Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (33 page)

Incidents such as this taught Schauberger that water needs to be cool— about 4°C [celsius]—even as it bubbles out of the ground. Without a shaded exit, he found, water will not "grow" to a great height underground and emerge as the mountaintop spring. As well as temperature, time spent maturing in underground rocks provides minerals which help make water sparkle with energy.

Schauberger noticed beautiful vegetation growing around natural springs —an indication of "mature" mineralized energetically-charged water. These concepts, of water having qualities such as strength and maturity, were not found in any textbooks or lecture notes. The brash forester later told hydrologists to abandon their microscopes and testing laboratories, and instead study water holistically in its environment. He found natural watercourses to be alive with inherent intelligence, and not to be mere movements of a chemical substance.

Another mystery which fascinated him was the sight of large trout and salmon lying nearly motionless in a stream while facing into a swift current. When the forester moved and startled the fish, they darted upstream headlong into the rushing current. Why didn't they go with the obvious flow and escape downstream? Was there some invisible channel of energy running opposite to the current?

He decided to experiment on a sizable stream with rapids where a large trout often lay. Schauberger sent his woodsmen 500 metres upstream to build a bonfire. He instructed them to heat about a hundred litres of water and pour it in the stream on signal. This infusion of warm in water made no noticeable difference in the overall temperature of the stream. But the

position of the large trout downstream immediately weakened, and despite thrashing its tail and fins, it was swept downstream. Schauberger was then sure of the connection between water temperature and some unknown flow of energy in the water.

This reinforced his belief that the sheltering tangle of willow branches overhanging a river is crucial; without cooling shade, excess warming would cause the water to lose an electrical-type potency.

One moonlit night brought both danger and a magical sight. He was sitting beside a waterfall waiting to catch a notorious fish poacher. To pass the time he watched trout swim in the crystal-clear pond below. Suddenly a much larger trout arrived and dominated the scene with a twisting underwater dance. It headed under the main fall of water, and soon reappeared for an instant, spinning vertically under a glittering cone-shaped stream of water. To Viktor's amazement, the lone fish then stopped spinning and instead floated upward to a higher ledge of the waterfall. There it fell into the rush water and disappeared again with a swish of its tail.

The dangerous poacher was forgotten, after the spectacle of a silvey fish floating up the moonlit waterfall. Schauberger filled his pipe and slowly, thoughtfully, walked home. Again, it seemed the wild stream must generate some type of energy. Years later, Schauberger would devise an experiment which clearly demonstrated an electric charge present in moving water.

COULDN'T BELIEVE HIS EYES

Another clear night, in late winter, he again rubbed his sharply observant eyes in disbelief. Exploring a rushing stream in bright moonlight, he stood on the bank looking down into a deep pool. The water was so clear that he could see the bottom, several metres below the surface. Large stones on the bottom were jostling about. Even more amazing, an egg-shaped stone about the size of a human head started circling in the same way as a trout does before jumping a waterfall. Suddenly the rock broke the surface of the pond, and slowly a circle of ice formed around the floating stone. Was this a cold-generating instead of a heat-generating process? Then one by one nearly all the egg-shaped stones circled up and appeared on the surface. Stones of other shapes remained unmoving on the bottom.

What metals did the dancing stones contain? Why the egg shape? What force develops in this pristine water? What is motion, anyway?
Schauberger had a lot of solitude for mulling these questions, and eventually he developed a theory about different types of motion. He saw that water needed freedom to move in a vortexian motion (three dimensional spiralling).
He saw the s pi rall ing shape in the growth of vines, ferns, snail shells, whirlpools, galaxies and countless other formations. The hyperbolic spiral was everywhere, as if acting out some underlying universal motion. In uncaged rivers, the spiral was seen in the horizontal tightening twists of the layered current. He became certain that the contracting vortex created a very real energy in the water as it flowed.
Schauberger learned how colder, denser, stronger water in streams carried heavy natural debris without silting, and how undisturbed rivers managed seasonal torrents without seriously eroding their banks.
Schauberger proved to be a skilled engineer who turned his insights into practical devices. But even his first invention was controversial.

PRINCE NEEDED CASH

While Schauberger was studying nature's habits, outside the forest others were more entranced by worldly ways. The aging prince who owned the wilderness had a young wife who liked to gamble, so he needed quick cash to pay his wife's debts. The prince eyed his remote forests and saw lumber which could be sold. The prince's predicament placed a challenge before his forester—could Schauberger make a miles-long wooden waterslide which would carry logs from the high mountain slopes down to the valley?

Experts said it was impossible—heavy logs would scrape to a halt on the wooden slide. Or if they somehow gathered speed, they would smash the sides of a flume. However, from his father and from observing wild rivers, Schauberger knew how to bolster the strength of water just as nature does, so that even heavy beechwood would ride high on the shallow stream. He hired men to build a strange structure which curved and twisted down the steep mountain. At points along the route, his design included valves for inlets and outlets which poured in cold water from other streams and released sun-warmed water from the chute.

The day before the deadline, a log started down the new chute for a test run, then it stalled and stuck in place. The workmen snickered, they had no faith in this zigzagging construction.

Schauberger sent them home so that he could think. While sitting on a rock looking down at his log-sorting dams, he felt a snake under his leather trousers. After he jumped up and threw it away, it landed in the dam. Observing it through binoculars, he wondered how a snake can swim so quickly without fins. As if in answer to his problem of transporting logs, the snake twisted in both vertical and horizontal curves.

"Understand Nature, then copy Nature," was Schauberger's motto. From the sawmill he ordered lengths of wood, and his workers hammered all night, nailing short timbers within the curves of the flume to add the up-down snakelike motion to the water.

When the Prince and Princess and other dignitaries arrived for the demonstration the next day, there had been no time for a test run. None of the men believed the flimsy-appearing structure could carry even one of the massive logs without disaster. But it did work. The cold water floated heavy logs and the shape of the chute spiralled the water, which swept the logs always toward the centre of the current and away from the sides of the wooden flume. The serpentine movement was a success.

PROFESSIONALS JEALOUS

In gratitude the Prince appointed Schauberger as head warden of all his hunting and forest districts. Then Schauberger was awarded a further honour—the position of State Consultant for Timber Flotation Installations. Not everyone was pleased, however. Experts with academics degrees resented the fact that a non-academic had landed such a high-salaried position, and the fact that they had to consult with him. Finally the payscale furore reached high levels, and the federal minister who hired Schauberger had to cut his salary in half. Schauberger was welcome to stay on the job, though, and the minister offered to make up the missing half of his wages out of the minister's "black funds." Schauberger would have nothing to do with such sleazy practices, however, and he immediately resigned.

He was then hired by a private building contractor to construct log flumes in various European countries until 1934, when Schauberger again criticized an employer's manipulations.

Why would a natural philosopher like Schauberger get involved in log transport, anyway? The answer is complex. Earlier as a forester, it was his job to plan how to move wind-felled timber from high slopes down to valleys where people could use it for firewood and building. Schauberger opposed what he saw as exploitation of horses; he objected to the practice of forcing draft animals to burst their sinews pulling heavy logs down mountainsides. Also, his biographer Olaf Alexandersson writes, Schauberger naively tried to restrict tree-cutting by reducing transport costs—the companies would not need to cut as many trees in order to make the same amount of profit.

At the same time as he was flume-building, he gave speeches and wrote articles about the result of clearing a forest area totally—loss of healthy water downstream and, eventually, drought.

"Every economic death of a people is always preceded by the death of its forests," he warned.
Forests were not as checkered with clearcuts at that time, and local sawmills were not all bought up by large companies which were to become voracious in their appetite for timber. However, Schauberger was alarmed at what he saw forthcoming—"Reckless deforestation results in the drying out of mountain sources, dying of whole forests, uncontrollable mountain streams, silting of water and the sinking of subterranean water stores near where human interference took place."
"Water follows the same laws as the blood in our bodies and the sap in plants; it has analogically the right of being treated as the blood of earth."
He sharply criticized hydrologists—the experts on water—and said that they had only their own careers in understand what was happening in except reinforce . . . quite haphazardly, some banks of rivers and brooks, but managed to forget everything about the water itself as if it had no concern." mind and had failed radically to watercourses. "They did nothing,

OFFICIAL EXPERTS

Hydrologists scorned learned that river water is made up of layers of different densities and the lamination has a purpose in generating a charge in healthy water. Water is not merely a chemical compound, he insisted; it should not be recklessly chopped up in hydro-electric turbines, much less injected with chlorine or unnecessarily exposed to heating.

The experts hooted when he pointed out that in a person, a temperature change of only a tenth of a degree celcius could mean sickness or health. Was he comparing a planet with a person? Did he think Earth was a living organism with biologically-active bloodstream? They ignored the heretical concepts.

Schauberger offered to organize a job creation project to rebuild watercourses. If artificially-channelled rivers were to be uncaged and restored to their meanders and oxbows sheltered by vegetation, would the rivers again keep their own channels clean and stop their own wild flooding? Schauberger was never given the chance to find out. He was realistic enough to look for a more feasible way of rebuilding, and in 1929 he patented a system of braking barriers to be inserted along a troublesome watercourse. The barriers would redirect the axis of flow toward the middle of a stream, reducing the amount of soil carried away from the banks. Another complex Schauberger patent offered to both control the action of outlet water from holding dams and to strengthen the dams by including factors of temperature and motion.

Was anyone from academia listening? One renowned hydrologist eventually was; he started out by denigrating Schauberger and ended up following him around in the woods and even into a chilly river. Professor Forcheimer literally waded into Schauberger's teachings about the laws governing water's behaviour, and the professor decided that the self-eduJEER

Schauberger's non-academic warnings. He had cated man actually based theories on facts. Unlike colleagues who were in the middle of academic careers, Forcheimer would not lose financially by championing a heretic; the professor was in his seventies and, as it turned out, near the end of his life.

Regardless of his bitter battles with the scientific community, Schauberger believed in the scientific method. He experimented on liquids and gases in a small laboratory he set up. His aim however, was to develop a science which actually worked [on principles opposite to the orthodox viewpoint]. "Humanity has committed a great crime by ignoring the use of cycloidal motion of water," he said. For example, the current waterpumping devices were not only uneconomical, he said, "they cause water to degenerate by depriving it of its biological values."

Attempts to explain connections between cycloidal motion and levitation to a scientist are useless, Schauberger said bitterly. Nor are world leaders any help "because they lean on the ignorance of the masses, including the scientists, as well as . . . current physical laws, to safeguard their vested interests and positions."

Conventional energy conversion—burning of fossil fuels or atom-splitting—turns order into chaos. Schauberger proposed processes which would add order and energy to substances such as water, instead of destroying it, while generating useful electric power.

POWER FROM THE UNKNOWN

Schauberger believed that an invisible field structure permeated everything and was necessary for life, but he observed that technologies could propel the unknown field structure into either motions harmful to biosystems or helpful to biosystems. In other words, he held technical planners responsible for the life or death of biological systems.

How did he prove his ideas?
Not one to stay at the vapourware [designed but not yet produced] level of ideas, Schauberger picked up his tools and built hardware. From watercourses to agricultural implements, his constructions attracted praise from users. Then he turned to extracting electrical energy directly from the flow of water and air. "They contain all the power we need."
Hitler had heard of the Living Water Man through an industrialist. After Germany took over Austria in 1938, word came to Schauberger that he would be hired to plan log flotation structures in Bavaria, Bohemia and North Austria, and that furthermore he could use a professor's laboratory in Nuremburg for his research.
Viktor Schauberger sent for his son Walter (born July 26, 1914). Walter had studied physics in university and found that some of his father's concepts were foreign to the way he had been taught to think. However. Walter's scepticism crumbled during Walter contributed useful techniques extracting 50,000 volts from fine jets of water at low pressures. A physicist from a nearby technical college came; his first action was to search for hidden wires. When he could find none, he lost his temper and asked Walter where he had hidden the electrical leads. Eventually he had to admit that there was no trick involved; the experiment was valid. However, he could not explain such a high charge from water.
The Second World War interrupted their experiments, and Walter [was] drafted. Viktor was ordered to undergo a physical examination supposedly related to his forthcoming pension. However, says biographer Alexandersson, "it looked like an engineering and architectural association was behind this demand for a check-up."
Viktor Schauberger unsuspectingly showed up, but was whisked away to another clinic. He was told it was for a special exam, but to his horror he found himself being questioned in a psychiatric clinic. He forced himself to answer the questions in a peaceful non-abrasive way; if he displayed anger he might be locked up. Two doctors tested him and found him perfectly sane as well as highly intelligent. They never found out who had arranged to get him into the mental hospital.
the experiments they conducted. himself, and the duo were soon