The water wizard
Mark Pilkington
Thu 28 Aug 2003 02.46 BST
It's said that future wars will be fought over water, not oil. One man who would have appreciated this was Viktor Schauberger, the water wizard.
Born in Austria in 1885, to a family who had been foresting for 400 years, Viktor grew up surrounded by unspoiled wilderness. Developing an intuitive understanding for the rhythms of nature, he became fascinated by water, which he felt was a living organism as complex as any other. "Comprehend and copy nature!" was his maxim.
Viktor first demonstrated his talents designing elaborate, highly efficient log flumes inspired, he said, by watching the movement of a snake through water. The shallow, narrow flumes transported vast numbers of logs - including heavy oaks and beeches - through the valleys of Austria, Bavaria and Yugoslavia, and brought him international acclaim.
The sight of a trout leaping from a fast-flowing river set the course for the next phase of Viktor's life. The trout, he observed, exploited natural forces and currents to propel itself out of the water. This led him to devise his own system of hydrodynamics, based on the spiralling motion of whirlpools and, later, wind vortices. Viktor began work on a radical new engine that reversed conventional engineering practice, being driven by implosions, rather than explosions.
From here, Viktor's story becomes vague. The popular account has him summoned to the court of Adolf Hitler in 1934, then, during the second world war, blackmailed into working for the Germans, developing experimental air turbine engines and disc-shaped aircraft. These, according to alternative historians, became the flying saucers that buzzed 1940s America.
After the war, an ageing and impoverished Viktor concentrated on techniques to improve agricultural yields and - his magnum opus - a home-energy generator known as the trout turbine, based on his implosion theories. This is said to have attracted American entrepreneurs who, in 1958, took him, his plans, models and prototypes to Texas. A proposed deal turned sour, and the strain was too much for Viktor, who returned to Austria, empty-handed, broken and exhausted.
Viktor died five days later, leaving behind an untapped legacy of ideas kept alive by a handful of dreamers today.
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