Viktor Schauberger

" They called me deranged. I hope that they are right. It is of no greater import if another fool wanders this earth. But if I am right and the science is wrong, then may the Lord God have mercy on mankind."

Viktor Schauberger (pronounced 'shoy - burger') was born in Holzschlag, Austria in 1885. His father was a forester, as were all his male ancestors back to the 15th century, and Viktor started out his life as a forester too, a career briefly interrupted by the First World War. He was born obstinate, hot-tempered and highly intelligent, with an unshakeable self-belief and an unusual mind, and it's possible to imagine that he could have become anything, given different circumstances - a politician or leader, a writer, a composer, maybe even a monk. However, his upbringing in the Austrian forests had a strange effect on him, and one which shaped the whole future course of his life.

Viktor became fascinated by water. He used to take long walks through the forests, watching the motion of water through rivers and streams, dripping along ferns and leaves, and steaming up from heated paths. He was especially fascinated by watercourses, and the energy of a river that allowed it to carry hundreds of heavy logs for hundreds of miles. He would sit on a rock beside a river for hours, gazing at the revolutions and eddies, letting his awareness pass into the water and flow along with it. These meditations gave him a unique insight into the properties of water - he describes them in an almost mystical way, saying that his consciousness took on the properties of water, allowing him to understand its workings and the nature of its energy.

Water, Viktor began to understand, contained an internal, spiralling, 'implosive' force that cooled it and gave it more energy than could be explained by conventional matter science. He developed this theory into a broader framework for the examination of natural energy, saying that there were two forces in Nature: an implosive, cooling, unifying, inward-moving, centripetal force which enhanced life and created complex forms, and an explosive, outward-moving, centrifugal, scattering force which destroyed life. He said:

"Prevailing technology uses the wrong forms of motion. It is based on entropy — on motions which nature uses to break down and scatter materials. However, Nature uses a different type of motion for creating order and new growth. The prevailing explosion-based technology — fuel burning and atom splitting — fills the world with expanding, heat-generating centrifugal motion."

In Viktor's theory, the implosive force of Nature involved multiple, interacting centripetal forces which combined to bring energy to a higher, constructive and self-sustaining level - in other words, nature had found a way to do more with less. He drew examples as far apart in scale as the motion of spiral galaxies and the interlocking helixes of the DNA molecule. When many of these spiral forces or vortices interacted, he said, a new form of energy called diamagnetism was produced, which had the characteristics of being opposed to gravity, and able to condense biological matter into more complex forms.

If he had remained a theorist, perhaps his ideas would have remained in the realm of abstract philosophy, on a par with similar 'spiral' theories propounded by Zoroaster, who said "God has a spiral force" and W. B. Yeats, who said that life and human history were the result of the interaction of vortices or 'gyres' of subtle energy. The theory is as old and well-established as recorded history itself, and is best represented by the ubiquitous Yin Yang symbol of Taoism. However, Viktor was not a philosopher, he was a scientist. Even though he didn't have any formal training in science, he had a keen understanding of engineering and biology and physics, and he had a burning desire to see the practical application of his ideas. He wanted to save the world, like so many geniuses. So he built things.

He was a forest master and gamekeeper at Steyrling, on the Krems river in Eastern Austria, an area controlled by Count Adolf zu Schaumburg. Adolf was looking for a way to cut down on the cost of transporting logs from his forest, which was currently done by teams of oxen, a slow and laborious journey. Viktor's suggestion was simple - use the river to transport the logs. The other forest experts disagreed, saying that the logs they were cutting were beech and oak, which do not float well and could not be carried by water, but Viktor, probably through sheer force of personality, got permission to try his idea out. Possibly his offer of a 90% reduction of costs had some influence as well. He built long wooden log flumes, and inserted wooden slats at certain places which induced the water to spiral as it flowed. He also placed "water exchange systems" along the flume, which renewed 'old water' which had lost its energy. To everyone's enormous surprise, the heavy beech and oak logs shot along the flume with great speed, rotating along their central axis without even touching the sides of the flume.

Viktor was promoted to Forest Manager, and he began to expand on his theories. He found that there was no existing terminology which could describe the complex internal motion of water, and he began to create his own, using terms such as 'cycloid turbulence', 'inward flushing movement' and 'diamagnetism'. Naturally, the scientific establishment laughed at this yokel with a huge beard who had never formally studied science and claimed to have discovered the secrets of water alone in the forest - however, no one could laugh at the inventions which seemed to confirm his weird ideas - he disagreed with the design of the conventional turbine, which he said 'chopped up' the water to produce explosive energy, and succeeded in designing a suction turbine based on spiralling, implosive energy, which produced electricity. He went on to modify this design to produce an implosion motor.

Around this time, the Nazi party came to power in Germany, and Schauberger, who by that time was State Consultant on logging flume installations, was asked by Chancellor Adolf Hitler to design an air turbine which would lift an aircraft without burning petrochemical fuel. Some sources report that Schauberger refused to work for the Third Reich, while others say that, threatened with internment in a concentration camp and the lives of his family, he built and tested his air turbine, but that it was never used.

The air turbine device was called a 'Repulsin', and bore an uncanny resemblance to a flying saucer. It was composed of two flattened saucer-shaped disks with spiral grooves cut into their undersides, which rotated in opposite directions. A suction turbine forced air through this device, creating a spiralling air pattern underneath similar to that of a tornado. There are reports of early tests of this device, in which it took off from the floor of the workshop with such speed and force that it smashed into the ceiling and was completely destroyed, but Viktor claimed to have perfected the technology later on, and produced a flying disc that could be propelled with great speed in any direction using only air, but could not be steered or stopped. A Munich newspaper, Da Neue Zeitalter, reported in the 1950's that an unmanned flying disk with a diameter of 50 meters, based on Schauberger's principles, was tested in Prague in 1945, and that it could hover motionless in the air, and move easily and quickly in any direction. The Avrocar Flying Disc, a device developed in Canada in the 1950's and funded partially by the US, seems likely to have been based on Schauberger's Nazi-era research.*

Whatever the truth of all this, Viktor's experiments were stopped at the conclusion of World War Two, and his papers and equipment were seized by the US. He himself was placed in "protective custody" as a Nazi collaborator, but was later released and moved to the United States of his own accord. Above all, he believed in the rightness of his ideas and wanted to benefit the world somehow. He spent a lot of time working on a 'home power plant' which would generate cheap, clean electricity for households, but, perhaps not understanding the world he was moving into, he sold the rights to most of his ideas to industrial concerns who either did not understand them or had a vested interest in burying them. He died in Linz, Austria in 1958, at the age of 73, penniless and without reputation, except in Germany, where his work in implosion science has made him fairly famous and researchers are still trying to find applications for his theory. A similar pattern can be seen in the career of Wilhelm Reich, another scientist who claimed to have discovered a new kind of energy in Nature, which he called orgone - Reich was arrested and his research and equipment destroyed by the US government, and his theories are dismissed today by the scientific mainstream.

The most detailed and authoritative book on Schauberger and his work is Living Energies by Callum Coates, and for the less scientifically-inclined, Living Water by Olof Alexandersson is a good summary and biography. Opinion is sharply divided on the scientific merit of Schauberger's inventions and theories, but they are gradually receiving more attention as the world slowly recognises the need for clean, efficient technology. It's a pity Viktor couldn't have seen this happen in his own lifetime, but his abrasive personality and lack of respect for his peers in the scientific establishment who did not share his vision, combined with a world decades behind his ideas, caused him to be ostracized, exploited and forgotten for a long time. The Internet has proved to be an invaluable medium for propagating his ideas to a more receptive audience, and there is a wealth of excellent information available on Viktor Schauberger and his inventions through almost any search engine.

* - Thanks to Anark who pointed me to this!