Dean drive
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The Dean drive or Dean device was claimed to be a "reactionless drive" — a mechanical device that could use energy to produce linear acceleration without the use of any reaction mass. Such a device, if it existed, would revolutionize space travel, since most of a rocket's weight is devoted to carrying reaction mass. Such a device would also have violated Newtonian physics.
The Dean drive obtained a good deal of publicity in the 1960s via the columns of John W. Campbell in Astounding Science Fiction magazine. Campbell believed the device worked. He claimed to have seen the device running on a bathroom scale, to have seen the reading on the scale decrease when the device was activated, and published photographs of the scale with the drive stopped and running.
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 known to contain assymmetrical rotating weights and to generate a great deal of vibration.
Campbell and Dean claimed that Newton's laws of motion were only an approximation, and that Dean had discovered a fourth law of motion, a nonlinear correction to one of Newton's laws, which, if correct, would have made the Dean drive feasible. Skeptics maintained that there were 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, to say nothing of outright deception.
It is said that Dean first invented a set of levers so that his invention would climb up a pole or rope (U.S. Patent 2,886,976, filed 1956, issued 1959). Later, he is said to claim that the machine with improvement could rise and float in the air without any supporting rope or pole. This set of levers and counterweights and gears was said to be based on a principle that was claimed to be "rectifying centrifugal force". The machine supposedly incorporated an electric drill so that applying alternating current line power to the motor would turn the Dean Machine's input shaft, which would convert the rotational energy into linear force. Aligned properly, this linear force would counteract gravity and thus the scale would show a decrease in weight.
Purportedly, several groups (including Westinghouse and the U.S. Military) were interested in buying the device, if it worked, for sums of half a million dollars or more. Dean's paranoia and insistence upon cash before showing the device, kept any of the possible buyers from seeing the device. When buyers became insistent, Dean also required the delivery of a Nobel Prize in Physics as well.
Dean never succeeded in making a sale.