The Inexhaustible Power of Water


The Water Wizard

A simple forester, Viktor Schauberger (1885-1958), made some of the most truly fundamental discoveries of the 20th century, opening completely new energy sources for humanity with his vortex technology.



“The secret of water is the capital of Capital—which is why any attempt to reveal it is ruthlessly terminated in embryo.”
These lines were written by the remarkable Viktor Schauberger more than 60 years ago. A man, you might say, who had been sent by God to proclaim once again the true significance of water to ‘enlightened’ modern men. A man of uncompromising honesty and dedication to nature. A man who faced bitter opposition his whole lifetime, before dying alone and impoverished, a broken man.

Yet he left behind an inheritance of incalculable worth, insights which still inspire and which form the building blocks of many astounding developments. And this by uncovering something that was already known to the Incas, the Mongols, the ancient Cretans, and the Tibetan monks: that all water creates vortices, and that if you let it flow naturally, you might just experience some real miracles. Viktor Schauberger’s discoveries are simple, yet truly revolutionary—they tear down several of the laws of hydrology, and concede far more power and significance to water than mankind would like to allow. Does it surprise anyone that even to the present day many scientists fail to understand him? One of them, Professor Wilhelm Balters, has been honest enough to admit, “Why should it be easy for us to understand Schauberger’s language, when he was writing in the language of the future?” The future, however, has long since arrived.

Before we tackle that, let us return to where it all began. Viktor Schauberger was born in 1885 as the fifth of nine children, in the back of beyond by Lake Plöckenstein in Austria. His uncle had been the last imperial huntmaster in Bad Ischl during the days of Emperor Franz Josef. His father was master forester, as was his grandfather, great-grandfather, and even his father be­­fore that. Viktor was a real ‘son of the forest’ who would roam alone in the wild woods around the lake for days on end, observing nature in a state of purity and preservation that today no longer exists.

Viktor’s father wanted to send him to university to study forestry, but Viktor re­­fused, fearing that the academics would cloud his unprejudiced, innocent view of nature, as they had done to his brother. He went to an ordinary forestry school instead, and became a forester.

His first job was to manage 21,000 hectares of a virtually untouched, primeval forest belonging to Prince Adolf von Schaum­­­­burg-Lippe, near Steyrling. He loved the forest, which had barely felt the gaze of man, and in its untouched nature he gai­n­­ed his first deep insights into the true nature of water—something that held a particular fascination for him.

The Power of Cool Water

Schauberger quickly learnt that water does not enjoy being exposed to sunlight. For example, there was a spring over which a stone hut had been built long ago. The hut was later torn down, and the spring lay exposed to the sunlight. Before much time had passed, the spring dried up, and no one could say why. When the stone hut was rebuilt, the water returned. The Romans covered their springs with stone slabs, leaving only a round mouthpiece free, and attaching the outlet pipe in such a way that not even air could get in.

It’s obvious that water loves the shade, which is why springs are found hidden in the deep forest or in clefts in rocks, and why a natural river or stream protects itself against direct sunlight with shady trees and bushes on its banks.

Neither did it escape Schauberger’s atten­­­­­­­tion that during thaws (the water warming up), rising floodwaters built up banks of debris, which were often carried away again on cool, clear nights (the water cooling down). He came to the conclusion that the carrying and suction power of water is at its greatest when its temperature is low and its flow undisturbed.

He was able to prove this for the first time in the winter of 1918, when Linz faced an extreme shortage of firewood due to the war. There was more than enough wind­­­­throw lying in the nearby Priel hills, but no pack animals to drag it down to the city, or streams big enough to float it down. The hitherto obscure forester Schauberger ­prof­­­­fered his services. He proposed using a small, rocky mountain stream to get the wood down into the valley, a stream which the experts said was totally unsuitable. For the first time, Viktor Schauberger faced accusations that his ideas were folly and doomed to failure—and it wouldn’t be the last time that he would prove his critics wrong.

Unperturbed, he waited until the early hours of the morning, when the water is at its coldest, before releasing the wood into the water at just the right moment. It took only one night to get all the wood, 16,000 cubic metres, down to the valley floor. Later in his career, he would draw further attention with his outstanding log flume.

Stones That Float in the Water

The trout and salmon that swam in the mountain streams were another source of fascination for Viktor Schauberger. How on earth did they manage to stay stationary in the water, even in a mountain torrent in full spate? How could they escape, fast as grea­sed lightning, against the current, instead of letting themselves be swept away by it? And up to the surface, not into the sheltering depths!

Water forming a hyperbolic vortex

Viktor’s son Walter attempts an implosion. You can see the water forming a hyperbolic vortex which corresponds exactly to the law of harmony (1/n x n = 1). Hence the term ‘singing tower’.

Did the trout, too, owe this capability to the water temperature? No sooner had the thought occurred to him than he decided to find out. He had one hundred litres of water war­­­med up and released into a stream about one hundred metres upstream from a trout. This small amount of water could hardly make a big difference to the stream’s temperature… Yet soon afterwards, the trout became uneasy, and started striking the water forcefully with its fins. It could barely hold itself in position, and indeed soon found itself washed downstream.

Viktor Schauberger asked himself how trout managed to get past rapids and waterfalls, and why they jumped higher the more forceful the water. He observed the trout floating motionlessly upward in a stream pouring downward, before being slung into the inflowing water above, just like that. Only after decades of intense observation would he find the answer. We know today that every force—material or immaterial—produces an equally strong counterforce. Exactly as a tornado pulls the masses of air outside of it downward, be­­fore sucking them upwards again on the inside, naturally flowing (whirling) water too produces energy that flows in the opposite direction to the water, upwards instead of downwards. This flow of energy, visible inside a waterfall as a ray of light within the water, is used by the trout like a waterspout to move upward.
Schauberger made another unbelievable discovery. On an icy, moonlit winter night he watched stones as big as a man’s head loosen themselves from the basin of a moun­­­tain stream, circle like the trout before its great leap, hover upward then bob on the surface! Heavy stones! He couldn’t believe his eyes. What power was at work here? The same power of levitation, dormant in the water, which let the trout ‘jump’.

Not all of the stones levitated, though. Only the polished, egg-shaped ones rose up to dance on the surface, apparently weightless. The rough stones lay motionless on the bottom, as one would expect from a rock.

Why? The egg-shape is the child of the vortex. Geometrically speaking, it arises inside a hyperbolic vortex, and since water too forms vortices, egg-shapes can be particularly easily moved, and break free of the law of gravity. You can test this yourself by taking a round, tall, thin jar, filling it with water, and slipping an egg into it. By lightly swirling the water (using a pencil for example), you will be able to see the egg slowly rising from the bottom and floating to the top, where it stays as long as the eddy remains intact.

‘Technological Miracles’, Copied from Nature

Prince Adolf von Schaumburg-Lippe had pressing financial worries, and wanted to turn the timber in Schauberger’s forest into cash as quickly as possible. Yet the high cost of transport from the remote forest would have consumed most of the profits. Experts put forward different solutions, yet none of them were practicable. Finally, they turned to Schauberger, who proclaimed himself capable of reducing transport costs from 12 to 1 Austrian Schilling per cubic metre. Admittedly, he would have to build the log flume at his own expense first. The chute was 30 miles long, taking not the direct route downwards, but following the curve of valley and gorge. No one had seen this before. Every so often, he had water drained from the channel to be replaced by cool water from mountain streams, clai­­m­­­­ing that the trunks would slide only in cold water.

He fell back on not just his own observations, but the wisdom ac­­cumulated in his family for generations. His father had already taught him that the sun’s rays make water lazy and tired, whereas at night, particularly by moonlight, it is fresh and lively; and his forefathers had been able to manage a flume so skilfully that rhythmic changes in curvature induced the water to flow uphill in places.

The solution, Schauberger knew, was to get the water moving in the right way at the right temperature. The flume that he built had a cross-section like the blunt end of an egg. It followed the twists and turns of the mountain valleys “because, quite naturally, the water has shown us itself the way it wants to go, for its needs to be optimally ful­filled, and we should follow its wishes.” For it is not technology’s task to ­correct nature, but to copy it.

His insistence that temperature differences in the water of only a tenth of a de­­gree were of the utmost importance provoked only disbelieving laughter from the hydrologists. When he pointed out that si­­milar disparities in the human body were an in­­dicator of sickness or health, they took him for a complete lunatic.

It seemed like the critics were right. During the first test run, the timber wouldn’t move, although the water was cold and the curves had been calculated correctly. Schau­­­­berger was in a state of despair. Providence came to his aid in the form of a snake, which crossed over a pond before his eyes. How was it able to swim, fast as an arrow, without fins? The realisation came over him even as he was watching it slither, and he hurried back to nail a kind of guiderail to the curves of the chute, to make the water snake just as the reptile had.

Stunning success was the result. Giant blocks of wood, heavier than water, now snaked speedily down into the valley one after the other. The prince’s enthusiasm was so great that he put Schauberger in charge of all his forests. The government in Vienna soon came to hear of this remarkable forester, and appointed him national advisor for log flumes. His salary was twice that of an academic of the same rank, and paid out in gold to boot, an extraordinary exception in those times of inflation.