by Lou Mancinelli
It hangs from above like a flying saucer attached to a string from the heavens. When it spins it sounds like a finger rimmed around the lip of fine crystal.
What it actually is, is a gyroscopic wheel hanging from the bottom of the deck of local inventor Fran McCabe. The floor of his deck forms a roof behind his garage at his Mt. Airy home. If he’s right, McCabe’s work might provide the world with a capacity to create energy heretofore unrealized by humankind. It’s a discovery that Nikola Tesla would celebrate.
In fact, Tesla is part of McCabe’s tale of his investigations of gyroscopic motion, a 30-year string of experiments carried out mostly in a Bucks County barn, but more on that later.
McCabe claims his discovery of the power of gyroscopic precession can reduce greenhouse gases, thus reducing pollution, and be used to fight disease.
“If [Isaac] Newton ever saw this thing, the world would be a different place today,” said McCabe, 76, about his gyroscopic wheel. It’s essentially a top used as a mechanical device.
Raised in Philadelphia, McCabe graduated from North Catholic High School in 1954. He joined the Navy after he was thrown out of Drexel University in the early 1950s, where he studied mechanical engineering. He served for six years in the Navy as a flight training class leader and left in 1964.
Later, in 1968, he founded Prefco Products, a fire and smoke damper manufacturer. The company played an instrumental role in changing laws on fire regulation and safety. From the air and wind technology created during his time running Prefco, McCabe created the world’s fastest and lowest wind-responding wind-turbine airfoil. With his company Lev/Air he created the most powerful max-torque windmill airfoil system.
His work has taken him around the world as a speaker, consultant and writer. In the 1990s he was arrested in Russia. The Russians had commissioned him to write six papers on gyroscopics, and one way or another, the word “spy” became involved, albeit wrongly. He bought his freedom from his jailer for $100.
McCabe is a rocket scientist, according to his NASA certification. Our talk with him proceeded as if our reporter was a high school kid sitting in on a graduate quantum physics class. Names of prominent scientists rolled off McCabe’s tongue as if he were a coach talking quarterbacks.
We talked about the Higgs particle, known as the God particle. We talked about how the universe came into existence. We talked about what happened before the big bang. It is here, in the process that led to the big bang, that the fundamentals of McCabe’s gyroscopic discovery are rooted.
But first, some further credentials. McCabe is the owner of more than 100 patents – with more than 100 pending – in machinery, aerodynamics and more. He has worked for and with Boeing, MDI and NASA engineers. He spoke to members of parliament in England about reducing germs in hospitals via pressurization. He is the father of two daughters.
“The earth is a gyroscope,” McCabe said. “If you ask me, everything is a gyroscope.”
Gyroscopic physics is a study rooted in motion. Before the big bang, according to McCabe, there was static time. There was no basic energy but time. That energy contained an encrypted plan. When something bent the energy, a force the religious call God, an arch was put into motion.
“If you’re gonna build the universe you do it with motion,” McCabe said. “ If there’s a direction that takes you somewhere random, it’s just a game whoever’s putting it in motion is playing.”
This energy, now in motion, spun along a spiral, sometimes condensing other times diverging until it found an electron. From there, it continued along its encrypted plan and found protons and neutrons and eventually whole molecular structures and organisms. This is known as evolution.
And this spiral energy is gyroscopic precession. According to McCabe, physicists stop their gyroscopic investigations at this point of understanding. But McCabe wondered if there was power created from the procession, and he wondered how to channel that power.
As he built his companies, manufactured inventions and traveled around the world, he experimented with what he hypothesized would be the world’s most powerful generator of energy and power.
After three decades, and many talks with professors, physicists and inventors, McCabe had not discovered the right mix of energy and spinning wheel. If you take a wheel and spin it the wheel has an arm and a pivot, like the galaxy, McCabe explained. His theory is that a spinning wheel shaped like a disc put into gyroscopic motion by a certain amount of torque could, in turn, produce an exponential amount of torque.
Essentially, he’s modeled his generator after the mechanism allegedly responsible for the energy that created the universe. He fumbled with discs that were too heavy and too large.
The great discovery came through a talk with a medium, through an alternative discipline like that of a psychic. After being urged, first saying “no thank you,” and then eventually accepting a fellow physicist’s suggestion, McCabe visited the medium. That’s where Tesla told McCabe through the medium to change to a smaller aluminum wheel, according to McCabe. He’d been using steel.
He also changed the size of the wheel. The result: McCabe discovered that when he used an air pressurizer to put 1.2 pounds per square inch (PSI) of torque into his gyroscopic wheel, it created 1,200 psi of torque out. But more importantly, he discovered the in-to-out relationship grew in an exponential manner. Add a second wheel, put in 25 psi, and the result is 4,200 psi out.
The implications are astounding. Today, gyroscopes are used to guide satellites and missiles. They are used in PlayStation’s three controllers and in iPhones.
But apply this understanding to the current applications of physics.
“They struggle with this – people in universities,” McCabe said about the usual challenges posed to him by students and professors during his presentations around the world. Many argue that his invention is simply a fly wheel. Still, he’s realizing some success.
McCabe believes the energy created by gyroscopic motion can change the world in a green way. He claims gyroscopes would use far less heat to create far more energy. Less heat emitted into the air means less greenhouse gas. He also envisions it being used in DNA re-encryption. If cancer is represented by a bump along a DNA spiral, gyro energy can theoretically smooth out the bump.
He’s spreading his findings by teaching gyroscopic science to young students through The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential and at The Quaker School at Horsham. He has submitted the idea to NASA as a way of replacing rocket propulsion. NASA has named gyroscopic propulsion as a pending game changing technology.
McCabe moved to Mt. Airy three years ago. His explorations in mechanics started in the hot rod shop he owned as a young man. There he modified a 1958 Corvette engine to go faster than 200 mph with his own engine accessories. He’s a member of numerous groups and served as director for the Central Bucks County Chamber of Commerce and Buck’s County Association for Retarded Citizens.
At his company Levr/Air, he created the first car to run on compressed air, something that requires no gas or electricity. The car is powered by a low RPM high torque windmill. His explorations in wind technology led him to found Omniwind in 2009. It seeks to power homes and cars through free wind energy.
If gyroscopic propulsion is anything like some of his other inventions, it could change the world. It’s a science in its early stages. And there are many questions. What does it cost? What are the politics of it? If it goes the way of many of Tesla’s discoveries, themselves poised to change the world 100 years ago and offer the world free energy, the world may never know.
For more information visit www.FranMcCabe.com.