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Laithwaite Every year the Royal Institution in London has a guest lecturer. In 1973 it was Professor Laithwaite, professor of electrical engineering at Imperial College in London. Laithwaite invented the linear motor and the Maglev system for powering a train - a system that is currently being implemented in Germany and Japan. I saw Professor Laithwaite’s lecture on TV. In it he attempted to lift a weight with an attached wheel, which he was just able to do with great difficulty. It weighed, he said, more than 50 pounds. Then he started to rotate the wheel and was able to lift the weight easily above his head. Anyone who has played with gyroscopes would have experienced the ethereal quality of how they move and Laithwaite proposed that there was an ‘anti-gravity’ component in this. The science behind the controversy is quite complicated, but put simply, the sceptic explanation is that that power of the lift comes from the movement of the gyroscope. The spin provides a force that is at right angles to the force of gravity. (In my opinion this is what anti-gravity is). Laithwaite’s claim was that there was lift with no reaction and this explanation does not counter this. There is also the common-sense problem: How is it that Laithwaite could lift the 50-pound weight only when the gyroscope is running? It’s said that Laithwaite admitted he had got it wrong, but if he did say this, the evidence indicates it was simply to shut his critics up. He was, it must be remembered, a professor of engineering at a world-renowned university and had made radical inventions that only today are being realised commercially. In fact, he was still working on gyroscopic anti-gravity devices up until his death and NASA was sponsoring his research. Laithwaite was ridiculed by the very scientists who had invited him to do the Royal Institution lecture, although they never published the proceedings of that lecture. A number of reputable scientists were convinced by his work, however. This is from Alternative science: After retiring from Imperial College, Laithwaite began a long series of detailed experiments. Sussex University offered him a laboratory and he formed a partnership with fellow engineer and inventor, Bill Dawson, who also funded the research. Laithwaite and Dawson spent three years from 1991 to 1994, investigating in detail the strange phenomena that had unnerved the Royal Institution. 'The first thing I wanted to find out was how I could lift a 50 pound wheel in one hand. So we set out to try to reproduce this as a hands-off experiment. Then we tackled the problem of lack of centrifugal force and the experiments were telling us that there was less centrifugal force than there should be. Meanwhile I started to do the theory. We devised more and more sophisticated experiments until, not long ago, we cracked it.' The real breakthrough came, said Laithwaite, when they realised that a precessing gyroscope could move mass through space. 'The spinning top showed us that all the time, but we couldn't see it. If the gyroscope does not produce the full amount of centrifugal force on its pivot in the centre then indeed you have produced mass transfer.' 'It became more exciting than ever now because I could explain the unexplainable. Gyroscopes became absolutely in accordance with Newton's laws. We were now not challenging any sacred laws at all. We were sticking strictly to the rules that everyone would approve of, but getting the same result -- a force through space without a rocket.' The research of Laithwaite and Dawson has now borne practical fruit. Their commercial company, Gyron, filed a world patent for a reactionless drive -- a device that most orthodox scientists say is impossible.