“Who do you think you’re dealing with?” the would-be angel investor said following the demonstration, “I’m not just a bag of money, I also have a Master’s degree in Engineering. What you’ve got here not only breaks the laws of physics, but several laws regarding investment fraud. Because you guys put on such an entertaining magic show, I’m going to be incredibly generous and not report you to the FTC. How did you do it? Hidden helium pockets? Magnets? No, don’t tell me. You guys should just play to your strengths and go into entertainment.” He packed up his stuff and left.
“Well, that went over like a lead balloon,” said Igor.
“Funny,” replied Dave, “Real funny. He’s going to pass the word around that we’re con-men and we’re going to end up having to bootstrap it.”
What they had was the real deal, but they weren’t certain how it worked. They had set out to design an artificial gravity system for spacecraft, but ended up failing spectacularly. Their premise was simple: Replicate the system that the earth uses to create gravity. They made a ball that was structured roughly in the same manner as the planet. Instead of having an iron/nickel alloy kept in a liquid state by the intense heat and pressure at the core, they substituted a proprietary mercury solution that replicated it’s magnetic properties. The other layers were replicated in the same way. They mounted the high-tech sphere on an axle and spun it, but it did not exert any attractive force whatsoever. Not only that, but when they removed the sphere from the axle, they dropped it on the concrete floor of their lab. When they put it back on the axle to see if it was damaged, it worked. Small objects were attracted to it, but it would have to be scaled up to a size and weight that was ineffective for space vehicles in order to provide enough gravity to hold a human crew in place. They had inadvertently reproduced the cosmic collision that formed the moon.
They accidentally made the sphere spin backwards the next time they placed it on the axle. When they placed it in the same orientation as the poles of the Earth, the sphere suddenly shot up into the air and then came crashing down when its height exceeded the length of the power cable and it was pulled loose. A reexamination of video from the camera that recorded their lab experiments revealed that through a series of fuck-ups, they had discovered a workable anti-gravity system. The only problem was that nobody believed a couple of nobodies like Igor Karitz and Dave Dallas.
Dave mounted the sphere in the engine compartment of a 1972 Corvette Sting Ray. Igor drank a little too much vodka and decided to take her for a spin. Once he hit 40,000 feet, the mechanism froze and I. Karitz fell from the sky having traveled too close to the sun. D. Dallas wept.
Literature in Small Doses 