Sandy Kidd

Sandy Kidd
Residence	Dundee, Scotland
Nationality	Scottish
Known for	Inertial Propulsion, Gyroscopes

Alexander Duncan "Sandy" Kidd is a Scottish engineer and amateur inventor from Dundee, Scotland, best known for his development of a gyroscopic device that he claimed could produce vertical thrust, or lift, without the reaction predicted by Newton's third law of motion. He described the device as a form of inertial propulsion and presented it as a possible basis for a new means of space travel. His claims have not been accepted by the mainstream scientific community, which holds that a closed system of internal masses cannot generate net external thrust.

Biography

Kidd trained as an apprentice toolmaker and later served as a radar technician in the Royal Air Force. He subsequently worked for several years as a planning engineer for a North Sea oil company. His interest in gyroscopes reportedly began during his Air Force service: while removing a gyroscope from an aircraft, he did not realise that the instrument was still spinning, and as he turned at the foot of the aircraft steps the precession of the running gyroscope almost threw him across the floor. This experience prompted a decades-long private investigation into gyroscopic behaviour.

Working largely alone in a workshop in the garden shed of his Dundee home, Kidd spent many years and, by his own account, tens of thousands of pounds building and testing successive gyroscopic devices. He began work on what he called an anti-gravity machine around 1980, and by Christmas 1984 reported that one of his devices had generated its first measurable vertical thrust.

Work

Kidd's apparatus used spinning gyroscopes mounted at the ends of a rotating crossarm. By setting the gyroscopes at particular angles and cycling the assembly through a controlled sequence, he claimed that the precession of the spinning masses could be converted into a net upward force. He characterised the effect as being able to "switch some centrifugal force, or angular momentum, off and on in a usable manner." One demonstration unit weighed about three kilograms and measured roughly 45 centimetres across, with a gyroscope at each end of a crossarm; Kidd reported that it rose from its test bench during trials. Later prototypes explored a "centrifugal switch" concept and "split-sphere" designs in the late 1980s.

The device attracted attention from several scientists and institutions. Professor Eric Laithwaite of Imperial College London, himself a long-time investigator of gyroscopic effects, watched a demonstration and described Kidd as "ingenious." At the University of Dundee, Dr Bill Ferrier examined the apparatus in the mid-1980s and stated that there was "no doubt that the device does produce vertical lift," adding that modifications had been made at his suggestion to rule out other explanations such as aerodynamic effects. The University worked with Kidd for a time but was ultimately unable to provide the sustained funding needed to continue.

Unable to secure long-term backing in Britain, Kidd pursued development overseas. A second prototype was tested in Melbourne, Australia, in the late 1980s under the supervision of specialist engineers, and Kidd relocated to Australia for a period. An Australian corporation, BWM, took on the task of developing a gyroscopic propulsion system but went out of business. British Aerospace was also involved in the research for a time before withdrawing its funding.

Kidd sought patent protection for his invention. A US patent (No. 5,024,112) was granted, though maintenance fees later lapsed; a European patent application was, according to Kidd, withdrawn at a late stage after funding was lost. He set out his account of the work, presented as memoir, argument and experimental record, in the book Beyond 2001: The Laws of Physics Revolutionized (1990), co-authored with Ron Thompson.

Mainstream physicists regard claims of reactionless or inertial propulsion as inconsistent with the conservation of momentum, and Kidd's device was not accepted by the established scientific community. Supporters within the alternative-propulsion field have continued to discuss and attempt to replicate his results.

Books

• 1990 - "Beyond 2001: The Laws of Physics Revolutionized" (Read in full)

External links

• Sandy Kidd and Force Precessed Gyroscopes
• Sandy Kidd — Gyroscopic propulsion (Rex Research)