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The Dean drive or Dean device was a mechanical device that was allegedly a "reactionless drive"—a 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.
Dean never succeeded in consummating a sale.
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