Thomas Townsend Brown

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. 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.