theguardian | On January 31 2003, less than 24 hours before the Columbia space shuttle broke up, Nasa announced that it would no longer be funding its Breakthrough Physics Propulsion Programme - the world's largest visible antigravity project.
A working antigravity technology is still decades away at least, but the origins of one of the most promising branches of research can be found in an Ohio garage, almost 100 years ago.
Thomas Townsend Brown was born in Ohio in1905, two years after the Wright brothers took off. By his teens he was already dreaming about space travel, tinkering in his parents' garage with the ideas that would obsess him for the rest of his life. One day, while experimenting with X-ray tubes, he applied a high voltage electrical charge to a capacitor (a device for storing electricity) attached to a glass tube suspended from the ceiling. To Brown's astonishment, the tube began to rotate, apparently propelled by electricity itself.
Aged 18, Brown was taken under the wing of Dr Paul Biefield, a close friend and colleague of Albert Einstein. Biefield was deeply impressed with Brown's discoveries and together they proposed the Biefield-Brown effect. This states that when an electrical current is applied to a capacitor, it will move in the direction of the flow of current - towards its positive pole. And so the fledgling field of electrogravitics was born.
By the early 1950s, Brown had developed platforms, three feet in diameter, which he is said to have demonstrated hovering and rotating. The American military classified the results, but they neglected to support Brown's research. This proved to be the story of his life. Brown never got the funding he wanted, but he continued to develop his ideas until his death in 1985.
But the story continues in the research of groups exploring electrogravitics, among them Boeing, Nasa and BAe Systems. Closest to Brown's original vision are the "Lifters" being built by American Antigravity and others - skeletal metal frames that can lift a pound in weight, propelled by electric currents. Thomas Townsend Brown's name may be forgotten, but his dream lives on.
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