3M Once Created A Force Field
Then they promptly ignored it
For lack of a better explanation (and no one has tried), in late 1980, 3M created a legitimate force field within a Polypropylene film manufacturing plant.
Strong enough to trap flies or repel people, this mysterious force field was able to block small items thrown at it and left them with an electrical charge.
If you’re unfamiliar, 3M is a corporate behemoth creating 60,000+ products and operates in the industries of worker safety, health care, and consumer goods.
This situation took place in South Carolina in a large room using 20ft wide Polypropylene film. Each spool was 50,000 ft long and their process involved unwinding these spools at high speeds while slicing and re-spooling the material into shorter rolls for sale. The design of the operation created a hallway of sorts, surrounded on its sides and overhead with rapidly moving plastic sheets. The spools moved at 1,000 ft per minute and combined with the high humidity, they created huge amounts of static electricity. Imagine static cling at an industrial level and you’ll start to get close to the forces being experienced in this room.
One area that workers referred to as the corridor was where the strongest effects could be felt. The force was so strong at times that people could walk into it, but couldn’t turn their heads, and would instead have to walk backward to escape its effects.
Remarkably, there is almost no detail beyond this. The only reason it was discovered at all is that there was a symposium in 1995 where David Swenson moderated and shared this story. This would have been fifteen years after the discovery of this force field event.
If you want to avoid creating a conspiracy theory, this isn’t how you do it.
So many questions remain. Why did these workers not find this more fascinating? Can this scenario be recreated? Presumably, people still use big sheets of plastic so is this effect still unfolding today somewhere? Why didn’t 3M pursue understanding this effect, or if they did, why isn’t this story more widely known?
If you research further, you will come to learn that some believe this effect is the same as Coulomb’s law or a quantified amount of force between two electrically charged particles. Interestingly, this quasi-law of physics was critical to understanding electromagnetism, and in many ways mimics gravity in how distance decreases the force. Other ideas involve vortexes of ionized air, or simply muscles being manipulated by such a strong force to make it feel as though a person couldn’t move (what about the coins…).
But, none of this is known and there is no true explanation. I wish more time and money was spent on interesting topics like this — how will we find the magic things unless we look? Can you imagine being there when they discovered x-rays, penicillin, or any number of remarkably magic-like discoveries?
— Benedict