I've got a deep appreciation for old-school inventors. These pre-internet "lone wolf" type renaissance men dabbled in physics, engineering, and machining and they had to excel at integrating those skills together in order to get results.

When I started doing Antigravity research in 1992, the only way to find information was the prototypical old-school method, in books. I haunted the 4th floor's east-wing of the WWU library between 1992 and 1996, researching everything that applied to gravitational and related science. The college photocopier cost 25 cents per page, and it was three-floors away from the physics and engineering wing, so I ended up hand-copying most of the notes onto spiral-bound notebooks with pencil. I fared a bit better at the community-college library -- their library had a tiny engineering section, but it did contain a complete engineering encyclopedia set, which covered a lot of the physical effects that I wanted to learn about.

Every now and again you find a real gem in the library. One such treasure at the WWU library was an old book from the 1960's on Terrestrial Electromagnetism, and it contained Nikola Tesla's theory of how to produce ball-lightning, as well as an in-depth explanation of geomagnetism and geo-electrical theory.

The pre-internet days of inventing were a little more pure than today, and a bit less distracting as well. The downside was the intellectual isolation, which is a result of specializing in a unique field of knowledge. I met a few kindly professors that offered guidance, but for the most part sharing knowledge involved writing letters or using the phone.

Bill Butler was in a similar situation with the Hovertech newsletter. He was printing the publication regularly, conducting experimental research and attending new-technology conferences, which had completely filled his schedule. Corresponding through the mail was an extra burden that he didn't need -- a time-consuming process that sometimes took weeks for a reply. My research was connected with the Hovertech project, and Bill and I exchanged several messages on paper about the technology and research progress.

Pre-internet Antigravity research suffered for the lack of multimedia. If you came up with a real breakthrough, it would cost real bucks to mail photos, and even then only a few people would see them. Also, it was impossible to validate the Searl-Effect and Biefeld-Brown technology without actually building a prototype, and documentation on how to reproduce the results was impossible to obtain. I have an hour's worth of Antigravity conference footage on VHS-tape that Bill Butler sent me in 1994. It was one of those rare collectibles until I copied the tape into RealPlayer format. Now its just more data for enthusiasts to view online...

Nowdays, finding data is easy, and we've already begun to see the arguments about whether easy-access to data somehow devalues the data in the process. If you have to search harder to find information, obviously you're more likely to value it -- however, sometimes you end up making poor decisions because you have less information overall.

One of the goals of American Antigravity is to collate information from the "lone-wolf" days into a single online resource, so that we could share not only the data itself, but also hopefully maintain the importance of existing research for the younger generation (including myself) to learn about. On the downside, it means that cocky teenagers have a bit more opportunity to sound off to established inventors, but it also means that the old-school inventors have access to a "virtual students" in a manner never before achievable.

Once upon a time writing a book was the only way to get the message out: now you can do it in minutes, and I think that's a good thing. It's important to remember the pre-internet days of bookwork, sliderules, and card-catalogs, though, because they defined our current culture in many ways...