AlexZander is on to something with his dryer
theory. However, something was missing from the dryer which would enable it to propel objects other than socks at faster than the speed of light.
We need a power source that generates infinite power.
Therefore, I propose, the world's first light speed engine: Buttered toast strapped to the back of a cat inside a dryer in motion!
The cat and buttered toast's infinite energy will rotate in a direction opposite to that which the dryer is spinning at, therefore combined with the power of dryers to tesseract (fold the distance between two points in space/time, as seen in the children's book A Wrinkle in Time), the dryer/cat and toast combo will be used to propel space ships across vast distances in space! No longer are we limited to just socks!
And to think, all this time, we were thinking that matter/antimatter reactions would do it. Who would have imagined that we had all the elements readily available? Time makes fools of us all.