Ben Arown-Awile
Banned
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2001
- Messages
- 889
When I was in high school in the 50's, I went to an open house at a local engineering college, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. There were all kinds of gadgets on display built by students, kind of like a science fair.
I have always wondered about one of them. It was a metal box about 10 inches square with a rod sticking out of the top. A flat metal disk about 8 inches in diameter with a hole in the center was floating above the box with the rod through the hole, but nothing was touching.
At first, I was not too impressed, figuring it was some sort of magnetism, but the kid took the disk off and handed to me. It was aluminum. Then he put a copper one on the rod, adjusted some knobs on the box and it floated up like magic.
I asked him how it worked and he just gave me a smart ass smirk and said "invisible forces".
I wanted to ask him more, but I got interested to the guy next to him who had built a strain meter that was so sensitive it could register when you took a 2 inch thick steel bar in your hands and tried to bend it. I spent the next half hour playing superman seeing how high I could get the reading to go, and I forgot about the guy with the floating disks. But over the years I wondered what became of that guy and what it was that he had actually built.
I have always wondered about one of them. It was a metal box about 10 inches square with a rod sticking out of the top. A flat metal disk about 8 inches in diameter with a hole in the center was floating above the box with the rod through the hole, but nothing was touching.
At first, I was not too impressed, figuring it was some sort of magnetism, but the kid took the disk off and handed to me. It was aluminum. Then he put a copper one on the rod, adjusted some knobs on the box and it floated up like magic.
I asked him how it worked and he just gave me a smart ass smirk and said "invisible forces".
I wanted to ask him more, but I got interested to the guy next to him who had built a strain meter that was so sensitive it could register when you took a 2 inch thick steel bar in your hands and tried to bend it. I spent the next half hour playing superman seeing how high I could get the reading to go, and I forgot about the guy with the floating disks. But over the years I wondered what became of that guy and what it was that he had actually built.