"Detesters, Phasers and Dean Drives" is an article by G. Harry Stine in Analog (June 1976). Stine was one of two men from Huyck Corporation's research office who watched Norman L. Dean run his machine in 1960, and he built the apparatus with which that office then spent nearly five years looking for the physics behind it. The article is a memoir with laboratory detail, not a test report on Dean's device: its author says plainly that the device itself was never put through a decisive test. It is the testers' own version of events, written by someone who still thought the question open.
What Stine and Davis saw in Dean's apartment
The background Stine gives is a letter from John W. Campbell dated August 21, 1959. In it Campbell, who had seen photographs, passed on figures for a tabletop model driven by a 1/4 inch electric drill: a push of about 85 pounds, and a weight on a scale falling from 135 lb to 50 lb with the motor running. Stine passes these figures on from Campbell's letter and gives no first-hand observation of them.
What he did witness came on September 28, 1960, when he and Dr William O. Davis, Huyck's Director of Research, visited Dean's apartment on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington DC. His evidence for the visit is Davis's laboratory notebook entry of September 30, 1960, which Stine signed as a witness.
What did they see? A horizontal demonstration on the waxed apartment floor: the machine never left the ground. A push-rod joined the drive to a second, separate weight that the visitors judged to be roughly three times as heavy. With the motor at speed and the clutch engaged, the notebook records the heavier weight creeping a few millimeters across the floor while the drive, watched by eye from a few inches away, seemed to stay where it was. In a second trial each man put a hand in place of the weight and felt the machine push. Stine adds that he still remembers it vividly against his right hand.
What did they check? Only what could be settled by looking and handling. The notebook describes a mechanism of metal and Lucite whose moving parts were in plain view. The two men found no air hoses, saw no slope in the floor, and satisfied themselves before and after the run that both objects slid freely. Magnets they discounted, partly because the device seemed to contain very little ferritic material and partly because the push seemed too strong for them. The entry offers one comparison: with the motor off, the same hand pressure slid the drive several inches.
What could they not check? A good deal. The entry records no measurement of the force, the drive's stillness was judged by looking at it, and both objects stood on Dean's floor throughout, so the visit could not show what the machine would do without a surface under it.
Davis's notebook concludes that fraud was unlikely and that something new had been seen. It also says Dean's own explanation did not strike him as valid. Stine adds that by the June 1960 article Campbell, too, no longer believed Dean's mathematics.
The theory built to fit: Davis mechanics
Davis's response, as Stine tells it, was to wonder aloud whether some force depends on how quickly acceleration itself changes. By October 14, 1960 he had added a third-derivative term to the standard equation of motion, which Stine gives as:
F = kx + V dx/dt + m d^2x/dt^2 + Dm d^3x/dt^3
Here k is the spring constant, V the viscous damping coefficient, m the mass, and D a critical action time: an interval during which, on this hypothesis, a system cannot take up a change of energy as a whole. Davis published the idea in Analog in May 1962 as "The Fourth Law of Motion".
A monthly review group formed around it: Davis, Stine, the mathematician E.L. Victory, Professor Serge Korff of New York University as academic critic, and Campbell. Stine reports that a paper by the group, delivered to the American Physical Society on April 23, 1962, drew no comment and was refused publication.
The Phasers and the 3-degree phase angle
Huyck never obtained a Dean Drive. Stine says negotiations with Dean went nowhere and that the company could not legally build a copy. The experiments were therefore on stand-ins.
The first rigs, built from late 1960 at Milford, Connecticut, were simple-harmonic-motion devices meant to reveal D. They were discarded one by one because not all the forces in them could be accounted for.
In May 1961 Stine designed and had built a copy of the harmonic drive mechanism used in the Dean Drive: two counter-rotating eccentric masses, an arrangement he says industry calls a Buehler Drive. His own description of the complete Dean Drive is that oscillator plus a coupling that locked the oscillating frame to the main frame or the force rod for part of each cycle. The target was a claim Dean had made at the 1960 meeting. Classically, carriage and weights move 180 degrees out of step; Dean said the carriage led by 225 degrees, a phase angle of 45 degrees. The rig, Phaser Mark I, had rotating weights of 1607.3 grams, a weight-to-carriage mass ratio of 0.9333, a 1/4 inch drill motor with a 6-inch, 10-pound flywheel, a protractor dial and a stroboscope.
The reported results:
- Mark I Mod 0, with light 1/4-inch universal joints, was run from 150 rpm to 1,500 rpm. Nobody saw Dean's angle, and the joints wore until they had at least 15 degrees of slop, enough to make any reading meaningless.
- Mark I Mod 1, with 1/2-inch joints and shaft, showed a three-degree phase angle at 1,500 rpm. Stine measured total drive-train slack at less than a half-degree.
- Mark II, which replaced the rotating weights with a single mass shaken back and forth, gave the same three degrees.
- A 1963 rerun followed building instructions Dean published in Analog in May 1963. Two Huyck technicians, C. Philip Morse and Maclane Tilton, worked unsupervised and again saw 3 degrees, not 45.
Stine and Victory reported this in Analog in September 1963. Dean's reply, printed in January 1964, accused them among other things of violating his patent rights. Huyck's general counsel and patent attorneys became involved, and on their advice Davis instructed Stine not to go and see Dean. Stine suspects that Dean's larger angle came from his light drive train, which had no flywheel, but says he does not know.
The rocket pendulum that found nothing
The second line of experiment sought a different prediction of Davis mechanics: a delay between force and motion, and a shortfall in how far a struck body travels. Stine hung two five-pound masses joined by a 36-inch rod as a ballistic pendulum, eight feet long at first and later on 16-foot lines, and fired an Estes Type B14 rocket motor on it (peak thrust nine pounds, 300 milliseconds duration). A strain-gage load cell recorded thrust; photocells, and later a capacitance system, recorded position.
After hundreds of firings over more than two years, the predicted effect had not appeared. In March 1965 the improved position readings showed the pendulum vibrating in four degrees of freedom, so the energy could not be fully tracked, and the experiment was dropped. Stine attributes the null result to a rig too small and a thrust applied too slowly. That is his reading, not a demonstrated cause. The laboratory closed in April 1965 when Huyck cut its research budget.
The pendulum test, and the admission
The pendulum work produced the criterion Stine applied to every inventor's machine brought to Huyck: hang it freely, switch it on, and see whether it holds itself off vertical for as long as it runs, without swinging about the rest point. He reports that none passed, and that some of those machines climbed slopes or scooted across floors by stick-slip friction.
Dean's machine never took this test at Huyck. Campbell had written in November 1960, "Suspended from a flexible wire, the model will push itself away from the vertical and hang at an angle". Stine never saw that and is convinced Campbell was repeating Dean. His summary is blunt: "Nobody has ever conducted a series of critical, objective tests on the Dean Drive."
What the account does and does not establish
The article establishes that two technically trained visitors saw and felt a push from a machine resting on a floor, and were persuaded. It does not establish thrust without a surface to push on, since that is what the untried pendulum test was meant to check. The 3-degree angle was read by strobe and protractor by people committed to the theory; the article reports no outside replication and no force measurement on the Phasers, and the scaled-up rig that Stine says would have tested the prediction was never built. The rocket pendulum, which recorded thrust with a load cell and position with photocells and then a capacitance system, did not show the predicted delay or shortfall.
Connections within the dossier
Stine remarks that Dean's patent, described in US Patent 2,886,976 (1959): Norman L. Dean's System for Converting Rotary Motion into Unidirectional Motion, will not tell a reader much about building a Dean Drive. His pendulum test is a criterion much like the one the 2006 NASA memorandum proposes in Responding to Mechanical Antigravity (2006): Millis and Thomas on Why Oscillation Thrusters Like the Dean Drive Only Appear to Produce Thrust, which also explains floor-bound motion by friction.
The wider story of the device is told in The Dean Drive: Norman L. Dean's Reactionless-Drive Claim, Its Demonstrations, Its Publicity and How It Was Later Judged. On points that bear on it, Stine reports that Dean died in the late 1960s and Davis on May 10, 1974, and that the 3-degree phase angle was seen on the oscillating Phasers, while the rocket pendulum was a separate experiment that did not find the predicted effect.
Source notes & attribution
- http://www.rexresearch.com/dean/stine.htm