Paul Alfred Biefeld
Dr. Paul Alfred Biefeld was a Swiss scientist, who emigrated to the USA. He was an astronomer and physicist. There is some disagreement between sources - some say he was at Denison University, Granville, Ohio, teaching. Other sources say he was at the California Institue of Technology. Of course, these may have been at different times in his career.
He is best known for research into the Biefeld-Brown effect. He noticed that a charged/ionised capacitor plate would move suddenly towards the positive plate if they were an unequal size (towards the smaller, generally positive, plate) when power was applied.
Thomas Townsend Brown was the student he assigned to look into this phenomena.
A note from a modern physics perspective:-
It is entirely posible that the "jumping" first seen was due to magnetostriction or electrostriction of the capacitor materials. Magnetostriction (literally "Constriction caused by magnetics") is what causes the faint hum off a transformer, as the magnetic field grows and shrinks with every cycle of the 50Hz AC mains current, causing a 100Hz hum (or 120Hz in those places with 60Hz mains!)
That a second effect exists only becomes apparent after a short time, and at very high voltages, and it is this authors opinion that the so-called "levitation effect" was actually a lucky find. But then, that's discovery for you!
