The Atlantis Blueprint (19 page)

Any scientist who read Verne’s novel would have dismissed his prophecy as nonsense. The law of the conservation of energy declares that you can only get out of a machine as much energy as you put in. If you decompose water by electrolysis – running an electric current through it – and then recombine the hydrogen and oxygen by dropping in a match, the resulting explosion only produces as much energy as you have introduced via the electrolysis. Perhaps the seminary student was unaware of this. At all events, he continued to dream of one day turning Cyrus Harding’s dream into reality.

But in the spring of 1941, Bulgaria joined the Axis Powers and declared war on Britain and the United States. Ilya Velbov found himself commanding an occupying force of marines on a tiny Greek island in the Aegean. After the Nazis were defeated and the Russians had invaded Bulgaria, Brown took a degree in electrical engineering and spent some time working in Moscow. But he hated communist society, and was finally denounced to the secret police by his wife, a devout communist. He spent the next six years in a ‘hard regime’ concentration camp, which wrecked his health and almost killed him.

But he did not die. Perhaps he was sustained by hatred. At all events, he determined to escape the communists. He did this by swimming the river dividing Bulgaria and Turkey. As he stood shivering in his clothes on the other side of the border, he was arrested by Turkish border guards and thrown into jail as a spy. There he spent the next five years.

Finally, with the aid of the US intelligence service – and in particular a major called Brown – he was released in 1958 and allowed to emigrate to a country of his choice, which happened to be Australia. Since it seemed a good idea to take an English name, he chose Brown in honour of the American major, and Yull because he admired Yul Brynner (whose name he misspelled). He was qualified as an electrical engineer, and managed to find a job in Sydney with Australian Consolidated Industries, where he designed and built test instruments and rose to become chief instrument officer. But he found working for a boss unsatisfying, and the work unexciting; after ten years, he resigned and set up in business for himself.

This was a period when plane hijackings were in the news every day, and airports all over the world were being forced to introduce security systems. The method, of course, was a simple metal detector, whose disadvantage was that it would respond to coins or belt buckles as well as concealed weapons, obliging security guards to examine pockets and wave metal
detectors over passengers’ arms and legs. Brown perceived, rightly, that this was a waste of money. What about a system that would recognise guns or bombs and ignore everything else? He devised a revolving door that had three detection systems: one for objects weighing more than 14 ounces, one for objects the size of guns, and one for the high-carbon steel used in pistols. It cost about 4,000 Australian dollars to install, but neither banks nor airlines were interested, favouring the old labour-intensive method. So Brown’s first invention found no takers.

Brown turned his attention back to the idea that had occupied his mind since that evening in the seminary when he had read Jules Verne: turning water into a fuel. As an electrical engineer, he must have understood all the scientific objections, yet some deep intuition drove him to persist. He learned how dangerous it can be to mix hydrogen and oxygen when an accidental explosion wrecked his laboratory and almost cost him his life, but still he carried on.

The basic problem is quite simple: when oxygen and hydrogen are mixed together, their natural tendency is to combine. So when water is subjected to electrolysis, oxygen and hydrogen are placed, so to speak, in separate locked rooms – that is, a mesh is placed between them to keep the gases apart. This raises the resistance in the vessel and means that any process depending on the electrolysis of water is extremely expensive. It explains why hydrogen, which is plentiful in nature, is not used as a fuel – it is too dangerous, as the manufacturers of airships discovered. Hydrogen on its own will merely explode with a mild plop, or burn with a gentle flame; it is only when mixed with oxygen that it becomes dangerously explosive. The same is true of coal gas, though, and millions of people have gas stoves.

After three years of experiment, Yull Brown realised his dream of making use of the hydrogen in water. His major insight, it seems, was that if hydrogen and oxygen are mixed together in the same proportion as they are found in water,
they ought – so to speak – to be glad to combine quietly, without a loud bang. This proved to be the case. When the two gases are recombined with a spark, the result is not an explosion, but an implosion. That is, they combine to make water, which occupies a far smaller volume, and if the reaction takes place in a closed vessel also creates a vacuum. When Brown passed these gases through a nozzle and lit them with the end of the cigar that was permanently between his lips, the result was an almost colourless flame that burned at a temperature of around 130 degrees Celsius, slightly hotter than boiling water, so that it can be wafted up and down someone’s bare arm without any discomfort. Yet when applied to tungsten, which melts at 3,000 degrees Celsius, it simply vaporises it.

Obviously, something very strange is taking place. The flame is not merely heating the material; it is reacting with it. Instead of simply heating to 130 degrees Celsius, the temperature of the tungsten is soaring until it vaporises. One suggestion offered by scientists who witnessed the reaction is that perhaps Brown’s Gas keeps the oxygen and hydrogen in their atomic state, that is, as single atoms, instead of allowing them to combine into molecules of O2 and H2. Even if that proves to be correct, it is still hard to see why a flame made of atoms rather than molecules should make the substances to which it is applied behave so unaccountably.

Shawn Montgomery’s reaction was that he was witnessing something akin to alchemy13 If a flame that burns at around 130 degrees Celsius can punch holes in a firebrick and vaporise tungsten, then the laws of nature are, at the very least, not as straightforward as we assumed. It looks as if the Brown’s Gas flame can somehow ‘take account’ of the substance it is heating, which sounds more like medieval alchemy than the chemistry we were taught at school.

The same might be said of the gas’s ability to detoxify nuclear waste, which Brown demonstrated repeatedly. The writer Christopher Bird describes how Brown melted a piece of radioactive Americanum 241 (made by the decay of an isotope
of plutonium) along with small pieces of steel and aluminium, on a brick. ‘After a couple of minutes under the flame, the molten metals sent up an instant flash, in what Brown says is the reaction that destroys the radioactivity’ The Americanum, which had originally measured 16,000 curies of radiation per minute, now showed only 100 curies per minute – about the same harmless low level as background radiation.

At the point when it began to look as if Brown’s work was destined to be ignored, he received an offer from the People’s Republic of China. The result was that Chinese submarines began to put to sea with Brown’s Gas generators instead of huge tanks of fresh water, and Chinese scientists began disposing of their nuclear waste by heating with Brown’s Gas.

It is impossible that Yull Brown could have been a swindler. The Chinese found that his gas actually worked; so did the large American corporation that built him a laboratory, and the many people like Professor Michrovski who purchased Brown’s Gas generators. Over the years, hundred of people have seen the demonstrations that Shawn Montgomery witnessed, such as the gas burning a hole in a firebrick or vaporising tungsten.

One possible solution to the mystery may lie in the fact that when Brown’s Gas burns it implodes. An oxyacetylene flame is, in effect, a controlled explosion. The same is true of welding torches that use hydrogen gas in place of acetylene. When oxygen and hydrogen combine in exactly the same proportions as in water, they create almost no heat, and when the flame is applied to some substance like tungsten, it looks as if the oxygen and hydrogen enter into chemical reaction with the tungsten, aided by the heat of the flame. It is also possible, as has been suggested, that the flame consists of atoms of oxygen and hydrogen rather than molecules, and that their ‘combinatory capacity’ is therefore increased.

An ordinary flame burns by heating the substance until its elements dissociate, which is what happens when you apply a match to a piece of paper. On the other hand, if you mix sulphur
and iron filings then heat them over a flame in a metal tray, the sulphur will melt and turn brown, then begin to fizz and bubble furiously. You can remove the heat, and the reaction will continue until, instead of sulphur and iron, you have a solid lump of iron sulphide. Again, if sulphur dioxide and oxygen are passed over heated platinised asbestos, they combine to form sulphur trioxide, which, when dissolved in water, makes sulphuric acid. The platinised asbestos is a catalyst – that is, it is not changed by the reaction. This sounds like ‘alchemy’ – certainly the kind of alchemy that takes place when tungsten vaporises when heated with a mere 130-degree flame.

In other words, Brown’s Gas may simply cause the tungsten, firebrick, gold ore or radioactive waste to react like the sulphur and iron filings, combining in an essentially chemical reaction, as straightforward as dropping a piece of zinc into hydrochloric acid and watching it dissolve. If so, the essence of Brown’s Gas is simply that it causes chemical reactions. This would also explain why it is possible to hold one end of a piece of tungsten as it ‘burns’. This would suggest that Yull Brown was not being accurate when he made the statement that Brown’s Gas can create a temperature of 6,000 degrees Celsius. When a California company named Diversified Inspections measured what happened when Brown’s Gas vaporised tungsten, the inspector handling the optical measuring device was puzzled when it read ‘a measurement far lower than the boiling point of that metal’. In his four-part article on Brown’s Gas in
Raum und Zeit,
Christopher Bird seems to assume that this is a mistake. He says that, when a further reading was taken, using a new measuring instrument, 6,000 degrees Celsius was recorded, although Diversified Inspections declined to offer a certificate to this effect. It seems conceivable that this is because the measuring device did
not
register 6,000 degrees Celsius.

Bird goes on to record that when the temperature of the ‘implosion’ inside a cylinder was taken, it was a mere 4.3 degrees Celsius. The fact that Shawn Montgomery could continue to
hold the tungsten rod as it was ‘burning’ seems to make it highly likely that Brown’s Gas reactions do not take place at high temperatures.

So perhaps the ancients knew the secret of Brown’s Gas. Various clues point in this direction. In June 1936, a German archaeologist named William König, from the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, was opening a Parthian grave when he came upon a clay vase that contained a copper cylinder, inside which was an iron rod held in place by asphalt and molten lead. It looked to König like a primitive battery; fellow archaeologists disputed this, since the grave was dated to about 250
BC.
But Dr Arne Eggebrecht constructed a duplicate, and poured fruit juice into it; the result was a half-volt current that lasted for eighteen days, with which he was able to coat a silver figurine in gold in half an hour. Having observed that on many gold-covered Egyptian statues the gold seemed to be too fine to have been glued or beaten on, he had become convinced that the ancient Egyptians knew the secret of electroplating.

When Colonel Howard-Vyse was exploring the Great Pyramid in 1837, he instructed one of his assistants, J. R. Hill, to unblock the end of the southern ‘air shaft’ from the King’s Chamber with gunpowder. Hill found an iron plate, 1 foot long, 4 inches wide and an eighth of an inch thick, embedded in the masonry of the pyramid. Re-examined at the Mineral Resources Department of Imperial College, London, in 1989, it was found to be iron that had been smelted at over 1,000 degrees Celsius. The ancient Egyptians were not supposed to understand the processes of smelting iron – all their iron ore came from deposits left by meteorites. But the plate was not meteorite iron – it contained too much nickel. It would seem that the Egyptians knew about smelting iron ore two thousand years before the iron age. Oddly enough, traces of gold were found on one side of the iron plate, indicating that it had been gold-plated. Of course, the gold may have been beaten on, but if Eggebrecht was correct about his statues, the plate may have been electroplated.

No one has ever satisfactorily explained what the decorators of the walls of Egyptian tombs used as a light source as they worked. There is no sign of lampblack on the ceilings. The explanation may, of course, be simple: that they went to some trouble to clean off any carbon. On the other hand, engravings on the walls of the temple at Dendera seem to depict electric lights and insulators…

If the Egyptians had possessed a technology even as rudimentary as the Baghdad battery, they could have been able to dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen in water by electrolysis, and could have possessed the knowledge to create Brown’s Gas.

When Shawn Montgomery interviewed Yull Brown in April 1996, Brown told him that the Aztecs had a means of producing Brown’s Gas. Using a particular mixture of wet wood and dry wood, they set it alight to produce a high temperature that caused the imprisoned steam to dissociate and become Brown’s Gas. It would, of course, implode, but this implosion could cause gold ore – presumably also trapped in the burning wood – to yield up ten times as much gold as in the normal separation process. According to Brown: ‘They were producing a lot of gold. A lot of gold. But they couldn’t have produced that much gold from the amount of ore that they were producing. I was experimenting with this matter, and I found out why. Now with Brown’s Gas you can produce ten times more gold with the same amount of ore.’

Montgomery asked if Brown had done this himself.
¹⁵
Brown replied, ‘Oh yes. There are even some Mayans who use this in the production of gold. They have examined it, and done the lab work, and conclude that this works. Not only gold, but platinum, silver and so on.’ When we recall Lord Rennell’s pure gold necklace, and the pure gold necklace from Mexico seen by Hapgood, it is natural to wonder whether these might have been produced using Brown’s Gas.