Ponderolet, or to put it another way, anti-gravity "flyer", the engine, theoretically capable of developing the speed of light, was built in 1996 in Russia. Sounds absolutely fantastic, and even unrealistic, doesn't it? If not for one thing - the personality of its inventor.
Gennady Fedorovich Ignatiev, a physicist from Krasnoyarsk, who for a long time headed the design bureau of the rocket and space direction (Central Design Bureau "Geofizika"). Laureate of, among other things, the Lenin and State Prizes, space consultant and academician. Author of many still "secret" inventions.
Umov-Poynting vector in ponderal flight.
In the late 90s, Ignatiev founded a laboratory in his native Krasnoyarsk that deals with an interesting and well-known phenomenon - the Umov-Poynting effect. In short, its essence is that anti-gravity forces arise from the interaction of magnetic and electric fields. At the end of the 19th century, Professor Umov introduced the concept of energy flows of elastic bodies, and a little later Poynting supplemented these studies for electromagnetic interactions.
In 1996, at a conference in St. Petersburg, Ignatiev presented a report on the development of an experimental model of a new engine using "old principles", as Ignatiev himself liked to say. With a size of about four meters, the installation created a lifting force capable of lifting six kilograms of cargo. And this while consuming 10 kW of electricity. The rig itself weighed about thirty kg, so the model could not fly. But, with an estimated size of about forty meters and a lifting force of three hundred kilograms, the installation could fly.
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Of course, the main drawback of the design was immediately visible - it needs a powerful source of energy, the weight of which interferes with the main task. But Ignatiev believed that by improving his invention, he would be able to overcome this factor.
Gennady Fedorovich never made secrets from his research. In his laboratory, diagrams, drawings and explanations of the mechanism were hung on the walls. He also never hid that he drew ideas from Nikola Tesla - even the coils placed at the ends of the device are Tesla coils.
Like many great minds before him, Ignatiev "paid the price" for his research. He was fired from the institute for unscientific activity: students, citing calculations for the work of a ponderole, argued that the speed of light is not limiting. Since then, the scientist began to be haunted by failures - a daughter who died in a strange way, his son's suicide, a stroke that made him disabled, and then a second, who killed the inventor.