Paul Biefeld
Summary
Paul Biefeld was a German-Swiss astronomer and physicist who, while teaching at Denison University in Ohio, was a mentor and laboratory advisor to Thomas_Townsend_Brown. The Biefeld-Brown effect — the observed thrust force on asymmetric capacitors at high voltage — bears his name as joint discoverer, though he did not publish on the topic; the attribution comes from Brown's accounts of the original 1920s observations.
Life
Biefeld was born in Munich. He earned his PhD at the University of Zurich (where he was a classmate of Albert Einstein, though their relationship was not close). He emigrated to the US and joined the faculty of Denison University in Granville, Ohio, in 1900, where he taught astronomy and physics for the remainder of his career.
His mainstream publication record is in observational astronomy — comet observations, stellar photometry, eclipse timings — and is unrelated to the electrogravitic work for which his name is now better known.
Key Contributions
Mentorship of Thomas Townsend Brown
In the late 1920s, Thomas_Townsend_Brown was an undergraduate at Denison and worked closely with Biefeld on laboratory investigations of high-voltage capacitive systems. Brown's accounts (in patent specifications and later writings) credit Biefeld with co-development of the apparatus and the initial observations.
The specific phenomenon — asymmetric capacitors at high voltage exhibit a small thrust force toward the smaller electrode — was reportedly first observed in Biefeld's laboratory at Denison around 1928. The effect became known as the Biefeld-Brown effect in subsequent literature.
Astronomy
Biefeld's astronomical work includes:
- Observations and photometric measurements of the 1910 return of Halley's comet.
- Contributions to the Denison University observatory's stellar-photometry programme.
- Pedagogical publications on observational astronomy.
Reception
Biefeld is not widely known outside the electrogravitic-research community. His mainstream astronomy work was solid but unremarkable. The Biefeld-Brown effect itself is now generally interpreted in mainstream physics as an ionic-wind phenomenon (electrohydrodynamic thrust from charge transport in the air gap), not as a fundamental electrogravitic coupling — see Biefeld-Brown_Effect.
Bibliography
- (No mainstream publications on the Biefeld-Brown effect.)
- Multiple observational-astronomy papers, Astronomical Journal and Popular Astronomy, 1900-1940.
See Also
External Links
- Denison University archives.
References
- Valone, T. (1994). Electrogravitics Systems: Reports on a New Propulsion Methodology. Integrity Research Institute.
- Cornillon, P. (2014). The Biefeld-Brown Effect: Misinterpretation of Corona-Wind Phenomena. (Online technical report.)
