Norman Dean: Inertial Drive -- Articles & Patents


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**Norman L. DEAN**

**Inertial Drive**

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<http://www.deanspacedrive.org>/ --- Dean
family website

> **[Norman
> DEAN ( II ) ~ Photos & Documentation](../dean2/dean2.htm)**

![](deandrv.jpg)

**Norman L. Dean**   
[ Photo source: Wikipedia ]

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**[Wikipedia Entry](#wiki)**

**[John W. Campbell:
"The Space Dive Problem"; Analog (June 1960)](campbl.htm)**

**[Norman L. Dean: US Patent # 2,886,976
--- System for Converting Rotary Motion into
Unidirectional Motion](2886.htm)**

**[N. Dean: US Patent #
3,182,517 --- Variable Oscillator System](3182.htm)**

**[William O. Davis:
"The Fourth Law of Motion"; *Analog*  (May
1962)](davis4.htm)**

**[G. Harry Stine:
"Detesters, Phasers and Dean Drives"; *Analog* [
Date unknown ]](stine.htm)**

**[John W. Campbell:
"Instrumentation for the Dean Drive"; *Analog*
(November 1960)](instrum.htm)**

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[**http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean\_drive**](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_drive)


**Norman L. Dean --- The Dean Drive**

**Role of John W. Campbell**

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 apparently 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 orbiting 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 Newtons 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 Newtons laws, which, if
correct, would allegedly have rendered a reactionless drive
feasible after all.

Skeptics maintain that there are many
possibilities for illusory effects, involving interactions of
vibration, friction, resonance with the springs of the scale,
instantaneous photographs of an oscillating scale reading, and
so forth. Some even go so far as to attribute the reported
demonstrations to outright deception, either by Dean or by
witnesses.

**Further Developments**

Purportedly, several groups (including
Westinghouse and the U.S. military) became interested in
buying the device, if it worked, for sums of half a million
dollars or more. Deans paranoia and insistence upon cash
before showing the device, kept interested parties from seeing
the device, and Dean never did make any sales.

In 1999, Deans son, Norman Robert Bob Dean,
appeared at an anti-gravity conference by invitation of a
group of patent holders who had created differing versions of
the reactionless drives that referred to N.L. Dean in their
patents. He gave a presentation about his fathers device. The
original drive models, as well as Deans well-kept and
detailed notes, are apparently in the possession of the Dean
Family.

The noted science-fiction writer and critic
Damon Knight had this to say about the Dean drive in a chapter
called Campbell and His Decade in his collection of essays
about the science-fiction field In Search of Wonder:

    Oh, the Dean Machine, the
Dean Machine,   
    You put it right in a submarine,   
    And it flies so high that it cant be seen
  
    The wonderful, wonderful Dean Machine!

**Conceptual Issues**

One major problem with the Dean patent is that
the device simply does not work as described. Some claim that
this discrepancy is due to intentional omissions in the
technical details of the patent disclosure documents --- a
subtle effort to prevent intellectual property theft. Others
deny any possibility that this is the case and maintain that
the patented device simply doesn't work.

One major argument against the possibility of
physically realizing a reactionless drive like the Dean Drive
is that such a device could not transfer momentum and thus
violates Newtonian physics. New scientific theories such as
stochastic electrodynamics might eventually provide an
explanation for some mechanisms of momentum transfer not
currently encompassed by Newtonian physics.

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