that Josephine had hung onto even through the most threadbare of times. It broke Linda’s heart knowing that her mother was being asked to part with a treasure that Joseph would slip on the finger of a woman Josephine had never even met.
“What’s the girl’s name,” Linda asked.


“I don’t know, Sweetie. He didn’t tell me that. He just asked me to send him the ring.”
Linda’s thoughts drifted through the hours she’d just spent by the pool with Morgan.
“Momma,” Linda blurted, “How did you know that Daddy was going to be the one true love in your life?”
As the pale predawn light filtered into the bedroom, Linda’s mother put her arm around her daughter and told her of the day in 1926 when young Thomas Townsend Brown took young Josephine Beale sailing on Ohio’s Buckeye Lake.
“I thought that he would be talkative and egotistical, but he was quiet and very shy – completely different from what I expected him to be! And he had those crystal blue eyes that were just wonderful! All of my friends had painted this picture of a womanizing playboy, but all those preconceptions just dissolved that afternoon.”
Linda giggled at the thought of anyone calling her father a playboy. Mother and daughter hushed themselves like a couple of teenagers at a slumber party. “Mom fluffed up her big pillow and I snuggled in beside her,” Linda recalled. “We continued in a whisper, and I remember the sun was just beginning to break.”
“Was that glimpse of Daddy really all you needed?”
“Sweetie, I guess that it’s different with every person. I pushed away from that dock believing that I was in the company of a spoiled cad. By the time we sailed back to the dock I was thoroughly convinced that he was a rare force of nature and already the love of my life.


14


We Will Just Sail Away
(1927)
Josephine Beale ca. 1928
Josephine Beale was a pretty, slender girl with soft, dark blonde hair, an enthusiastic smile and blue-grey eyes, a junior at Lash High School in Zanesville. She had seen Townsend Brown around town, heard people refer to him as “the second coming of Einstein,” and knew that he was the heir to one of the town’s more prominent families.
Josephine caught Townsend’s eye while performing in a school play. She didn’t know what to make of it when her gossipy girlfriends mentioned that Townsend Brown had been asking about her.
Josephine heard all kinds of stories: That he owned his own cruiser out on Buckeye Lake – a refitted pilot boat called the Viking. His devilishly


handsome friend Paul Grey had a reputation with the girls. Josephine’s girlfriends giggled whenever they mentioned Paul Grey and Townsend Brown. Now the gossip mill was starting to grind on Josephine Beale, who did all she could to feign disinterest.
As the Beale family gathered for dinner one night, Josephine’s father Clifford Beale – a prosperous businessman with an avocation in woodcraft – mentioned an inquiry he’d had that day about a carpentry project.
“I had an interesting visitor today,” Dr. Beale started. “That young man Townsend Brown came to ask what I would charge to build a curio cabinet for his mother’s birthday.”
Dr. Beale watched his daughter hold her breath.
“He asked about you,” Dr. Beale said. “Well, more precisely, he asked my permission to call on you.”
“Poppa, are you serious? He came here? Oh Poppa! You don’t know what everyone is saying about him! I can’t believe that he would have the nerve to come straight to you like this!”
Dr. Beale delighted in his daughter’s reaction. “Don’t be so quick to believe what others say,” he said. “This fellow made quite an effort to ask my permission in the most proper way. He stressed that you could select a chaperone if you wanted to. But I don’t think that will be necessary.”


Townsend’s gaff-rigged sailboat, the TomCat, on Buckeye Lake in Ohio.
Josephine and Townsend’s first date was a picnic on the shore of Buckeye Lake in the spring of 1927. In a fitting prelude to their future together, Townsend showed up late, having found it difficult to pull himself away from his laboratory. Josephine acted indifferent when he finally arrived in the Brown family’s chauffeur-driven Packard.
Their second date was more memorable. It began with Townsend showing Josephine around his private laboratory, which she found impressive even if she understood little of what he was showing her. After another chauffeured drive out to Buckeye Lake, he took her sailing in his gaff-rigged catboat, the aptly named TomCat. Josephine tried to tease him about the name, but Townsend just laughed and swore that was the name of the boat when he’d bought it.
It was a perfect day for sailing, warm and clear with a light zephyr chasing over the surface of the lake. She was new to sailing but took


naturally to the trim wooden boat; Townsend showed her the ropes, and even gave her a turn at the tiller.
“See that area over there, the ripples on the water?” Townsend said. “There’s more wind over there, try to steer toward it.” And when she did, the little boat picked up the fresh breeze and accelerated over the surface.
The visit to the lab and the adventure on the lake gave Josephine a better sense of her suitor. “We talked about everything that day,” Josephine later told Linda. “I kept watching him and noticing how wonderful and blue his eyes were. He was very handsome and so tanned and when he smiled at me I just lit up inside. My previous impressions of him just melted away that day.”
Tacking toward the far shore of the lake, Townsend told Josephine about dreams he’d been having and the ideas that came to him in his sleep that inspired him to experiment in his laboratory.
“He didn’t have anyone who would just listen to him, so that was my role from the first,” Josephine told Linda. “I didn’t understand half of what he was trying to explain to me. It took a couple of weeks before it began to sink in. I just knew that it was the most important information that I probably would ever hear, and here was a man who was going to need me.”
As the little sailboat skimmed across the lake, Josephine tried to lighten the mood.
“OK, Mr. Smarty, if you could travel through time, what do you think you will find in the future? Will there be more wars? What will become of Mankind in the future?”
The young dreamer with the tiller in one hand and the mainsheet in the other knew it was time to share the vision he had seen in his dreams.
“We will just sail away,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Someday, men will travel in space, just as easily as we are sailing now. Great ships will silently push away from the Earth just as easily as this sailboat pushed away from the dock.”
Josephine lingered in silence, listening to the water lapping against the hull. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine their little boat sailing across


the void of space. In her heart she knew she was hearing something not only strange and fantastic, but also true.
She opened her eyes and smiled. “Mr. Brown, you are different, aren’t you?”
Townsend smiled back.
“That was pretty much it for me,” Josephine recalled. “I was a gone goose!”
When they got back to the yacht club, Townsend took Josephine home, and left her on the doorstep without so much as a kiss on her cheek.
“That night, I couldn’t sleep,” Josephine recounted. “So I knew what I was going through!”
“Yes,” Linda thought to herself, as she listened to her mother that morning as the sun rose over Ashlawn. In her tangled feelings for Morgan, Linda knew exactly what her mother was talking about.


15


A Pineapple and A Pea
(Notes from the Rabbit Hole #4)
“Only a few find the way, some don’t recognize it when they do – some... don’t ever want to.”
– Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
More than a decade after I first heard and wrote the words, “We will just sail away...” I still don’t know if the vision Townsend Brown shared with Josephine as they sailed across Buckeye Lake is scientifically viable, but the vision is hard to ignore.
Rereading Townsend’s prediction reminded me of a passage from The Boy Who Invented Television, my biography of Philo T. Farnsworth.
In the final years of his life, long after he was done with television, Philo Farnsworth turned his attention to the riddle of controlled nuclear fusion: How do you bottle a star?
My journey to that riddle started when I first heard of Philo Farnsworth in the summer of 1973. As I was getting ready to relocate to Los Angeles to seek my fortune in the TeeVee business, I picked up a magazine25 with a story about Farnsworth. I was surprised I’d never heard the name, nor had any idea that the industry I wanted to work in could trace its origins to a sketch he drew for his high school science teacher in 1922 – when he was just 14 years old. The imagery in the article – photographs of televisions and cameras from the 1920s and 1930s – was all new to me. I wondered why I’d never seen any of it before, as I had seen photos of Edison with his first phonograph or the Wright Brothers hovering above Kitty Hawk in the original ‘Flyer.’
Later that summer I took a trip up the Pacific Coast Highway and stopped to visit a public access TV advocate in Santa Cruz who called himself ‘Johnny Videotape.’ Johnny was friends with Phil Gietzen, who edited the magazine where I’d found the article about Farnsworth. Gietzen knew Philo T. Farnsworth III, eldest son of the TV inventor, who told Gietzen stories about his father’s pursuit of controlled nuclear fusion in the 1950s and 60s.


Nuclear fusion is the same process that powers our sun and all the stars. If fusion could be harnessed on Earth in the same manner as its evil twin nuclear fission – it could offer a clean, safe, and virtually unlimited source of electrical power. But there’s a catch: Just like a star, a fusion reaction is so hot – millions of degrees Centigrade – that it cannot be allowed to touch the walls of its container. That would either destroy the reactor vessel or cool and extinguish the reaction.
This is the celestial magic that Philo T. Farnsworth – who “breathed life into all our living-room dreams26” – tried to perform in the 1960’s.
In 2022, when I returned to the Townsend Brown story after my long hiatus, I recalled a passage from the Farnsworth bio that describes his vision of how fusion energy would change the world:
He believed that fusion would alter the basic relationship that hinders current space travel – the weight ratio between launch vehicle and payload. He used the analogy of a pineapple and a pea: Today, what little space travel we do is conducted with payloads the size of a pea that are lifted into Earth orbit by launch vehicles the size of a pineapple. The reason for this inefficiency is because so much fuel has to be consumed in the initial thrust just to get the rest of the fuel off the launchpad. Farnsworth predicted the reversal of these ratios, with small fusion-engines gently lifting enormous payloads into orbit. He predicted that once in orbit, fusion-powered spacecraft could make it to Mars on as much nuclear fuel as could be stored in a tank the size of a fountain pen.
In the realm of interstellar travel, Farnsworth hinted at the truly daring cosmology behind his fusion work. He dared to question our whole concept of distance as it relates to travel through outer space, asking aloud on many occasions, “Why do we assume that we have to exert so much energy to cross something which is actually nothing?”
Farnsworth proved his unorthodox theories with the Fusor – a device not much larger than a soccer ball. But he stopped short of his goal of producing useful energy. He became suspicious of his corporate benefactors and withheld certain information. The funding ran out and the research ended in 1967.


And then he took the secret to his early grave27.
I was first drawn to Philo Farnsworth because he invented electronic video. The harpoon didn’t sink in until I started hearing about his unfinished work in fusion energy.
Thirty years later, that chance encounter in Santa Cruz led me to Townsend Brown.
Now here I am – another twenty years farther on – seeing the similarity between Philo Farnsworth’s ‘pineapple and pea’ scenario and what Townsend told Josephine: that voyagers of the future will just “push away from the Earth as easily as we pushed away from the dock.”
And wondering if the combination of fusion energy and gravity control offers a glimpse into the Universe of Magical Things.
Philo T. Farnsworth and an early ‘bell jar’ iteration of his Fusor, ca. 1959


16


A Great Disappointment
(1926)
The staff of L.K. Brown’s offices in Zanesville ca. 1930. Townsend on the far left, his father third from right, Grace Redmond to his right.
Townsend and Josephine kept their romance to themselves for more than a year, not only to keep Josephine’s girlfriends’ tongues from wagging, but also to avoid any interference from Townsend and Brown families.
Townsend’s mother Mary – ‘Mame’ to friends and family – had already selected a bride for her only son, a young woman from her own patrician circles, Miss Cornelia Smith. Mame and Cornelia’s mother were already making plans for a big church wedding that would surely be the highlight of the Zanesville social season. Recalling her own wedding – attended by more than 600 guests when she married Lewis Brown in 1898 – Mame expected nothing less for their son and heir.
Townsend, happily exploring the mysteries of the universe in his laboratory, hadn’t really given Miss Cornelia much thought. He was quite certain that Josephine was the woman he could confide in and trust to protect his innermost secrets.


Townsend’s laboratory was funded entirely by his father’s largesse and operated in a corner of the elder Brown’s offices in downtown Zanesville. Townsend would have been left entirely to his own devices were it not for the meddling of one Grace Redmond, his father’s secretary and the unofficial holder of the purse-strings for the various family enterprises. Miss Redman did not share her boss’s deference to his son’s scientific inquiries. She considered the younger Brown’s experiments to be “utter nonsense,” and never missed an opportunity to make Townsend beg her for the funds he needed to purchase equipment and supplies.
In her churlish way, Grace Redmond embodied the expectations descending onto the shoulders of T. B. Townsend’s only grandson. On his twenty-first birthday, Townsend received a letter from his Uncle Orville, Mame’s brother:
Dear Nephew,
You are now twenty-one years old and don’t want to be a chauffeur or a loafer all your life. You will never be happy unless you get into active business so you will be independent. Your parents are not well, you will not always have them with you, so you should start now to earn something, while you have the benefit of their advice, instead of everlastingly spending and looking for ways to spend money.
We want you to distinctly understand that all of the families have nothing but the kindest wishes for your success. You must realize that you are the only man out of the three families to hold together the business and financial interests that your uncles and your father will leave. Naturally, all of us wish that you will be a successful businessman. You are now of the age and you should appreciate what your father and mother have done for you in the way of education. Now it is up to you to repay them and the families that are interested in you, to show them whether or not you are capable. Unless you tie down to business at once, you will be a great disappointment to us all.
Kindly keep this letter for future reference. You may thank me in later years for writing you as I have, as it is all intended for your personal good.


Your affectionate uncle,
Orville N. Townsend
Rather than tying himself down to the family business, Townsend was pondering his escape from the midwestern confines of Zanesville.
First, there was the matter of a wedding to attend to.


17


Wagner In The Trees
(1928)
Josephine and Townsend on their honeymoon at Green Cove Springs, Florida.
On September 8, 1928, more than one-hundred guests gathered for what they thought was just another late-summer picnic and swimming party at Hawthorne Farm – the Brown family’s estate on the outskirts of Zanesville. Some were still dripping wet, fresh out of the pool, when the sound of Wagner’s wedding march suddenly began to radiate from loudspeakers that Townsend had hidden among the pine trees.
The ensuing nuptials were described in the society column of the next day’s Zanesville Times Recorder:
Surrounded by members of their own families and intimate friends and in the midst of tall trees through which the setting sun shone in benediction, Miss Josephine Beale, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. C.A. Beale of Merrick Avenue and Townsend Brown, only son of Mr. and Mrs. Lewis K. Brown of Adair Avenue, were united in marriage, Thursday afternoon at the Brown farm on the Newark Road.


The marriage was to have been a surprise, but some of the many birds who live in the trees on the Brown farm must have heard the young couple whispering their secret and made haste to tell it to their friends for everyone was expecting “something to happen.”
After a delightful picnic supper had been served to the guests who numbered over five score the music of the Lohengrin wedding march was heard faintly at first, as though from a great distance, then as the voices of the guests were hushed, more clearly. The music seemed to be wafted from the tops of the trees by angel voices in the most entrancing fashion and had been so arranged by the young bride and groom and as the guests all arose and moved up to meet them, the young couple appeared walking together over the brink of the wooded hill and proceeded to the place where Dr. Austin M. Courtenay of Delaware, a personal friend of the Brown family and a former pastor of Grace church awaited them.
Dr. Courtenay read the beautiful ring service of the Methodist Episcopal Church without a book and made it seem by so doing a peculiarly intimate and personal service performed for those whom he loved.
It was a picture seen by those present which will never be forgotten. The youth of the principals, the beauty of the woods and sunset sky and the solemn hush which stole over the scene as they made the responses uniting them for life, all created an atmosphere of dignity mingled with simplicity which was most appealing.
The bride was attired in a simple grey traveling frock with little grey hat and shoes and hose to match and carried a huge shower bouquet of pink and lavender flowers with a long pink and lavender shower. She was graduated last year from Senior High School and is a member of the Putnam Presbyterian church. She is unusually popular with her classmates and members of the younger social set.
Townsend Brown is one of the most interesting young men in Zanesville and has been widely known as an inventor and experimenter and has made some unusual discoveries which will work changes in theories of gravitation and electrical mechanism.


He is engaged with his father in the sand business, but his chief interest is in his laboratory where his research and experiments are conducted.
After two weeks in the East the young bride and groom will live at the Brown home on Adair avenue, although they plan during fine weather to spend a great deal of their time at the Brown farm, where Mr. Brown has built himself a little house right by the edge of the large swimming pool. Both Mr. and Mrs. Brown are greatly interested in swimming and water sports and out-of-doors life of all kinds, and the farm offers an alluring spot on which to spend an early fall honeymoon.
The newlyweds spent their wedding night at Hawthorne, in the little poolside cottage that would serve as their first home together, which they dubbed ‘El Nido’ – ‘The Nest.’
Before departing for their honeymoon in New York and Florida, Townsend presented Josephine with a gift: A mint-green ceramic teapot, hand-painted with delicate, cursive gold lettering that read simply ‘El Nido.’ As Josephine placed the little green teapot on a shelf, she had no way of knowing how many different shelves she would place it on in the years ahead.


18


Anniversaries
(1964)
Linda Brown had her own reasons for remembering the date of her parents’ wedding. On September 8, 1964, her parents went into the city to celebrate their 36th anniversary. Linda stayed home in the solitude of Ashlawn, preparing for her departure the next day for a college in Western Virginia called Southern Seminary.
When it was founded in 1867 as the Bowling Green Female Seminary, the word ‘seminary’ just meant a school for girls or women. Now it was a finishing school – a place for young women to find a suitable husband and take their place in proper society. Linda chose Southern Sem only for its outstanding equitation program, having loved all things hoof-and-bridle since she was nine years old. She wasn’t interested in the school’s social pretensions. She just wanted to spend as much of the next two years as she could in the company of horses.
Linda expected her parents would be leaving Ashlawn soon, too. Her father had honored the bargain he made with Josephine when they moved in: that they would stay put long enough for Linda to finish her last two years of high school in a single location.
“Hattie and Taft were still on vacation,” Linda recalled, “and I knew that Dad had arranged for them to take another position when they got back.” Indeed, after Josephine found a situation for them with the neighboring Asquith family, Townsend informed Mr. Asquith that he had been paying “his couple” a sum that was double their actual salary at the time – and had promised them a substantial raise as well. When Mr. Asquith accepted the terms, “Hattie and Taft were beside themselves” at the prospect of their new positions.
“I was alone in that big house,” Linda recalled of her last night at Ashlawn. “Charles had driven them into town, left the car with Dad and took a train to Washington. I’d already said my goodbyes to him, and he slipped a hundred-dollar bill into my hand, saying ‘This is for anything extra you might need.’ I didn’t actually stop to think that it might be years before I would see him again.”


Linda wandered around the house, “just sort of saying goodbye to everything. That’s a trick I’d learned long before, with all the moving we did, to take a very hard and long last look, so that I would not be homesick later for things left behind.”
Linda was still confused with the way things stood with Morgan. After the night of their long talk, he came by and “grabbed his guitar out of my hands, mumbling something about being late for work and took off. I was still grieving over what I figured was a lost cause.”
And then the phone rang.
Linda started a fire in the downstairs rec room and put some music on. “I hadn’t really intended to make it such a romantic setting,” Linda remembered, “but... well, maybe...”
Morgan had his guitar with him when he entered the room.
“You better be careful you don’t leave that thing here again,” Linda teased.
“Oh? And why is that?” Morgan asked.
“Because we’re all leaving in the morning and there won’t be anybody here for you to retrieve it from.”
They small-talked for a while, sitting next to each other on the sofa and staring a bit uncomfortably into the flames. The situation felt awkward and cold despite the warmth of the fire.
“What’s wrong?” Morgan finally asked.
“Look,” Linda said after a long silence, “I thought that maybe there was something going on between us. I guess I just thought, maybe, that you and I had something a bit more important than whatever you’ve got with all those other girls you spend time with. But now I don’t know. Now it all just feels....”
Linda stopped herself. In the silence, she first felt vulnerable, and then, suddenly... safe.
“It just seems very one sided,” she confided. “Like I’m the only one that feels this way. I guess I’m just sad because it really meant something to me. And now it’s coming to an end.”
Morgan jumped to his feet and put out his hand. “Let’s dance.”