from: http://changingpower.net/articles/w-baumgartner-will-be-missed/
W. Baumgartner will be missed January 3, 2011 | by Jeane Last Wednesday, December 29, William Baumgartner’s dear wife Margery (Maggie) Baumgartner told me that he had passed over, in hospital in Kelowna which is a city in the interior of British Columbia. I lost a wise mentor who was a very special soul, and the world lost much of his vast store of insights about the works of Viktor Schauberger, Walter Russell, John W. Keely and Nikola Tesla. He did leave a collection of writings, however. Eighty years ago he was christened Walter Baumgartner (but changed his name to William in 1993). As a child and as a teenager in Bavaria, he felt closer to truth when out skiing the Alps or mountain climbing than when sitting bored in school. His school teachers, exasperated at his constant questioning, quoted books written by authorities. “But you always search;” he told me. “You have a feeling something is not right in this whole scientific edifice.” He nevertheless went on to get a mechanical engineering degree from Technisches Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. His love of nature led to a dream of living off the land in a trapper’s hut in northern Canada, so he emigrated in 1954. The dream gave way to the immigrant’s reality of working in a sawmill on Vancouver island and studying English on the side. Then he landed a job as an electrician on power dam projects which paid high wages to young men who worked long hours and didn’t question the environmental wisdom of hydro power. British Columbia’s frenzy of river-damming was then in full flood. Later he would read books such as *Living Water*, a biography of Austrian naturalist Viktor Schauberger, and see the importance of letting a river run naturally in unfettered spiraling movements. At that later time also he learned that there are workable alternatives to hydro dams or polluting sources of energy. Someone in Vancouver introduced Baumgartner to Nikola Tesla’s patents and articles, long before many people knew about the topic. The young immigrant got an opportunity to repeat Tesla coil experiments and pulsing-the-earth experiments after a fortunate job change; supervising an automated pumping station for natural gas left him with spare time. He had moved to near the rural town of Merritt BC, where he could supervise from home. The utility company supplied a house with large workshop area. Baumgartner had newly-acquired machine shop tools. He had sent for papers from John Searl of England, so he built two Searl-type rotating magnetic disks. That was only the first of many projects in which Baumgartner studied others’ inventions and built prototypes of energy devices in order to learn what worked. The friend from Vancouver was more interested in Tesla memorabilia, but agreed that money for research was needed. Their plan was that Baumgartner would write and sell information by mail order to raise money for research. They advertised in Popular Mechanics and were surprised when up to 40 letters per day addressed to Tesla Research Centre showed up in the tiny post office at Merritt. Most of the mail was from California, which led to contacts and some movement in the New Energy field – then called “free energy” — when he later lived in California. A cartoonist named John Bigelow sent Baumgartner a page out of Walter Russell’s book *Atomic Suicide* and noted that Russell (1871-1962) was a friend of Tesla and had met Tesla occasionally in New York. That was the beginning of Baumgartner’s very thorough investigation of Russell’s experiments and Russell’s many writings about the background invisible geometry of the universe. Baumgartner eventually traveled to Virginia to visit the mansion called Swannanoa where Walter and Lao Russell had established a University of Science and Philosophy. Russell’s widow gave Baumgartner access to a wealth of information and an extended stay. Baumgartner’s research path later took him through many subsequent adventures such as a well-funded two years in Mexico and financially disastrous stay in Australia. He was also called to the UK and to Europe as a consultant. (Accompanying this blogpost is a photo of him at the last conference in Germany where we were each guest speakers. I think that the last time he addressed an audience of 200 or more was at the book launch for *Breakthrough Power* in Vancouver*.*) He pioneered in New-Energy print media by publishing the magazine *Energy Unlimited* from 1977 to 1987, followed by *Causes *newsletter co-written with Rhetta Jacobsen. They were teaching workshops when I met them in 1986. Baumgartner described the vortex as “Nature’s Tool with which it creates anything it chooses.” Human technologies can copy the natural processes, he said, if we recognize nature’s movements. “In the center of the vortex you have the invisible shaft. The shaft accumulates ether energy. You have to create a steady flow out of the void, or space fabric, or ether or whatever you want to call it.” He coined a name for that creative process: vortex mechanics. He was certain that the etheric energy of the vacuum of space is very real. “With our machinery today we dissipate this force so it never accumulates or flows steadily.” His hands-on work was varied. Over the years he built large hydraulic turbines, Tesla’s mechanical oscillator, ozone equipment, a pancake-shaped generator, a levitating platform and other projects such as the Baumgartner Immersion Heater. From 1977 on, Schauberger’s work was never far from his mind. Across the Atlantic from the visionary Russell who saw the hidden geometry of space, Schauberger had been the hardware designer who brought vortexian mechanics into manifestation. When William was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, around 1993 I visited his workshop where he was constructing Schauberger technology he called Twister Pipes. Baumgartner had to fabricate molds for the unique twisting, indented pipes, and when the pipes were finally formed he used variations in his turbines. The theory was that tornado power could be contained in channels shaped like the spiraling in nature. When air, water or another medium spirals through, its vortexian movement creates an inward-pulling centripetal force resulting in mechanical movement on a machine’s metal shaft. He was also learning more about the principles behind the inventions such as the compression principle of nature that Russell had described. William Baumgartner worked with Schauberger’s successors in Europe and sent prototypes across the ocean that they had commissioned him to build. Toward the end of his life, Baumgartner concluded that there were easier approaches than Schauberger technology. William experimented then with magnetism and refined his theoretical understanding. He was a visionary who never stopped learning and expressing uplifting concepts that would help people glimpse the larger realities of science. William had expressed science concepts through art a number of times, and in the past year or two he took painting lessons to improve his art techniques. William was a gracious host to guests and generous. The last time I saw him was in early September when I had again been invited to their home, a six hour drive from the coast. On my birthday his wife Maggie, William and I walked a canyon path through a wilderness to a pristine waterfall within miles of their home. It was a perfect autumn day of admiring nature’s exquisite tableaux – and collecting memories to cherish.
