Eric Laithwaite

Through his service in World War II, he rose to the rank of Flying Officer, becoming a test engineer for autopilot technology at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough.

[3] He became professor of heavy electrical engineering at Imperial College London in 1964 where he continued his successful development of the linear motor.

In his 1974 lectures, Laithwaite suggested that Newton's laws of motion could not account for the behaviour of gyroscopes and that they could be used as a means of reactionless propulsion.

He proposed that they communicate via ultra short wave electromagnetic phenomena (Inventor in the Garden of Eden, E R Laithwaite 1994 page 199).

This explanation did not account for where the necessary energy might come from – a matter later taken up by P. S. Callahan, though he too suffered considerable controversy (largely due to Laithwaite's detractors overlooking his "(i)/(ii)" distinction).

[citation needed] Laithwaite retired from Imperial College in 1986, but was offered no other research post until 1990, when he became Visiting Professor at the University of Sussex.

The track uses both levitation coils and linear induction motors and it can be seen in the "Magnets" episode of Modern Marvels on the History Channel.

Laithwaite was also a keen entomologist and the co-author of The Dictionary of Butterflies and Moths (1975); he had one of the finest British collections of specimens.