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2026-10-06 Internet Archive (archive.org) - Hilgenberg-OC

Queries (full-text search in Chrome): - Hilgenberg Erdball OR Hilgenberg Gravitation OR "Ott Christoph Hilgenberg" (text contents) -> 0 results (Boolean form not accepted). - "Hilgenberg" Äther (text contents) -> 1,978 results; first two are scans of Vom wachsenden Erdball (1933). Others on page 1 are unrelated (other Hilgenbergs) plus Farrell's Die Bruderschaft der Glocke (German edition of SS Brotherhood of the Bell, not opened). - Search inside the 1933 item for Äther -> 7 hits, all on scan pages n19-n22. - Wayback Machine: TU Berlin pages, see 2026-10-06-web-archive-tu-berlin.md.

Found: Hilgenberg's own 1933 book, full scan with OCR (priority 1)

  • Item "Vom wachsenden Erdball - Hilgenberg 1933", identifier Hilgenberg1933. [web] https://archive.org/details/Hilgenberg1933
  • Files: PDF 30.5 MB, text PDF 5.9 MB, OCR full text 158.6 KB (Hilgenberg 1933_djvu.txt), EPUB 19.9 MB; uploaded Oct 2016. [web] https://archive.org/download/Hilgenberg1933 ; full text [web] https://archive.org/stream/Hilgenberg1933/Hilgenberg%201933_djvu.txt
  • Title page (OCR): "28 Abbildungen, 2 Tafeln"; Verlag: O. Hilgenberg, Charlottenburg 2, Carmerstr. 2; Druck: Gießmann & Bartsch, Berlin-Pankow; Copyright 1933 by O. C. Hilgenberg. (So the book was self-published and only printed by Gießmann & Bartsch; the folder document lists Gießmann & Bartsch as publisher.)
  • Second copy in the search results ("Vom Wachsenden Erdball by Hilgenberg, O. C.", 113 views), not opened.
  • Same scan is offered by nuclearplanet.com (see that note), which states that Helge Hilgenberg allowed free reproduction.

What the book says, read in Chrome (OCR text pp.1-18 approx.; ether section from page images, scan pages n20-n21)

Tagged [web: archive.org Hilgenberg1933]. Page images = [web: page image, scan n20/n21]. Paraphrased from the German.

  1. Geometry first, physics later (book p.1): he says he will first show the "remarkable fact" that the continental shelves fit without gaps on a sphere ("Schelfkugel") whose diameter is about half the present Earth's, and only later bring in the "absurd-seeming" hypothesis of a growing Earth; he notes he is not a professional geologist or geophysicist.
  2. The 0.6 figure is his own measured diameter ratio (book pp.2-7): shelf areas are about 35% of Earth's surface (Wegener, Born), so the shelf sphere's diameter should be sqrt(0.35) of the globe's; to leave play he used 0.62-0.65 of the globe diameter, and at the lower limit 0.62 "hardly any gap remained". He gives a cut-out net (Tafel 1) to paste on an 8.7 cm ball, matching a 14 cm globe (ratio 0.62). The reader is invited to repeat the paper-and-glue construction ("nachzuprüfen") on a globe of at least 20 cm. [web]
  3. To close the fit he cuts North America twice: a Mackenzie-Florida shear line ("MF-Scherlinie", about 2000 km of horizontal strike-slip) and an Alaska line (Yakutat Bay to Kotzebue Sound); pp.8-18 list geological evidence (faults, Appalachian truncation, gravity values of Miller in the Mackenzie basin, the 1899 Yakutat earthquake, fault strikes compared with a shear diagram after Mead's experiments). He predicts a shelf area near the then unexplored North Pole (about two-thirds the size of Greenland). [web] (This is the 1933 antecedent of the "Laurentia megashear" in the folder document.)
  4. Ether section (page image, scan n20, left): he summarises the views of his 1931 booklet Über Gravitation, Tromben und Wellen in bewegten Medien (his ref. 65). From the relativity of motion (he stresses: of motion only, not of time) and the equality of heavy and inertial mass he concludes that gravitation is caused by ether flowing into matter; two attracting masses are two spatial ether sinks; a gravitational field corresponds to an ether stream of definite velocity; a body accelerates in a field because a sink sits in a stream; a body accelerated by a force has an ether stream opposite to the acceleration superposed on its own field. He says he reached this independently of "long known similar ideas of B. Riemann and others", and suggests Riemann moved to the abstract four-dimensional picture because the ether simply vanishing inside matter did not satisfy him. Since radioactivity shows matter turns into radiation, he argues it should be no great step to assume streaming ether can turn into matter; he openly lists as unanswered how ether enters atoms and how swallowed ether becomes mass. A rotating body is modelled as a 3-D sink with a superposed circular equatorial source and two polar sinks. [web: page image, scan n20]
  5. Flow effects he cites as medium-independent (scan n20, right): besides the Magnus effect and its inversion: two spherical or circular sinks in a medium at rest attract; two sources attract; a sink and a source repel; a sink in a stream accelerates with the stream, a source against it; two fixed spherical sinks start rotating (axes perpendicular to the line joining them), two sources likewise (axes along the line), and a sink-source pair (sink axis perpendicular, source axis along). His own experiments with circular sinks and sources and with linear sinks are described in the 1931 booklet, pp.14-15; he later found that Westphal (his ref. 67) had described experiments with one-dimensional sinks and sources, "oddly" presented the other way round as an analogy for repulsion. Astronomical consequences (1931 booklet pp.43-50, 68-72): orbiting bodies recede from each other as their masses grow, spin up, and orbital periods lengthen. [web: page image, scan n20]
  6. Growth law with numbers (scan n21, left): the Earth gains mass and volume; mass grows by "the known e-function of organic growth". Assuming (he says: not true, but simplifying) constant uniform density, V/V' = M/M' = (0.6)^3 = 0.216, with V the shelf-sphere volume and V' today's. With V' = V e^(mu t) and t = 1 billion years = 3x10^16 s since before the Paleozoic (radioactive dating after Born), mu = (1/3)x10^-16 ln 4.63, about 5x10^-17 (printed with unit "g/sec"; dimensionally it is per second, i.e. grams per gram per second). Illustration: 1 g of hydrogen would produce about 15 million new hydrogen molecules per second. If the Paleozoic began only about 100 Myr ago (sediment-thickness estimates), mu is correspondingly larger. Once physics knows "the gravitational constant in the sense of the ether-stream hypothesis" (the volume of ether swallowed per unit mass per unit time) and the condensation ratio of ether to mass, geological ages could be found from them. [web: page image, scan n21] - Arithmetic check [calculation]: 1/0.216 = 4.63; ln 4.63 = 1.532; 1.532/3x10^16 = 5.1x10^-17 s^-1. Consistent with his printed value. 3.045x10^23 x 5x10^-17 = 1.5x10^7, consistent with "15 million".
  7. Thermal and orbital consequences (scan n21, right): mass growth goes with a rise in the Earth's own temperature, independent of solar heating; the ratio of mass newly formed by ether uptake to mass converted to radiation falls toward 1 at equilibrium (a star). He cites Fricke (his ref. 69) for a numerical relation between temperature and gravity on celestial bodies, and Fricke's figure of 214 K intrinsic surface temperature plus 74 degrees from sunlight. Distance to the Sun grows, rotation speeds up, orbital period lengthens: days shorten and years lengthen (1931 booklet pp.46-47). A curve of air-envelope temperature over time is his Abb. 21. [web: page image, scan n21]
  8. Pages after scan n21 (mountain building, poles, Hudson Bay, the second half of the ether discussion and the reference list, which names refs 65-69) were not read in this run.

Bearing on the claims

  • Claims 1 and 2: the inventor's own statement of the ether-sink gravity and mass-conversion principle is now available, with his reasoning (equivalence of heavy and inertial mass plus relativity of motion) and his admission of what is unexplained.
  • Claim 3 (numbers): in 1933 the "0.6" is a diameter ratio (0.62-0.65) from the shelf-fitting construction, which gives a volume and mass ratio of 0.216 and an exponential rate of about 5x10^-17 per second over 1 Gyr. This explains the folder document's "60%" (diameter, not volume) and "nearly doubling" (1/0.6 = 1.67). The 4590 km and 4 mm/yr figures come from the 1965 paper and are not in the 1933 book; the 1965/1933 difference stays unreconciled until the 1965 paper is read.
  • Claim 4: the Magnus effect and its inversion appear here as one of a family of sink/source flow effects; the 1931 booklet (pp.14-15) holds his own sink/source experiments, and Westphal is named as earlier experimenter. Not found yet: the 1931 and 1933 Magnus booklets themselves.
  • Claim 6: the 1933 text already compares the ether-flow picture with Riemann, decades before the 1974 statement the folder document reports.

Downloads

None (downloads need the owner's approval). Candidate for research/files/: Hilgenberg 1933_djvu.txt (158.6 KB, OCR text) and Hilgenberg 1933.pdf (30.5 MB) from https://archive.org/download/Hilgenberg1933 . The OCR text alone would let a deep reader cover the whole book.