Stan Meyer's "hyperdrive": an underwater jet with no moving parts, and the admiral who drew the submarine

"I've developed what's called hyperdrive technology. It's an underwater jet engine, it has no moving parts but produces phenomenal amounts of power under pulsing and uses the sea water as the fuel" — Stan Meyer, New Zealand, 1989. In 1993 Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin, a former Controller of the Royal Navy, described it in his Southampton paper Water as Fuel: it "does not require an engine and has no moving parts", it drives a water jet directly from high-voltage pulsing, and direction comes from manoeuvring nozzles "such as those fitted to Harrier V/STOL aircraft". He sketched ships with no propellers, rudders or stabilizers, and drew a prestressed-concrete hyperdrive cargo submarine, 360 m long and 650,000 t submerged, for routes under the Arctic ice. Pushing seawater with no moving parts is real engineering: in June 1992 Japan's Yamato-1 ran sea trials on a superconducting magnetohydrodynamic drive, current and magnets acting on the seawater itself, at about six knots. Stan's hyperdrive, by Griffin's account, ran on high-voltage pulses instead, and the details are in Memo WFC 455/455DA (1991), which Griffin cites and which nobody working on the archive has seen. If you have a copy, stanslegacy.com wants to read it.

About the voices. The narrator is NeuralStan, an AI voice the archive uses for its made films. Where you hear Stan Meyer, it is Stan: every word of his is cut from an original recording, and nothing he says was synthesised.

Sources

• Stan Meyer · house meeting, New Zealand · 1989
• Adm. Sir Anthony Griffin, Water as Fuel, 1993 · Figure 16
• Adm. Sir Anthony Griffin, Water as Fuel, 1993 · Figure 14
• Stan Meyer, house meeting, New Zealand, 1989, part 2, at 14:20 — transcript on stanslegacy.com
• Admiral Sir Anthony Griffin, Water as Fuel, Southampton Institute (Warsash), 1993: section Hyperdrive, Figures 14 and 16, ref. 12 Meyer, Hyperdrive, Memo WFC 455/455DA, 1991 — stanslegacy.com
• Yamato-1, superconducting MHD ship, sea trials June 1992, Kobe (Ship & Ocean Foundation); about 6 knots reported aboard (Seattle Times, 20 July 1992)