Dear Patrick,

 

Thanks for the info, and I did and do admire Professor Laithwaite.  I only met him once and briefly, but liked him immediately.  His work was also important, and I do believe that much remains to be learned about gyros.  And he certainly did comprehend that Heaviside's extra energy circulation component had electrogravitational consequences.  I still think he got a bum deal from the Royal Society when no proceedings of his invited lecture was published, the first such time that happened in 200 years or so.

 

On the gyro experiment in water, the gyro should be completely enclosed so that no contact is made between the spinning wheel and the water (otherwise, we are converting mechanical stored energy into work being done upon the surface of the water) and even between the moving air around the gyro wheel and the water.  Then if in a closed box it floats for awhile when spinning, and doesn't float for a while when not spinning, one then would be faced with trying to explain the anomaly.

 

Best wishes,

 

Tom Bearden

---

 

From:  Patrick  / London / UK

22nd May  2002

FAO Tom Bearden / please forward if necessary

Dear Colonel Bearden,

I was interested to read you comments on Eric Laithwaite in a recent
correspondence reply. In my estimation Professor Laithwaite was one of the
great engineering minds of the post war period, but sadly without due honour in his own time. As you say, he had radical and important ideas about gyro precession and propulsion, which probably limited his career. Not many scientists or engineers seem to appreciate the reality of precessional forces. A lot of them want to confine the idea to the nutation of the earth¹s axis, but it is omni present in all dynamic systems.
Laithwaite was reasonably well known for his work on linear induction motors, and several of his lectures were broadcast on British TV, including demonstrations with massive, bench top gyros. I can still clearly remember him telling a studio audience of schoolchildren that proper, open research into gyro precession / propulsion was being neglected and discouraged.
Many years later, I conceived (in a dream !) a simple experiment which happens to work fine in reality, and demonstrates the principle for just a few pounds / dollars. Here goes:
Purchase a small gyro of the kind designed like a Œspinning top¹, where the flywheel is mounted inside a streamlined plastic casing, which is practically watertight. These are commercially available as toys in the UK.
Place the gyro in a large tank or bath of water. It quickly sinks.
Take the same gyro, dry it off, and power it up to the maximum possible revs. Carefully place the spinning gyro back into the water. Now it floats, for 10-15 seconds, maybe longer, until the flywheel starts to dump energy too quickly. Other lateral movements can also be seen.
So there it is !  An active gyro weighs less than the same gyro when Œinert¹ or Œstatic¹. Its mass is the same, but it weighs less, just like a man on the moon.
The obvious question is how come this particular force is only manifest in the water ? My insatnt hunch answer is as follows:
The spinning flywheel develops precessional forces at ninety degrees to the plane of rotation, in other words parallel to the axis of spin. The greater the mass acceleration of the flywheel, the greater the precessional force.
Air alone does not provide sufficient mass density for these forces to react against visibly, but water does. Precession begets precession, again at ninety degrees, and so a small lateral movement may also be seen.
I can only assume that this disparity in mass density is sufficient such that the forces act only to support the gyro, without, at the same time, working to sink it. In other words, when a gyro spins in the air, supported on a massive body, the precessional forces, in reality, (but non observably) are generated equally on both sides of the flywheel, along the axis of spin, but in each case away from the centre of spin. Being equal they will tend to cancel out. The presence of the air / water interface alters this equation;
it is suficiently asymmetric that the gyro can float as long as flywheel spins fast enough.
Anyway, that is my strictly non  academic contribution.
Best wishes and good luck in your endeavours

Patrick