I have this same problem. It is very hard to eat, I mean research, just one American WW2 defense scientist/engineer/industrialist with off-mainstream beliefs about physics - there are so many! I think you had to be at least 51% actual certified mad scientist to get in the door of the radar / Navy radio business in the 1940s. I suspect the same is true of radar's children - ARPA and Silicon Valley - today.
So let's take a bite of Robert Beckwith!
Reading Bob Beckwith's 2002 document, this part at least struck me as sensible (compared to the claims of "teleportation mode" buttons on minesweepers; but then technical people do love jokes, so there could well exist a button called "teleportation mode" which does not, in fact, physically teleport a ship, but just does something clever with the magnetic signal it's projecting).
After getting an engineering degree from Case School of Applied Science, I went to work with the General Electric Company. In 1942, I developed highly successful frequency shift keyed (FSK) transfer trip equipment [3]. This eliminated one high-voltage circuit-breaker at each substation where generator power was stepped up in voltage in order for sending it over a distance. Out work had the same "AAA" priority as the Manhattan Project.
The equipment became a part of nationally-coordinated electric utility crash program to connect existing generation together into what today has become the "national power grid". The specific need in 1942 was to supply power to Oak Ridge and to Hanford for the Manhattan Project (the development of the atomic bomb).
Our use of FSK was some 5 years ahead of a second use in FSK telemetry (we had always called it "telemtering"). The FSK telemetry was derived from our work by Walt Hause and others from the GE lab at Ithaca, NY. They had a contract for test firing captured German V2 rockets at White Sands. FSK
has since blossomed into worldwide use.
Yep, just getting a "national grid" would have been up there with the 1950s "interstate highway system" wouldn't it? So many things that we take for granted now were actually war requirements.
In late 1942, the success of the FSK power-line carrier equipment attracted the interest of people at Bell Telephone's Muray Hill Laboratories nearing Morristown, NJ. In a trip by my GE supervisor (Ed Kenefake) and me to Bell Lab, we learned from Dr. Edward Teller of the problem of the bottom-anchored German mine with its magnetic detector.
Oppenheimer had pretty much taken over the technical direction of the Manhattan Project. Dr. Teller took on the problem of the German mine since it seemed that we could lose the War by not being able to get troops to England before the development of the bomb was complete.
That's an interesting claim that I haven't seen before. Is there any historical justification for believing that Edward Teller was in fact involved in specifically magnetic mine detection (ie Townsend Brown Central) before he went all H-bomb-y? I mean I suppose Teller *must* have been doing something before inventing giant doomsday planet-destroying machines.
One reason my ears perk up whenever Teller's name appears in weird non-nuclear-doomsday contexts, is that for some reason Stan Deyo fingered him as being part of what Deyo considered to be the "UFO/antigravity illuminati". I don't know why! It's a weird claim to make! And a very specific one! But it shows that some kind of rumour about Teller must have been circulating through some kind of network in the 1970s. Deyo can't have just pulled Teller's name from a dartboard, right? Where did he source that rumour? I mean if I was going to randomly target someone fusion-adjacent running an antigravity project in 1978, I'd have picked John Wheeler, not Teller!
(For what it's worth, Deyo also claimed that Andrei Sakharov was Teller's counterpart as head of a USSR antigravity physics program, which at least has the justification that Sakharov wrote one paper about something somewhat adjacent to a "torsion" interpretation of General Relativity. But it's still a very odd and very thinly sourced claim to make and doesn't seem to have been borne out by history.)
I really want Teller to have spent at least part of his life doing something cool like antigravity and not just very uncool things like H-bombs. I want to believe that. But I'd like proof.
I will settle though for proof that Teller maybe hung out in the same building as Townsend Brown in 1941-ish!
Anyway: if "Morgan" was referring to this Beckwith, could "Beckwith's boss" mean (if not perhaps Teller) then Ed Kenefake?
Sadly "Intrepid's Last Case" is no longer available to borrow from Archive.org, but a Google Books search claims that the text of the book does not include the word "Beckwith".
My first Google hit for Kenefake shows that he was involved with the accelerator at University of Notre Dame University in the 1930s:
https://isnap.nd.edu/assets/186666/firstaccelerator.pdf
Ours was not the very first electrostatic accelerator, of course. It was probably the fourth, and the third one to be located at a university. Still, we have indeed an anniversary worth celebrating, in that we have now had, continuously for fifty years, at least one electrostatic accelerator
functioning on the campus. This is the story of the first one, that ran from about 1935 to 1942
Master-degree candidates were first admitted in 1934; two who came in that year, Edward Kenefake and Alfred Hiegel, plus Richard Schager who arrived the following year, completed the roster of accelerator builders, along with Collins and Coomes. Their three Master Essays make up a good part of the documentation of the accelerator.
Kenefake indeed appears in the 1934 Notre Dame yearbook, "The Dome".
https://archive.org/details/thedome1934 ... ew=theater
- Edward Kenefake, Notre Dame yearbook 1934
A brief mention of Kenefake in the 1936 The Dome, page 228, lists him as the head engineer of the campus radio station, a bit of a step down from particle accelerators, but maybe not for the 1930s:
https://archive.org/details/thedome1936 ... ew=theater
The staff announcers this year were Joseph Mansfield, Chief Announcer, Arem Jarrett, Gregory Byrnes, John Marbach, and Thomas Radigan. Working with these men were the engineers. Headed by Edward Kenefake this group was composed of Al Hiegel, Hal Vitter, and Dick Shiga.
Kenefake turns out to be a very happy string to search on in the Notre Damus alumni magazine, "Alumnus" (1923-1971) (
https://archives.nd.ed/alumnus/) Interestingly he now seems to be an "Edwin W Kenefake", not an "Edward" as he was in 1934. And he's nicknamed "Red".
October, 1935: Kenefake is a professor:
https://archives.nd.edu/Alumnus/VOL_001 ... E_0001.pdf
In Dillon Hall Father James Fogarty is the new governor and his lieutenants are Father Norbert Hoff, Father Frank Cavanaugh, Father William McNamara, Professor Tom Madden and Professor Ed Kenefake.
March, 1937:
https://archives.nd.edu/Alumnus/VOL_001 ... E_0006.pdf
Here is a bit of flashy news on Mike Leding. Mike is at the present instrumental, in fact he is the spearhead, in the formation of a Catholic Action group for Schenectady. The idea is new and novel to Schenectady and, consequently, is drawing much favorable reaction, not only from the younger set, but from the Catholic clergy as well. At the last meeting of the group more than 75 were present.
Ed Kenefake has been diligently applying himself to the success of Mike's brain child. Thus, he is able to gain a little diversion from his conscientious attempts at solving his advanced course engineering problems, under the auspices of the Educational Depajrtment of the General
Electric Company.
November, 1938:
https://archives.nd.edu/Alumnus/VOL_001 ... E_0002.pdf
"Red Kenefake is connected with the General Electric in Schenectady, New York.
February, 1942:
https://archives.nd.edu/Alumnus/VOL_002 ... E_0004.pdf
Forty-eight Notre Dame alumni are working for the General Electric Company, according to Joseph R. Farrell, '15, Camp Hill, Pa., who is himself associated with the company's Philadelphia office. Nearly every class graduated after 1919 is represented.... E. W. Kenefake, '34,
Schenectady
(Any relation to Joseph P Farrell, I wonder....? On this tangent: February 1948:
https://archives.nd.edu/Alumnus/VOL_002 ... E_0001.pdf
ATOMIC SPECIALIST Joseph B. Farrell, professor of Chemical Engineering, represented Notre Dame at a Heat Transfer Symposium in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Professor Farrell, who was associated with the Manhattan District Atomic Energy Project during ing World War II, is interested in solving the problem of propelling aircraft by nuclear energy through a development of new methods of heat transfer.
)
Aug-Sep 1957:
https://archives.nd.edu/Alumnus/VOL_003 ... E_0005.pdf
The sales manager for Carrier Current equipment of General Electric Company's ; communication products department is Edwin W. Kenefake. Ed joined the GE Company in 1936 and has had a highly successful career with this organization.
Before he became associated with the marketing aspects of the company's communications branch, Ed obtained eight patents on various devices he developed as a design engineer. He has had more than two decades of engineering and marketing experience in the communications field. While his headquarters have been in Syracuse, N. Y., for the past several years, he has traveled extensively in connection with his microwave work. Advisory assignments took him to Venezuela and Guatemala in 1954, and to India and Pakistan in 1956. He was one of the last persons to leave New Delhi when that area was ravaged by an earthquake and flood. He leads a somewhat calmer life in Syracuse with his family of four boys and one girl and his wife Ann Marie.
Mrs. Kenefake helped to organize the ladies auxiliary of the Notre Dame Club of Central New York and is a past president of that group.
Ed has been extremely active in alumni affairs having served as president of the Notre Dame Club of the Capitol District (Albany, N . Y.) and also president of the Notre Dame Club of Central New York (Syracuse)
March 1959:
https://www.archives.nd.edu/alumnus/vol ... e_0001.pdf
On November 20, 1958, the Notre Dame Club of Central New Vork paid tribute to Past President ED KENEFAKE at a going away party for
Ed and his wife, Annamarte. About twenty-five couples attended a dinner for the Kenefakes at the Bellevue Country-Club. Ed and his family left us for Lynchburg, Va., around January 1, 1959
September 1970:
https://archives.nd.edu/Alumnus/VOL_004 ... E_0005.pdf
Would enjoy receiving some news from EDWIN W. (RED) KENEFAKE. Has anyone heard from NORB MIZERSia lately. Another member of our class I'm sure many remember is DICK CHAPMAN. Is EDDIE KING still living in Canada? Would also like to know what ART CONLEY is doing in Canton, Ohio. Have not heard from RALPH ELSE in eight years.
Looking at Beckwith's, uh, idiosyncratic take on physics, we strike again a very familiar line of thinking... one that has been in the fringe-physics literature at least since Townsend Brown's Structure of Space (1943):
Aether then consists of "far force lines" between all atoms of universal space. Aether therefore has a density of the total quantized number of lines in all directions per cubic volume of space (say, in lines per cubic centimeter).
Aether is a variable -- being highest when holding solids together -- of moderate magnitude within super clusters of galaxies and zero in dark voids of the Universe. If the voids have no force lines, then electromagnetic radiation (including light) cannot go there. The voids may be where we are looking at empty space outside of the Universe.
That's not *quite* word for word, but very close to Townsend's SoS belief that electrons would not be able to exist in empty space far from galaxies, because space itself would have a maximum negative charge. I don't know how Townsend squared this belief with the existence of antimatter, with positively charged positrons which very much don't behave the way he thought electrons did, and with negatively charged antiprotons which we now know from recent CERN experiments to behave just like normal protons in terms of gravity.
But this weird non-GR model of gravity as a sort of "bouyancy" compared with a space field "density" - much like water, and also like diamagnetism... and possibly "dielectricity", if that was ever a concept used by anyone other than Townsend - seems to have started hanging around Navy-adjacent technical spaces since the 1940s. And then NASA-adjacent, um, "German-accented" technical spaces by the 1970s, if we include Rolf Schaffranke. And it was associated with a rescuscitated belief in the ether, which in the mainstream physics world even in the somewhat slapdash 1950s was pretty much instant career suicide. My question is: Where did this odd idea come from, and where did it spread? What social networks existed which WEREN'T mainstream academic physics, but WERE adjacent to US military engineering contractors, and in which it was considered okay to talk about "the ether" like this?
A tribute to Beckwith from his company, on the occasion of his death in October 2009, reveals that he was a real character. (Also a Freemason. Is it possible that Freemasonry was one of those social networks in which otherwise academically-disreputable alternative physics ideas spread between defense contractors?) Born 1919: 14 years younger than Townsend Brown.
https://beckwithelectric.com/news/beckw ... a-tribute/
Beckwith Electric Founder, Robert “Bob” Beckwith Passes – “A Tribute”
Robert W. Beckwith: July 25, 1919 – October 25, 2009
Largo, Florida – October 25, 2009 – Robert W. Beckwith passed away peacefully on Sunday, October 25, 2009. Bob was an honored scientist, inventor, researcher and consultant, with over 50 years as a world leader in the electric power industry and founder of Beckwith Electric Co., Inc., in Largo, Florida.
Bob is survived by his wife, Evelyn Bortner-Beckwith; two children: Tom Beckwith and Barbara Anderson; three grandchildren: Joshua, Sean, and Tiffany Beckwith; two step-grandchildren: Tommy Sanchez and Gerlid Quinones; two stepchildren: Marty Orosz and Robert Bortner; and two step-grandchildren: Alex and Aaron Orosz.
Born in Kent Ohio, Bob received his BSEE from Western Reserve University and an MSEE from Syracuse University. He also held professional engineering licenses in New Jersey, New York and Florida, as well as a Life Fellow membership with the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers).
Bob was a very curious and driven man, who often thought “out of the box”, and had many and varied intellectual and humanitarian interests. He was a Master Mason-3rd Degree, an amateur radio (HAM) operator, an avid artist and art collector. Bob was a philanthropist with numerous contributions to charities, public broadcast stations and the Hopi Indians.
Bob worked for General Electric Power Line Carrier Section in Schenectady, NY. From 1955 to 1961, he was Manager of Computers and Communications at General Electric Company Electronics Research Laboratory in Syracuse, New York. From 1961 to 1967, he was Manager of Utility Systems at Gulton Industries. In 1967, he founded Beckwith Electric Company in Largo, Florida. In 2000, Mr. Beckwith founded Beckwith Electric Research (BER), a division of Beckwith Electric Co. that conducted research at the forefront of present-day engineering and physics.
Along with his consulting work, his career achievements included working with US Defense projects during WWII, developing new high frequency transducers for SONAR applications. In addition, he helped develop transmission lines to supply power for the Manhattan Project. He was awarded over 30 patents on various aspects of the utility industry from 1949-2004.
Bob Beckwith is recognized today for his life-long dedication to the electric power community and his significant scientific contributions and influence on society in general. He will be truly missed by his business associates and family.
and one from the Tampa Bay:
https://www.tampabay.com/archive/2009/1 ... ical-edge/
INVENTOR THRIVED ON THE THEORETICAL EDGE
By Andrew Meacham Former Times Reporter
Published Nov. 5, 2009|Updated Nov. 6, 2009
Robert Beckwith, the owner of a successful electric company, was at home on the fringes of science.
While his employees made devices for generators, he was trying to levitate a quarter. While they were listening to customers, he was driving rods in the ground, listening for earthquakes in the Pacific Ocean.
The 125 employees of Beckwith Electric Co. don't mind if Mr. Beckwith, who died Oct. 25 at 90, lived on the theoretical edge. The 42-year-old company he started hasn't had layoffs in more than a decade.
He invented six of the products his company sells, including a 1990s precursor to the "smart grid" technology envisioned today.
"There was always an intensity in Bob," said engineer Drew Craig, 55. "He had these ideas, and these ideas burned in him."
Mr. Beckwith admired turn-of-the-century inventor Nikola Tesla, who introduced powering machinery with alternating current, a key component in the industrial revolution. He shared Tesla's fascination with magnetism and time travel, but couldn't get a magnetic coil to levitate a coin.
"The joke around the office was, maybe he should have used a dime instead of a quarter," said his son, Tom Beckwith, the company's chief executive.
Mr. Beckwith grew up in Kent, Ohio, an only child in a family with traceable roots to the Mayflower-era American colonies. He worked for General Electric before founding Beckwith Electric in 1967, which designs and manufactures devices for generators and transformers used by utility companies. A tornado destroyed the building in 1992, an event Mr. Beckwith calmly declared an "opportunity to rebuild."
He obtained 30 patents over the years, most of them for nuts-and-bolts methods of regulating electrical current. In recent years he was working on a way to predict earthquakes by measuring underground electrical vibrations. Mr. Beckwith had collected data that seemed to show a pattern between rumblings in the ground - as far away as the Pacific - and electrical signals received.
"We saw that we were getting vibrations that appeared to have some correlation to seismic events," Craig said. If the electrical field around the earth (discovered by Tesla) reacts to shifts in the earth, it could allow for advance warning for earthquakes, Mr. Beckwith believed.
Away from work, Mr. Beckwith and his second wife, Evelyn, enjoyed yearly trips to New Mexico, where he looked for Hopi art at an annual festival and in villages. The paintings he brought back hang on his office walls, interspersed with Mr. Beckwith's own artwork: including a drawing of an iron bridge that emerges from a mountainside and stretches across a gorge - until it stops in midair, suspended by a couple of balloons.
"Robert Beckwith" in a patent search (
https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Ro ... old&page=1 ) gets many false positives, but these ones I think are probably legitimate:
Frequency response circuits (1946/1949) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US246 ... 3A21d208eb
Frequency shift oscillator circuit (1948/1950) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US253 ... 3A8de8a35c
Frequency response circuit (1950) via Canadian GE -
https://patents.google.com/patent/CA462 ... 3Ae218ddd0
Frequency response circuits (1950/1955) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US271 ... 3A3540aac3
Frequency shift oscillator circuits (1951) - Canadian,
https://patents.google.com/patent/CA477 ... 3Aea2873cd
Communication system having keyed carrier to frequency shift conversion (1952/1957) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US280 ... 3Adcc8e2eb
Method and apparatus for transmission of intelligence (1952/1959) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US287 ... %3A477e4b1
Frequency response circuits (1956) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/CA527 ... 3Aee94fe06
Signal transmission circuit (1958/1961) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US299 ... 3A4b90dd49
Radio receiver detection circuit (1958) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/CA557 ... 3A9702ef76
Power transmission line switch control system (1967/1970, Gulton Ind Inc) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US349 ... 3Ab93b112b
Variable phase power frequency generator-amplifier (1968/1971) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US359 ... 3Aa4be152a
DC-to-DC converter (1969/1971) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US360 ... 3A84eeeb62
Spike suppressor circuit for analogue recorder (1969/1971) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US358 ... 3A954ff934
Voltage balance relay circuit (1970/1972) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US364 ... 3Ad8681b52
Relay cabinet (1970/1972) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/USD22 ... 3A9baff7ef
Phase condition indicating circuit (1972/1975) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/CA971 ... 3Aa9aca602
Regulator control (1972/1976) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/CA985 ... 3A29e9ab18
Overcurrent relay circuit (1974/1975) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US388 ... 3Aa6d47d40
Synchronizing check relay (1978/1980) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US421 ... 3A53e672b3
Power transfer relay circuitry and method of phase measurement (1979/1981, Beckwith Electric Co) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US425 ... 3A84a94b43
Method and apparatus for providing signals from LTC transformer... (1981/1982) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US436 ... 3Ac039a9bf
(many many more proasaic AC phase stuff patents through the 1990s and then, wham...... the honey badger mode kicks in...
He hits 77 in 1996 and writes his weird magnum opus, "Hypotheses" (
https://www.stealthskater.com/Documents/Beckwith_03.pdf )
And then in 1999 at age 80 his patents go honey badger too...
Direct uses of neutrino energy (1999/2001)
https://patents.google.com/patent/CA228 ... 3Abfce9921
Apparatus for obtaining worldwide data on the Earth's resonance (1999/2000)
https://patents.google.com/patent/CA228 ... 3A13f76b93
Apparatus for transmuting Nitrogen 14 into Carbon 14 (2000/2001)
https://patents.google.com/patent/EP115 ... 3Ae80c2989
Infinite speed space communications using information globes (2001/2002) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US200 ... 3A99fa4131
Synchronous Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) receiver (1998/2002) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US641 ... 3Abed87226
Neutrino light to photon light converting matrix (1998/2005) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US689 ... 3A6fe45205
Superconducting carbon 12 atomic strings and methods of manufacture of cables... (2004/2006) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US200 ... 3Abbc302e3
Neutrino telescope (2005/2007) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US200 ... 3A8a06553c
System for removing energy from tornados and hurricanes (2006/2008) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US200 ... 3Aa8d30fe8
Neutrino receiver (2005/2007) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US200 ... 3A6b34bb14
Apparatus and method for sensing Earth's inner ELF signals... (2006/2007) -
https://patents.google.com/patent/US200 ... 3A90487781
The "Neutrino" related patents smell quite a bit Townsend Brown-y. Or perhaps Gregory Hodowanec-y.
Now imagine that Beckworth isn't the only one who has a personal trajectory like this, and that these honey badger level 11 physics ideas and many others have been kicking around in the minds of several other highly placed defense-adjacent engineers much like Beckworth since the 1940s. It doesn't mean that any of these ideas are necessarily correct or implementable, but, if enough people in overlapping social circles have been thinking and talking about stuff like this for decades, that maybe explains quite a lot of the weird chatter that sometimes pops up to the surface....
Nate