Al wrote:

The Dean Drive!
I remember when John Campbell was extolling that to the sky!
Funniest thing to come out of the Dean Drive madness (besides John
Campbell taking another step down hill in the eyes of the science
fiction community) was that the United Statess Patents Office wrote
Dean back saying he should get in touch with the mining industry ,
that he has a good invention for using on mining processing shaker
tables!
(I don't know if Dean ever followed up on this!)


Western Gear corporation actually did some tests on the Dean Drive.
There's more on it he http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/dean.html
Then there's the other wild space drive from the same time period, T.
Townsend Brown's strange widget:
http://members.gcronline.com/cbrauda/0001.htm
For me, the test of a antigravity device would be to seal it in a
watertight sphere weighted to achieve neutral buoyancy, rev it up and
drop it into a swimming pool so that it is fully submerged, but not
touching the bottom. If it starts moving in one direction, you are on to
something.


Pat