able to carry a greater weight of logs. This was a principle that
enabled him to turn upside down the current theories of hydraulics,
and particularly the methods of river and flood management.Log flumes
Schauberger was looking for a way to demonstrate to others his ideas
about movement in Nature, and to discuss them with technical
experts and scientists. His opportunity came in 1922 when the owner
of the forest and hunting reserve on which Viktor was a junior warden,
Prince Adolf zu Schaumburg-Lippe, was looking for a way to avoid
bankruptcy. (His wife, the Princess, had very expensive tastes.) After
World War I there was a demand by the expanding building industry
for timber, and inaccessible stands of mature trees were earmarked for
felling. The timber flotation methods of the time were fairly crude,
straight channels running down the valleys, which caused the logs
enormous damage, many being good only for firewood.
The Prince offered a prize for the construction of a flume to bring
logs down from the remote areas, and Viktor eagerly submitted his
plans. These were, however, rejected by the administrators of the estate
as totally unworkable, as the proposed method went completely
against accepted hydraulic principles. Through a chance meeting on a
hunting expedition, the Princess asked Viktor what savings could be
achieved through his method. On claiming that he could offer a cost of
one schilling per lm^3 against the normal cost of 12 schillings per lm^3
for flotation, she offered to have his salary trebled should he succeed,
despite his lack of academic qualifications. The Prince, driving a hard
bargain, made a condition that Viktor should build the flume at his
own expense and that it had to deliver a minimum of 1,000m^3 daily.
There was much scoffing by the experts who judged
Schauberger completely mad, and who made malicious predictions
of the outcome; as Viktor describes:
The construction was completed after some four months. The
great timbers were in position. The day before the inauguration
I tried a test. An average sized log was put into the flume. It
floated down for about 100 metres and then suddenly
grounded on the bottom, causing the water behind to rise and
overflow the flume. I saw the scornful faces of my workers,
realized that I had miscalculated and felt discouraged. The log- VIKTOR SCHAUBERGER'S VISION