September 1999
You can see this coil levitate at the Air Victory Museum, Medford, NJ. Click Refresh on your browser to see it move again.
2/10/1999: This was the first coil of this series which could hover. But it tended to overheat and had to be secured with tethers to prevent it from flipping.
The coils of this series operate as the primary of a transformer and induce an eddy current into an aluminum plate. If the aluminum plate is thick enough .25 inch or more and the coil is constructed light enough, it can exhibit Magnetic Levitation. The power source for this series of coils is 120 Volts AC at 60 cycles per second.
6/8/1999: Better. This one allowed air cooling but it still got a little too hot for continuous use.
8/25/1999: The coil at the top of this page is the best at this time for air cooling and it uses a reduced voltage of some 50 volts instead of the 120 VAC that most of these coils use. While it needs tethers to remain stable as a single coil, it is stable without tethers when combined in a group of 3 or more coils.
There may have been a levitation of this kind performed at the Chicago World's Fair in 1933. If so this would represent a span of 66 years of lost opportunity. There is every indication that this technique can be further developed to lift heavier objects over aluminum. It is unfortunately unlikely to lift over a different conductor: ionized air (plasma), because of difficulties in keeping plasma hot for extended periods of time.
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