Dean Drive - Early Publicity

Early Publicity

The Dean drive obtained a good deal of publicity in the 1950s and 1960s via the columns of John W. Campbell, the longtime editor of Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Campbell believed that the device worked and claimed to have witnessed it operating on a bathroom scale. The weight reading on the scale appeared to decrease when the device was activated. He subsequently published photographs of the scale with the drive stopped and running. The June 1960 cover of Astounding magazine featured a painting of a United States submarine near Mars, supposedly propelled there by a Dean drive.

Dean, who was trying to find potential buyers for his technology, was secretive about the details of how it was supposed to work, but it was said to contain asymmetrical rotating weights and to generate a great deal of vibration.

Dean and Campbell claimed that Newton’s laws of motion were only an approximation, and that Dean had discovered a fourth law of motion. This has been described as a nonlinear correction to one of Newton’s laws, which, if correct, would allegedly have rendered a reactionless drive feasible after all.

One result of the initial articles in Campbell's magazine was that two other researchers, William O. Davis and G. Harry Stine, visited Dean and witnessed a demonstration. Results of this visit were published in the May 1962 and June 1976 issues of the magazine, the name of which had been changed by Campbell from Astounding to Analog. Davis wrote: "It was the conclusion of both Harry Stine and myself that we had witnessed a real anomaly and that the possibility of fraud in the demonstration was slim."

Davis' 1962 article was titled, "The Fourth Law of Motion", and described a hypothesis in which Dean's device (and others) could conserve momentum invisibly via "gravitational-inertial radiation". One detail of Davis' hypothesis involved the forces of action and reaction — physical bodies can respond to those forces nonsimultaneously, or "out of phase" with each other.

Stine was an engineer who built devices to test that aspect of the hypothesis. In his 1976 article, "Detesters, Phasers and Dean Drives", Stine claimed they were able to reliably create and reproduce a 3-degree phase angle. Their research was terminated when the national economy took a downturn, and was never resumed. The 1976 article was an attempt to get research re-started, but apparently failed.