There are still claims that Brown discovered anti-gravity, an idea popular with the unidentified flying object (UFO) community and spawning many conspiracy theories.
Brown started a lifelong series of experiments with electrical phenomena and began investigating what he thought was an electro-gravity phenomenon while still in high school.
[2] For two years, in 1922 and 1923, Brown attended Doane Academy, a preparatory school associated with Granville, Ohio's Denison University, graduating in June 1923.
Brown struggled with the required curriculum of a first-year student,[clarification needed] and to help Thomas in his school work, his parents set up a fully provisioned private laboratory in the family home in Pasadena, California.
He performed the dual roles of a rank-and-file sailor and a research assistant on the Navy submarine S-48 in the 1932 Navy-Princeton gravity expedition to the West Indies.
In 1933, he was assigned to the yacht Caroline (loaned to the Smithsonian Institution for scientific work by Eldridge R. Johnson) to operate a sonic-sounding device during the Johnson-Smithsonian Deep Sea Expedition to the Puerto Rico Trench in 1933.
[3][4] Brown was assigned from the Naval Research Laboratory with the primary duties of sonar and radio operator and had little involvement in scientific work.
[citation needed] In 1933 Brown lost his job at the Naval Research Lab due to Depression era budget cutbacks so he joined the U.S.
In 1938, Brown was promoted to lieutenant; in 1939, he was assigned for a few months as a material engineer for the Navy's flying boats built at the Glenn L. Martin Company in Maryland.
In research testing for the Société nationale des constructions aéronautiques du Sud-Ouest (SNCASO), Brown demonstrated what he thought was an anti-gravity effect in a vacuum with his device.
He also invited the press, and the May 26, 1924 edition Los Angeles Evening Express ran a story on Brown titled "Claims Gravity is a Push, not a Pull.
[9] Working in his home lab, Brown developed an electrical device he called a "gravitor" or "gravitator", consisting of a block of insulating or dielectric material with electrodes at either end.
In 1929, Brown published How I Control Gravitation in Science and Invention, claiming these devices produced a mysterious force that interacted with the pull of gravity.
[11] Brown spent the rest of his life working in his spare time and sometimes on funded projects, trying to prove his ideas on electricity's effect on gravity.
A physicist invited to observe Brown's disk device in the early 1950s noted during the demonstration that its motivation force was the well-known phenomenon of "electric wind" and not anti-gravity, saying, "I'm afraid these gentlemen played hooky from their high school physics classes...."[15] Scientists who have since studied Brown's devices have not found any anti-gravity effect, and have attributed the noticed motive force to the more well-understood phenomenon of ionic drift or "ion wind" from the air particles, some of which remained even when Brown put his device inside a vacuum chamber.