(C&P)
So this is it - my antigravity craft. The device itself is perched on a plastic filing cabinet in my living room. It's an equilateral triangle, 8 inches per side, composed of thin sticks of balsa wood. There's a ring of copper wire from RadioShack strung around the top and a strip of Reynolds Wrap held down with Krazy Glue around the bottom.

When I throw the switch, 20,000 volts will course through this bundle of sticks and foil - and it will levitate. It has no moving parts, no rotors, and no wings. But it will, I've been told, lift itself into the air.

Hence the name. This thing is called a lifter and is the peculiar obsession of a grassroots movement of antigravity fans. Hobbyists swiped the concept from the long-lost work of Thomas Townsend Brown, a fabled electrogravitics inventor of the early 20th century. They began trading designs online, and by last year a lifter subculture was in full swing, with basement scientists hotly debating "field to field gravity effects" and competing to build ever huger, more bloated devices. In January, one French tinkerer assembled a lifter strong enough to fly a mouse - named Orville, after the Wright brother - making it the first documented passenger of a UFO.

Sure, it's kooky. Except that scientists and entrepreneurs are beginning to explore the phenomenon. NASA was granted a patent on lifter technology and began investigating it as a way to propel satellites. Several companies announced they, too, were racing to bring lifters to market - with an aim of perhaps minting those Buck Rogers hovercars we've been promised for so long. "This is bigger than cold fusion!" one businessman told me jokingly.

Conspiracy theorists have always insisted that antigravity was being developed "in the black" by covert government commissions and military units. It's the secret engine in the B-2 bombers, man! They're testing them at Area 51! What makes lifters different is that they're no secret at all. Fans post home videos of themselves grinning as their devices hover above their kitchen tables. Last spring, three Detroit high school students won the city's science fair by floating a giant lifter, and the teachers sent out an exuberant press release ("BEAM ME UP SCOTTY," they gushed). With stuff like this, who needs black ops? This is antigravity for the masses.

There is, however, one screamingly obvious question: What's keeping these things in the air? Antigravity research has coughed up more bogus mumbo-jumbo than just about any other area of science. Are lifters - as debunkers claim - a mere physical hack, a trick of pushing air fast enough to float a toy? Or could this actually be evidence of Einstein's dream, the missing link between gravity and electricity? "They look like toys, these lifters," observes Alexander Szames, a French aerospace writer. "But in 1871, they tested the first airplane, and it was no more than a toy. And people laughed at it, too."

There's only one way to understand this, I realize.

So here I am. I clear my living room. I shove my metal desk as far away as possible to prevent minibolts of lightning. I stuff my cats in the hall closet so they don't somehow get electrocuted.

Then I reach down and turn on the juice.

Lifters go back to the 1920s, with the work of inventor Thomas Townsend Brown. Born into a wealthy Ohio construction family, he was a lackluster student who loved to mess with electricity. While at Denison University under the direction of mentor Paul Biefeld, Brown began experimenting with capacitors - electronic components that can store and release a charge. Brown noticed something odd. When he pumped a high voltage through a capacitor, it would produce a tiny propulsive force in one direction. He'd strap a capacitor to the end of a lever, turn on the current, and it would jump to one side, like the arm on a metronome. He dubbed it the Biefeld-Brown effect.

Brown was better at tinkering than theorizing, so he never developed a rigorous scientific explanation for why this happened. He had plenty of wide-eyed hypotheses, though: In "How I Control Gravity," a 1929 article for Science and Invention, he claimed that his capacitors generated mysterious fields that interacted with Earth's pull. Brown envisioned a giddy, Jules Verne future where his devices would drive the world: "Multi-impulse gravitators weighing hundreds of tons may propel the ocean liners of the future," he wrote. "Perhaps even the fantastic 'space cars' and the promised visit to Mars may be the final outcome. Who can tell?"

While working for the US Navy in the '30s - officially on electromagnetic mine detection - Brown continued building ever larger examples of his capacitors. His experiments culminated in a 1952 demonstration famous in antigravity lore: In front of an audience of scientists and military officials, Brown hauled out two 2-foot-wide metal disks affixed to the end of 10-foot-long rotor arms. When he pumped 50,000 volts through the apparatus with 50 watts of power, the disks spun at 16 rpm - proof of concept.

After that, interest in Brown's work slowly waned. The Pentagon never pursued the technology, and investors weren't interested. Worse, Brown's scientific credibility crumbled when, obsessed with UFOs and their means of propulsion, he founded the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena to hunt for little green men. In 1979, a book on the mythical Philadelphia Experiment - in which the Navy allegedly teleported a warship - cited Brown's participation, cementing his reputation as a crackpot. "I think that's when the mainstream physics guys started saying, OK, this stuff is crazy," says Andrew Bolland, a friend of the Brown family who runs a Web site devoted to Brown's work. For the next few decades, hardly anyone remembered Brown had ever existed.link

So? Did this mysterious device of yours work?

The cat got zapped!

Exactly!! And if it did work, tell us how to make our own!! lol

Bela do you have a link so we have more to go on?

I think I would be nervous playing with 20,000 volts!!

I am wondering how they got 20,000 volts into their house? Here in America the norm is 480 volts.

Makes you wonder!

Where did Bella say she had one of these devices?

The Biefeld–Brown effect is an effect that was discovered by Thomas Townsend Brown (USA) and Dr. Paul Alfred Biefeld (CH). The effect is more widely referred to as electrohydrodynamics (EHD) or sometimes electro-fluid-dynamics, a counterpart to the well-known magneto-hydrodynamics. Small models lifted by this effect are sometimes called 'lifters'.

The effect relies on corona discharge, which allows air molecules to become ionized near sharp points and edges — this belief is perpetuated in the construction of pointy lightning rods historically (though rounded or spherical topped rods are better than the pointed rods). Usually, two electrodes are used with a high voltage between them, about 20 kV and up to megavolt levels, where one electrode is small or sharp, and the other larger and smoother. The most effective distance between electrodes occurs at an electric field gradient of about 10 kV/cm, which is just below the nominal breakdown voltage of air between two sharp points. This creates a high field gradient around the smaller, positively charged electrode. Around this electrode, electrons are stripped off the atoms in the surrounding medium, they are literally pulled right off by the electrode's charge.

This leaves a cloud of positively charged ions in the medium, which are attracted to the negative smooth electrode, where they are neutralized again. In the process, thousands of impacts occur between these charged ions and the neutral air molecules in the air gap, causing a transfer in momentum between the two, which creates a net directional force on the electrode setup. This effect can be used for propulsion (see EHD thruster) and fluid pumps.

Biefeld–Brown effect

Theres plenty of instructions on the internet on how to make your own lifter, and yes, they apparently do work. I dont see why they'd be called antigravity though...

It goes with a recent issue of Popular Science and its cover "What happened to My Flying Car?" We were supposed to have cool antigravity cars as well.
The mainstream historical version we have been given for years is more or less that there has been nothing new to develop for a long time, while there is plenty of alternative history out there that shows lack of new tech for the general public was done through choice.
It could not really be called a conspiracy since existence of lots of tech is there for anyone to read about, but instead is a different version of tech history than what has been fed to the masses through education institutes and the media.
I got to thinking about how much tech history might have been squashed through the years by the corporate oil powers and went digging some.
I popped a link on to Wired.