1981

A collection of posts by John Bedini to the public forum started by Sterling Allan for the PESWiki Bedini SG project.
-----------

TOP 10 IMPOSSIBLE INVENTIONS THAT WORK

It was a Swedish engineer and anthroposophist, Olof Alexandersson, who wrote the first popular introduction to the radical ideas of Viktor Schauberger. I came across this attractive little book in 1979 and had it translated into English. Living Water is now in its eighth printing and has inspired many to go on to Callum Coats' in-depth study of Schauberger's ideas, Living Energies, which was published in 1996. My friendship with Callum goes back to 1981 when he confided in me his wish to write a definitive work on Viktor Schauberger. Callum had met Viktor's son, Walter Schauberger, in 1977 and was to spend three years studying with Walter at his Pythogoras-Keppler System Institute in Lauffen, in the Saltzkammergut near Salzburg. During that time, Callum was given access to all Viktor's writings.
Viktor Schauberger did not start seriously to write about his ideas and his discoveries until the age of 44, when he acquired a distinguished sponsor in Professor Philipp Forchheimer. As Callum describes later in this volume, Forchheimer, a world famous hydrologist, had been asked by the Austrian Government to report on Schauberger's controversial log flumes, which transported large amounts of timber from inaccessible locations without damage. He was so impressed with Schauberger's discovereies that he asked him to write a paper which was published in 1930 in Die Wasserwirtschaft , the Austrian Journal of Hydrology. This paper attracted the attention of the President of the Austrian Academy of Science, Professor Wilhelm Exner, and resulted in a commission to write a more detailed study of his theories for that same magazine under the title Temperature and the Movement of Water.
Schauberger's ideas completely flew in the face of conventional ideas of hydrology and water management and, as a result, gained him many enemies in scientific circles. The reason Viktor developed the strong feelings about orthodox scientific research that you will read in this and subsequent volumes was partly to defend himself from their attacks, and partly out of his despair at witnessing the ongoing destruction of the natural environment by their blind and uncaring technologies. It was this despair that motivated him to write his only book, Our Senseless Toil - the Cause of the World Crisis . It was published at a time of severe depression ,when many were worried about the future.
After Forchheimer died, Schauberger found another ally in Professor Werner Zimmermann who encouraged Viktor in 1935-1936 to write about the damage being wrought to the great rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, in a small 'new thought' magazine Tau . After Schauberger's death, two magazines published further collections of Schauberger's writings: Implosion was started by a student and collaborator of Viktor's, and published a number of his articles in the 1960s. Mensch und Technik in the 1970s published articles by and about Viktor Schauberger for the more free-thinking scientiific community.
Callum Coats has skilfully woven together these articles, together with correspondence with othere scientists, friends and officials of one kind or another, into a fascinating tapestry which gives a true and very readable account of Schauberger's impassioned campaign to alert the world to the dangers of the prevailing scientific dogma. Unfortunately, not much has changed, and Schauberger's vision of how humanity could work cooperatively with Nature is perhaps more relevant than ever.
Callum arranged this massive amount of material into a large volume, Eco-Technology. In considering this for publication, we realised that it would be much more accessible in several volumes, arranged by theme. This first one, The Water Wizard, is devoted to Schauberger's ideas about water and rivers. The second, Nature as Teacher, concerns the wider implications of his ideas on water and energy. The third, The Fertile Earth, describes the way trees transform energy, and processes of fertilisation of the soil . The final volume, The Energy Revolution , gathers together the discussion and description of Schauberger's appliances for purifying and energising water and for producing vast amounts of virtually free energy. Together with Living Energies, the Eco-technology series give a complete account of the vision and genius of one of the founders of the present ecological movement, and are an inspiration for all those who wish to see our precious Earth saved from extinction by short-sightedness and greed, and the emergence of a new partnership with bountiful Nature.