LIFT

LIFT
7 Lessons for Innovators
From an Otherworldly Thinker

By Randall G. Hunter
With Scott Brown

Copyright Randall Hunter, 2016

All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lift
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LIFT

Seven Lessons for Innovators

From
An Otherworldly Thinker
This book is printed on acid-free paper
Printed in the United States of America
Designed by Tracy Hopper and Randall G. Hunter

LIFT Copyright 2016 by Randall G Hunter All rights reserved Printed in the
United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews
Lift may be purchased for educational business or sales promotional use. For
information please write: Special Markets Department, Fine Art Estate 1840
41stAve #132 Capitola, CA 95010
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hunter, Randall G
Lift/Randall G Hunter-1sted.
ISBN Hardcover 978-9887599-2-3
ISBN Softcover 978-9887599-3-0
ISBN ePub 978-9887599-4-7
ISBN Kindle 978-9887599-5-4

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Dedicated to people who make

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Authors Note, by Randall Hunter

Presenting Alexander G. Weygers

Seven Lessons For Innovators

Lesson 1: Loss Is Not Loss
Lesson 2: Embrace the Power of Constraint
Lesson 3: If You Want To Learn, Teach
Lesson 4: Achieve Fluency
Lesson 5: Court the Middle Brain
Lesson 6: Tell Them a Story
Lesson 7: Live Life as an Experiment
Conclusion

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PRESENTING
ALEXANDER WEYGERS
In John Steinbecks Cannery Row, Mack and his famished friends depart the
chilling coastal fog of Monterey and head east toward Carmel Valley, searching for
sun.
Turning down a sinuous two-lane road running astride the Carmel River, they
discover unbridled territory basking beneath crystalline blue skies. Wildflowers
burst in bloom, dotting the orchards and quilted greenery of the rugged Santa Lucia
Mountain Range.
The men scoop up carrots fallen from a vegetable truck. Their Model T runs over a
rooster. They pluck a bay leaf from a tree and turn their prize into a gourmet meal.
Luck, Steinbeck writes, blossomed from the first.
Steinbecks Depression-era saga was published in 1945. Exactly 20 years later, a
15-year-old Monterey High student named Peter Partch made the same eastbound
turn onto Carmel Valley Road. Sitting quietly alongside his father in the cab of
their truck, Partch hoped luck would blossom for him, too.
My big brother was an athlete a great baseball player, Partch said. Hed hit
the ball and it would take off like a rocket. He was heroic and kind of majestic, but
I was an abysmal failure. I wasnt sure of myself or my abilities, or my place in the
world, for that matter.
Reserved and without the hard shell needed to succeed in sports, Partch found
salvation in art.
I had an instinct that Id have a place in the art world, he said. Artists seemed to
have a higher purpose. It wasnt about the ego.
I was particularly interested in sculpture. At the end of the school year, I felt like I
was finally finding myself. I didnt want that feeling to stop, so I asked my art
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teacher if he knew of any summer courses I could take. He said, Oh, yes, theres a
fellow in Carmel Valley who offers a workshop. If hell take you, I think it would
be an extraordinary experience.
Then the teacher added a caveat.
Theres just one thing, though, he said. This teacher he lives in a treehouse.
Partch called the instructor, who in a voice hewn with a thick Dutch accent said,
Youre a bit young. Lets meet each other first.
Driving to the teachers house that Saturday afternoon, the Carmel Valley
landscape grew more rugged by the minute. Live oaks reached out from either side
of the road, sometimes clasping one another, and slanting shafts of light sliced
through impossibly clean air.
Ten miles inland, Partchs dad turned the truck into a heavily wooded nook known
as La Rancheria. They rambled down a private drive before coming to an abrupt
halt in front of a scene that seemed straight from Tolkiens Middle Earth.
Set in a cluster of oak trees alongside a shrubby hillside was a perfectly circular
house with a bubble top. Whoever built it had taken coarse, thick planks of
Monterey pine and arranged them vertically along curved lines. The knotty wood
on the exterior of the house was left unfinished so that, only a few feet away, the
building blended in with the natural landscape. Lichen clung to the edge of the
roofline just as it did to the neighboring trees.
From the house emerged a strapping man with a shambling walk. As he
approached the truck, Partch could see his face was lined and weathered. He had
thick gray hair and intense brown eyes. He gestured toward the young man.
Hello, he said. I am Alexander Weygers. Welcome to my home.
Your house its round, the elder Partch said.
Yes, Weygers said. When I was a nautical engineer I learned that the strongest
structure in the world is a curve, so I built it that way. Let me show you around.
There was wonder around every corner.
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When I get an idea, I want to prove it, Weygers told the Partches.
Weygers told them that he built the house from materials nobody else wanted. He
framed it with scrap lumber and finished it with pine slabs discarded by the nearby
Cummings Brothers Saw Mill. The plumbing and windows came from junkyards.
Hinges and door locks were wrought by Weygers over a forge made from a
gasoline can. He made the roof from ferrocement, which he learned to mix during
his ship-building studies. It had yet to leak.
What I remember most about that day, though, was the art, Partch says.
Large and small low-relief sculptures made from marble, lemonwood and teak
mostly human figures in achingly tender poses hovered in corners and on
shelves. Some spoke of innocence and play, while others communicated loss. All
were emotional, belying the tough exterior of both the house and the man who built
it.
Richly detailed prints hung on the walls, while some larger works, including a
magnificent, classic torso in red marble, appeared at strategic points in the garden.
They were in stark juxtaposition to the surrounding driftwood, stone, and rusty, old
iron.
Id never experienced anything like it, Partch said. Id never seen art like that,
and I havent since. It was extraordinarily human, I guess youd say. And Id
certainly never met a human like Weygers. He was in total command of his
environment.
As they circled the property, Partch says he also had the mounting sense that
Weygers was sizing him up, seeing if he was ready for the journey that lay ahead.
He wanted to see if I was the sort of person who would see this thing through, and
not just a kid who was there to see the freak that lived in the treehouse, he said.
All that Alex asked for was appreciation. He was big on treasuring the
opportunity to improve each day, to invent, to innovate, to develop yourself.
At one point, Weygers abruptly stopped walking, looked squarely at Partch and
said, Now I have just one question for you: Are you the sort of person whos part
of the problem, or the sort of person whos part of the solution? I need to know.

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Many young men would have turned tail and headed home. Partch couldnt
imagine leaving.
I was totally enchanted, he said.
***
Alexander Weygers was a man who built an entire house out of scrap materials. He
deliberately lived a near-cashless life for almost five decades, growing or trading
for what he needed. He created incredible art while finding no time for the art
establishment. Most importantly he was a man who, in the second act of his life
generated breakthrough innovations on a near-daily basis.
Weygers way was uniquely his. He drew people to him because they knew he had
conquered the inner agony of deciding what is really important in life and
discarding everything else. But few realize that while Weygers eventually solved
the innovators dilemma through his broad spectrum of creative adventures, he was
a long time in doing it. In fact, the first stanza of Weygers life was characterized
by the tension between a series of fortunate and unfortunate events.
Weygers early years were idyllic. He was born in Java, Indonesia, on October 12,
1901, the son of colonial Dutch parents in a family of seven children. His father,
Albert Weygers, owned and operated a sugar plantation and a hotel. His mother,
Geertruida Van Leenhoff Weygers, was an intellectual who taught literature and
several languages at an elite girls college in Surabaya.
The family lived in a rambling house with a roof made of corrugated sheet metal.
Bare-footed and dressed in white tunics to stay cool, the children were most often
found climbing the citrus trees that sprang up around the property. When they left
the house, the Weygers siblings formed something of a street gang, playing cops
and robbers and using bamboo sticks to knock nuts from trees.
The family was unorthodox in that the father was the primary caregiver, as the
mother would leave for a week at a time for Surabaya. Albert often took his
children on botanical explorations through the tropical jungles and mountains of
exotic Java, instilling in him a deep love of nature, design and ecology. Alex
worked in a blacksmith studio and learned the trades of an early pioneer and
colonist, including forging and machining.

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At the age of 15, Albert and Geertruida sent Alex on a 30-day voyage aboard a
steamship to Holland. There he received an advanced education, first at prep
school, then at college in Groningen where he studied mechanical engineering.
This was followed by two years of extended studies in naval architecture at the
Dordrecht Technological Institute, where he resumed his study of the art of
blacksmithing, which Weygers referred to as the Mother Craft. Moreover, the
importance of self-reliance was emphatically impressed upon him.
My education as a marine engineer came at the tail end of the Steam Age, when
we were expected to be master craftsmen and experts in metalwork, Weygers
said. If parts wore out, there was no one there to save you you were alone at sea.
You were expected to make and design their replacements with whatever was at
hand.
Weygers returned to Java to work as an engineer in 1923. One year later, his kind
Dutch fiance, Jacoba Hutter (who he called Tose), came from Holland to join
him. They were soon married; however, she had difficulty acclimating to the
tropics and in 1926 the couple immigrated to the United States. Working as a
marine engineer and shipbuilding architect in Seattle, Weygers became an
American citizen, and the couple looked forward to raising a family in the cool
climes of the Pacific Northwest. Weygers spoke often to friends about his strong
paternal instinct and desire to emulate his own father.
That was when tragedy struck. Tose and the couples unborn son died during
childbirth September 13, 1927. In a letter to his family, Weygers wrote that Tose
remained concerned with his well-being until his final moments, telling him on her
deathbed, When you go back to our house, there are some vegetables there for
you to cook tonight.
The loss of his wife and child scarred Weygers deeply, marking him with grief and
causing him to reevaluate his life. In the depths of his sorrow, Weygers turned to
art.
He enrolled in classes at University of Washington, studying under Avard
Fairbanks, the prolific 20th-century American sculptor who had three works sitting
in the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Fairbanks identified Weygers
talent immediately and mentored him in the carving of a 36-inch monument to his
wife and child that he simply called Mourning.

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The sculpture features a lifeless woman splayed across a jagged column. Beneath
her, a man holds her limp hand, buries his head in the stone, clenches a fist, and
weeps.
Fairbanks brought the piece to the attention of prominent American sculptor
Lorado Taft, who sent Weygers a letter saying, (Mourning) appears to me to be
the most admirable sculpture that I have ever seen by an untrained hand.
For the next 18 months, Weygers apprenticed under Taft at the sculptors Midway
Studios in Chicago, where he focused on the sculpture of monuments. Among
other projects, Weygers worked on a 25-foot statue of a knight that would
eventually stand sentry at the state house of Louisiana politician Huey Kingfish
Long.
Weygers was now prepared for extended studies at prestigious European art
centers. First, he spent a year at the Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, Holland,
specializing in studies of human anatomy, life drawing, and modeling.
Maintaining his quest to study under artistic masters, Weygers next traveled to
Paris, where he studied end-grain wood engraving under the watch of Paul Bournet
at LEcole Esthetique Contemporaine. Even in the 1930s, wood engraving was
becoming a lost art. Weygers developed his skills to a level few could equal
requiring him to be registered with the U.S. government as an engraver capable of
creating printing plates for currency.
At Tafts urging, Weygers moved on to Florence, Italy, where he studied sculpture
under Ettore Massi, who schooled him in the arts of stone carving and bronze
casting. At the end of his apprenticeship, Massi challenged Weygers to do as
Michelangelo had done and attempt to carve a rendition of his own hand in Carrara
marble. Massi was so impressed with the result that he nicknamed Weygers
Maestro.
In 1936, Weygers decided it was time to return to America. Settling in Berkeley,
California, his work received a tremendous critical reception. Within months he
was recognized with a solo exhibition at the Cliff Hotel in San Francisco. His work
was featured at the Oakland Museum. Soon his sculptures were accepted into
prestigious San Francisco Art Association exhibitions. In 1940, he was recognized
as an artist of national significance and his work was included in a collection at the
Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

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Weygers attempted marriage again with an American named Emma Gene, a

socialite who his niece, Sheri Weygers Tromp, describes as being gorgeous, a
work of art with bright red nails and beautiful clothes. We were in awe of her.
The Oakland Tribune wrote a brief article about their marriage, with the couple
saying they thought marriage would be a barrel of laughs. This would not be the
case. In 1938, Alex and Emma sailed aboard the Empress of Asia to meet his
family in Indonesia. On the return trip, she fell in love with the ships captain and
the couple parted ways when they arrived home.
Difficult times continued to beset Weygers. The country was still reeling from the
Great Depression and commissions were few and far between. Weygers had
difficulty making a living and maintaining his studio.
More significantly, he was also burdened by the fact that several of his family
members were interned in Japanese-run concentration camps in Java and Thailand
in the early days of World War II. Ironically, Toses intolerance of the Indonesias
warm weather may have saved Weygers from the fate that befell the rest of his
family, as he was safe in the U.S. when the Dutch East Indes was occupied by
Japan in 1942.
Desperate to work toward his familys freedom, Weygers, now 41, shuttered his
studio and joined the military, where he served in Army Intelligence.
Weygers was valued for his remarkable language skills (he was fluent in Malay,
Dutch, Italian, German, and English), as well as his intimate knowledge of
Indonesia and its culture. Sadly, he was unable to reach his family.
In 1943, Weygers received word that his sister had lost a leg and his elderly mother
had died in a camp in Java. Meanwhile, his brother Wyk spent the entire war as a
slave laborer in Thailand, working on a railroad that was to connect Thailand with
Burma so the Japanese could transport goods and personnel back and forth.
The jungle was so thick there that you cant imagine building a railroad with no
machines, but thats what they did, said Tromp, who was Wyks daughter. They
built it by hand. It was hideous work.
Tromp and her mother, Riek, were in a camp of their own. When they were
reunited with her father, she did not recognize him because he was so emaciated.
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Just before the occupation, Rieks father died. Weygers created a death mask and
sculpted a bust of the man. When the Japanese put Riek in a concentration camp,
she was allowed one personal possession. She chose the sculpture, which she toted
with her wherever she went.
It was during his period in the Army that Weygers met Col. Arthur V. Jones, who
owned three acres of undeveloped rural land in the wilds of Californias Central
Coast. He so admired Weygers talents that he wanted him as his neighbor so
much so that Jones deeded him half his land. They agreed to both build homes on
the property when they returned stateside from the war effort.
Weygers was discharged from the Army in the winter of 1943. He went straight to
Los Angeles, where his future life partner, Marian, waited for him.
Alex had met Marian in Berkeley prior to his departure for the Army. A tall,
handsome woman, she was a third-generation San Franciscan and a graduate of the
University of California, where she studied art and worked under JapaneseAmerican artist Chiura Obata, who taught her ink-wash painting and design. By
the time they met, Marian was highly regarded in the art world and had developed
a printmaking process that she named Imprints from Nature, using natural
materials such as flowers, leaves, and grass.
Soon after his return to the United States, Weygers received word that his friend
Col. Jones had been killed in a plane crash, leaving the entire Carmel Valley
property to him.
***
Ironically, it was when Weygers was virtually alone that he found his voice.
Scarred from his personal losses and professional disappointments, he was eager to
start anew in the coastal wilderness.
First, Alex and Marian had to get themselves 300 miles north. In Los Angeles, they
purchased a 1928 Chevy Coupe they named Boxie, as it seemed to be comprised
entirely of right angles. The car burned oil furiously and was so powerless it could
scarcely climb hills, even in low gear. Plus, there were few cars on the road at the
time, as gasoline was still being rationed due to the war effort. Weygers put his
mind to work and overhauled the engine so Boxie could run on kerosene.

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From the time we left Los Angeles to the time we turned down the dirt road to our
homestead, we never saw another car the entire trip, Marian said. We were the
only ones on the road.
With only a tent to shelter them, Alex and Marian lived off the land, raising their
own food, and getting most of what they needed from bartering, scavenging, or
making it themselves.
They ate dandelion soup and gopher stew. They also captured wild bees and
installed them in scrap-lumber hives, where they produced white sage honey to eat
and trade.
Those early days we were like Adam and Eve, Marian said. We had no
neighbors. It was so dark at night, and wed just lie there and watch shooting star
after shooting star go past.
Weygers quickly set about building the house that someone later referred to as a
geodesic dome gone wild. It was an organic structure made entirely of recycled
logs and glass, along with local Carmel stone and ferroconcrete. All of its hinges,
handles, nuts, bolts, and kitchen tools were forged from cast-off metals using
Weygers blacksmithing skills. Window frames, bathtubs, and sinks were
repurposed from the dump in nearby Salinas.
To the unschooled eye, the finished product appeared slap-dash and primitive.
County officials would visit on occasion, complaining Weygers had not sought
proper permits or submitted plans for approval. Time and again, he would send
them packing after a demonstration of his homes structural integrity.
Weygers studio was adjacent to the main house and also built of heavy pine
planks with a curved design. It was an even more extraordinary structure than the
house. one angle, the studios roofline resembled a mushroom hat. Sculpted around
a large skylight, it let in copious amount of Northern light, which Weygers said
was ideal for perfecting the subtle relief in his marble sculptures.
As with the house, the heavy door of the studio blended with the exterior
surroundings and was easy to miss. A bent-branch handle was the tip-off. Once
inside, the eye was drawn upward from one level to another. Weygers had
balconies at five levels to enable him to view a sculpture from multiple
perspectives.
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Built for multiple purposes, the studio had several compartments within it, like a
honeycomb.
Walking into his blacksmith shop was like stepping back into the 19th century.
Several anvils, which Weygers made himself out of train rails, shared space with
forges, sledgehammers, prongs shaped for different tasks, band saws, tabletop
saws, an automatic hammer, lathes, and other equipment. All were built by
Weygers himself and customized for his unique needs.
Lots of men play sports, Weygers said. But blacksmithing is a real mans
hobby.
More tools hung on the walls, where they were both handy and ornamental. Wood
gouges, chisels, fire tools, and kitchen cleavers were all simultaneously
implements of work and works of art. As an engineer, he built them for strength; as
an artist, he created them with an eye toward aesthetics. They all awaited work in
the semi-darkness of the blacksmith studio, which Weygers said was necessary for
proper visual judging of the steels heat.
The nerve center of the studio was a tiny room built especially to house Weygers
prize possession: a 19th-century printing press, on which he would hand print his
wood engravings. The shiny black acorn-style press, one of only two in the
country at the time, was originally shipped around Cape Horn at the time of
Californias Gold Rush. Weygers speculated that it printed some of the nations
first newspapers. In the press, Weygers blocks could withstand a pressure of as
much as 2,000 pounds.
Below ground was a perfect darkroom that Weygers scooped out of the hillside so
that he could develop his own photographic prints, a complete novelty at the time.
The countryside immediately outside the studio abounded with every imaginable
category of scrap, which Weygers stored in shacks and lean-tos concealed among
the bushes. Under his inspired touch, they would eventually become objects of
usefulness: Auto springs became spatulas; a truck headlight evolved into a charcoal
brazier; a discarded dentists chair was reconditioned to allow Weygers to raise
and lower heavy marble with the pump of a toe.
The tremendous waste of our society has made my way of life possible, Weygers
said. Americans throw out things because they have a compulsion for newness.
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He went so far as to say the cast-off objects kept him company.

Im surrounded by things with meaning, with their own stories, he said. They
are not quiet. They talk to me.
Weygers balanced the time and energy required for survival with the time and
energy needed for his art, which he believed was his reason for existing. Creativity
became oxygen. Working relentlessly from dusk until dawn, and only resting on
Sundays, his artistic output was stupendous.
After visiting the Weygers property, Jonathan Root of Pageant Magazine wrote,
Weygers lives on no mans terms but his own, beyond all social pretense, and
with the artistic productivity worthy of a Picasso, with the inventive resources of
an Indian scout, with the endurance of a frontiersman, and with an innovative,
visionary mind that is somewhere in front of the Avant- Garde. He is a contentious
monument to self-honesty and an endemic rash under the saddle of complacency,
hypocrisy, and other communal afflictions.
In addition to his artwork, Weygers was an author, writing and illustrating four
books: The Modern Blacksmith; The Making of Tools; The Repair and Recycling of
Tools, and Sculpture, Form and Philosophy, which was published posthumously.
A fifth book, The Complete Modern Blacksmith, is a compendium of Weygers
written work from his first three books. Even today, each is considered a definitive
work among practitioners of these respective crafts.
Written in clear, direct prose, each is logically designed, elegantly made, and
illustrated with Weygers own lucid pencil drawings, many of which can stand
alone as fine art. Through the books, Weygers said, Ill leave my track.
***
Published late in his life, the books were so popular that their success threatened to
force Weygers into paying income tax for the first time.
Weygers infinite abundance as an artist and innovator was matched only by his
Herculean effort to avoid selling as few of his creations as possible.
Many first came to know him not as a versatile genius of art and science, but rather
as the man who outwitted the economic system. To some he was most remarkable
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for keeping at bay the wolves of commerce and governmental bureaucracy, all
while living in enviable serenity in a pastoral region of one of the worlds most
beautiful places.
I have nothing against money, Weygers said, and I certainly have not
repudiated it. But I am unwilling to pay the price to trade my life for it.
Weygers often said that the greatest failure of 20th century man was to recognize
when enough was enough. My goal is to have enough and nothing more. To
Weygers, the threshold at which he would have to pay income tax served as a
simple demarcation of when he had enough.
The temptation was to associate Weygers with movements happening nearby.
Some equated him with Big Sur beatniks of the 1950s, including Jack Kerouac,
who said, If you own a rug, you own too much.
Later they equated him with the alternative movement of the 1960s, which
emanated 45 miles to the south of Weygers at Big Surs Esalen Institute and spun
off New Age teachers like Aldous Huxley and Joseph Campbell. Others simply
thought Weygers was a hippie like those who launched the Summer of Love at the
Monterey Pop Festival.
Weygers resisted all of these categorizations. In fact, when a group of pacifists
protested the use of income tax revenues for armaments, Weygers wrote a letter to
the editor of the Monterey Peninsula Herald that called them imitation
Christians.
If tax expenditures for war weigh on your conscience, he wrote, then stop
making money. Christ did not belong in an income tax bracket. You have to make
a choice somewhere.
Weygers subsisted first and foremost through bartering, trading things like honey
and hand-carved tobacco pipes for goods and services. He also haggled knowledge.
In one case, a few evenings working out the engineering on a gear drive for an
experimental vehicle manufacturer earned him a pickup truck, which he kept
running by spinning his own parts from recycled materials.
When money was absolutely necessary, he worked as a consulting engineer, selling
illustrations to government agencies and private firms like the Schlage Locks
Company.
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Weygers innovated at a rate that would be the envy of industrys best-funded

research-and-development divisions. The fertility of his artistic mind was unrivaled
by any known contemporary. Yet he refused in all but a few cases to be paid for
his work. He declined to trade in his lifestyle for what we think is security and
two weeks of freedom once a year.
I am a free man, he said. My way of life is out of the ordinary but its mine.
If money is your aim, youll quickly find out what sells. Then you begin repeating
the same idea, and a once-creative person stops being creative. This is where the
genius that is inside all of us often dies. Instead of pursuing the art were capable
of making whatever that art may be we chase the badges of status that
substitute for inner security. We should all be creating for the sake of bringing
something into the world and not for what that idea will buy us.
One writer described Weygers as a man full of contrast: He is a little-known
sculptor of national repute who has acquired a dedicated following despite his
distaste for the hype of the gallery scene and the marketing of art as an
investment.
Paradoxically, when word of the enigmatic hyphenate living in a treehouse
spread during the mid-1960s, he became must-see. He opened his studio for
instruction in form theory, sculpture, and blacksmithing. Soon his home was an
oasis for the creatively inclined. Artists and thinkers the world over began making
annual pilgrimages to the Weygers property, sleeping at nearby campgrounds and
working on their feet 10 hours a day, all for the privilege of being in his presence.
Weygers would stand in the middle of his studio, his large, strong hands always in
motion, chopping the air to emphasize a thought, probing a chunk of local stone
carried up from the river, gripping a sledgehammer, tinkering with a piece of junk
and turning it into a humming machine. As they worked, Weygers would tell
stories, from the comical to the spellbinding to the profound. They spanned from
the wild jungles of Java to the streets of Chicago.
Despite his best efforts, it seemed Weygers destiny to belong to the world.
Weygers helped reveal to his students the voice hidden in the stone, the clarity of
thought that one feels in the ring of the anvil, and the validation that comes from
testing ones limitless spirit against the limits of the materials in ones own hands.
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One thing is for certain: they took more from him than they could ever use at the
forge.
Young people come here and seem to find something they are hungry for,
something they approve of, Weygers said. And I tell them, Never be in debt,
never harm anybody, and never be in (debt) to the government. That way nobody,
but nobody, will ever have a right to complain about you or to interfere with your
life. I tell them to simplify things find out how little they can get along with.
Then they can be free.
***
When Peter Partch first went to the Carmel Valley house, Weygers asked the
young man if he was part of the problem or the solution.
I dont remember what I told him, Partch said. But I think he saw in me an
intention to spend my life creating things. I think he saw a restlessness in me that
was also present in him, as well as others he liked. I think he knew I had a desire to
continually be moving forward and improving. To him, that was the solution.
Weygers was clearly satisfied with Partchs answer, as the young man became his
premier student and surrogate son.
The versatility of Alexs mind is still astonishing to me now, Partch said.
People liken him to an athlete who is equally outstanding at football, basketball,
and baseball. I say no, its not like he played all those games. Its like he invented
them.
Partch says its misguided to focus on Weygers aversion to commerce.
Alex didnt have extremist views at all, he said. He wasnt anti-money, anti-tax,
or anti-government, so long as that government functioned well. Alex simply
wanted to be around people who had a desire to create for the sake of creation,
irrespective of material gain. He wanted to be around people with an interest in
seeing ideas take flight.
Partch remembers that on that initial visit to the Weygers house, he happened upon
two framed drawings that seemed out of context with the rest. Whereas Weygers
other pieces were timeless, these two which looked like blueprint renderings
were futuristic. One was a drawing of an articulated flying saucer that looked very
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much like something from a science fiction novel. The other was a vision for the
Embarcadero in San Francisco, with different types of discs landing and lifting off
with the Golden Gate Bridge looming in the background.
In the lower-right corner of these drawings were the inscriptions AGW 1943.
To Partch, Weygers seemed to be a man in extraordinary commune with the earth.
He would never have guessed that for a period of his life, the thing Weygers
wanted most of all was to soar above it.
***
Twenty years into his remote existence, Weygers became famous despite his best
intentions. For the first time he was faced with the threat that he may have to pay
income tax. It was in the mid-1960s and two of his books -- The Making of Tools
and The Modern Blacksmith -- had helped save the art of blacksmithing from
extinction. Suddenly young students came from all over the world to meet the
master, see his shop, camp near his property, and study at his forge.
When you took his blacksmithing course, you were in for a week of hard work,
said Joseph Stevens, who traveled to Weygers property from Canada three times
in the 1970s. You were on your feet in his studio for 10-12 hours a day. He was a
great teacher very encouraging but he had high expectations. He wanted to
make progress every day, and he waited for no one.
At the end of each week, Weygers would finally invite his students into his home
for lunch.
There would be about a dozen of us, Stevens said. We would sit around this
magnificent, kidney-shaped, cantilevered table made from redwood that pivoted to
accommodate his guests. Wed eat food he and Marian grew in their garden, on
plates hed made on his forge.
It was a time when technology seemed to really be accelerating. But when you
were at their house, time really stood still. It could have been any time any
century, even.
Weygers thrived on the captive audience.
His stories were absolutely incredible, Partch said. He was enthralling.
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Weygers students describe those Friday sessions as having an orchestral quality.

He would start slowly, then build, build, build, said Polly Brumder, who came to
the Weygers home twice from Arizona for classes. Hed start by telling us about
the simple times when they first moved to Carmel Valley, living in a tent and
surviving by bartering leaf prints and bottle bells Marian made. One Christmas
they bartered some bottle bells for Scotch. He said, That was living the Cadillac
way we werent used to!
Then came the crescendo. With the room properly spellbound, Weygers would pull
out a well-preserved, leather-bound portfolio with his name and address printed in
the lower-right corner. From it he would remove a half-dozen photo-realistic
sketches and spread them out across the table.
The largest of the images was an artists visualization of San Franciscos
Embarcadero shoreline. Sleek, circular vehicles spun over a chunky, low-rise
cityscape. Tiny, one-person machines floated gently to their moorings atop
buildings. In the foreground, on a wide promenade jutting into San Francisco Bay,
a giant, trans-oceanic disc loaded passengers. In the background, mid-sized discs
whisked cargo above and beyond the Golden Gate Bridge.
The discs looked very much like the images from a dozen flying saucer B-movies.
But the drawings werent scary or menacing, Brumder said. They were
practical, purposeful. Alex would say, This is the first flying saucer.
The first time he showed it to me, it took me a second to realize that the reason he
was showing these drawings to us was because they were his drawings. Alex was
known as the guy who was one of the last masters of things like wood engraving
and blacksmithing trades that were nearly dead. It seemed impossible he could
also be responsible for something so much from the future. You wouldnt have
thought anyone could straddle two worlds like that.
With his plans displayed before them, Weygers would go on to tell them about
these incredible visions of the future from his long-gone past.
***
Alexander Weygers, a man born two years before Orville and Wilbur Wright took
to the air, had always had a fascination with flight.
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My belief was that man had copied the bird under the erroneous impression that
the most obvious way to fly is to copy the birds flight, he said. To me, it was as
impractical to make a plane like a bird as it would be to make an automobile look
like a horse or a motorcycle like a man.
Weygers first got the idea for his flying machine in 1927 when he was working as
a nautical engineer. The concept was inspired not by a bird, but a dolphin.
It was early one morning at sea when he observed with fascination a dolphin that
appeared to swim effortlessly in front of the ship.
He kept it up for at least 10 minutes, Weygers said. I asked myself, How could
the dolphin keep up that pace?
Putting his engineering training to work, Weygers soon had the answer. The
dolphin wasnt swimming at all. It was actually riding on a cushion of water. The
ship, as it moved through the ocean, pushed a wave of water ahead of it, and the
dolphin was riding that wave.
The idea of riding a wave lingered in Weygers brain, even as his life went through
an abrupt change. A shattered man after his wife died in childbirth in 1927, he
turned back to his first love: art. He gave up engineering, studied painting in
Holland, wood engraving in Paris, and sculpture in Italy. He apprenticed under the
great Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft, whose beauty is everywhere philosophy
appealed to him greatly.
Weygers eventually settled in Berkeley, renting a studio on Shattuck Ave. and
meeting Marian in a drawing class. It was the heart of the Great Depression and
artists even ones as skilled as Weygers often starved.
World War II came and Weygers with his native country of Indonesia occupied
by the Japanese and Holland conquered by Hitler volunteered for the Army in
1941. He knew that his family was in dire straits. His mother was dying in a
Japanese prison camp and his sister had already lost a leg to infection. His brother
managed to survive as a slave laborer in Thailand while building The Burma
Railway and bridges for the Japanese.
Desperate the help them, Weygers was told it was nearly impossible to access the
prison camps due to Javas rugged terrain. With this news, the flame for Weygers
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flying machine The Discopter was lit anew. World War II was the first all-out air
war, and there was a clear need to develop short or vertical take-off aircraft.
When he returned to the United States, Weygers joined Marian in Los Angeles,
where he wound up working for Northrup Aviation. The helicopter was just being
developed and Weygers was attracted to the project.
Instinctively Weygers realized that helicopters were highly vulnerable. They had
ungainly boxlike shapes and their exposed rotors were clearly a weak point.
There was a lot of interest in helicopters in those days, Weygers said. It seemed
to me they were doing it all wrong. It was like trying to convert a horse and buggy
into a car. Helicopters have a vulnerability that will never be improved. I thought,
there had to be a different, better way.
It also seemed to me the helicopter was an unfinished piece of engineering. You
cannot just lift it up. It must move like a pendulum, which makes it very limited in
use. I remembered back to the ship pushing the dolphin. I wondered, What would
happen if that pushing force were internalized like a jet? A ship like that could
become a fish of the air.
Weygers began working on his invention in earnest. He chose a circular shape for
the design, because as an artist and engineer, he liked the strength of the circle. To
him, the sea urchins body, which was built to withstand the pounding of waves of
the tidal region, seemed like the ultimate form. He wanted to create a craft with
such ideal weight distribution that it could land on terrain or sea. Its critical
machinery had to be hidden and be impervious to both enemies and weather.
Resembling an athletes discus, the circle provided a shape that could enclose the
crafts rotors. He envisioned a pilot sitting in a bubble-like pod above the main
disc. The rotors would be beneath the pilot at the top of an enclosed shaft.
The rotors would turn, sucking up huge quantities of air and then emitting an
enormous down force. The ship would rise on a wall of energized, concentrated
air, just as the dolphin rides on a wall of water. The shaft on which the rotors turn
was eliminated, instead turning around a whole central compartment, thereby
solving for the helicopters greatest weakness.
Weygers even conceived of a steering mechanism operated by a series of rings that
would slide into and out of the column of air being sucked up by the rotors. The
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rings would divert the force and direction of the air, allowing the machine to
maneuver.
The ships natural gyroscopic balance could be assisted with other stabilizers when
hauling cargo or shifting loads. Because the craft would essentially be a round
wing, Weygers felt that it could be made to fall like a leaf, backwards and
forwards, if the engines failed. He also designed small jets that would help in an
emergency.
It was around this time that fate intervened. Weygers Navy pilot friend was killed.
In his will, he bequeathed Alex his Carmel Valley acreage. He and Marian moved
to the property in 1942, ate the occasional possum, raccoon, or gopher, and kept
six hives of bees they caught on their property. They obtained manure for their
garden by offering to clean out other peoples stables, and subsisted on less than
$50 a month, which they obtained through the sale of driftwood arrangements and
prized honey.
Working in a tent situated on a property without electricity, Weygers completed his
Discopter design. In the summer of 1945, he received confirmation of his 18-yearold dream: Patent No. 2,377,835, the first flying saucer.
Weygers didnt just imagine the Discopter; he also created cityscapes shaped
around the concept. To him, the Discopter wasnt just an aircraft, but a vision of a
possible future. It was part of an entire ecosystem that lived in his minds eye.
One of his drawings, Discopter Port and Harbor Facilities, showed flying saucers
neatly parked atop every building on the San Francisco Embarcadero. Larger
Discopters at the waters edge contained promenade decks, bars, shuffleboard
facilities, and other amenities reminiscent of ocean liners.
He referred to the largest ships as Discopter Transoceanics, while the ones atop
the buildings were Discopter Transcontinentals, and so on down to the urban
workers single-cabin ships in the distance. Another drawing showed Discopter
tugs moving a cabin, built in town, to a remote foundation in a mountain retreat.
Weygers enclosed his plans in leatherbound portfolios and spent the remainder of
1945 sending them to the nations leading aircraft manufacturers.
In these presentations, Weygers pointed out that he realized the propulsion system
required to power the Discopter did not presently exist. Though there were no jet
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planes when he engineered his plans, his drawings featured a jet-powered

Discopter. Like Leonardo DaVincis winged ship, Weygers had created a flying
machine that could not yet fly.
In my patent application, he said, I realized there was no point in specifying the
source of power. I knew the technology needed wasnt available yet.
Weygers received polite No thank yous from several of the individuals who had
received his plans.
In April 1946, the Consolidated Vultee aircraft corporation sent him a letter that
read, It is the consensus that your invention is too advanced for the present day.
Obviously, a true analysis of an invention as revolutionary in its scopes as yours
would require far greater study and experimentation than can be afforded at this
time. We are advising you that its magnitude is beyond our present capacity.
Another large company sent Weygers a form letter asking him to sign over his
patent. When he refused, the firm sent his plans back, stamped Not opened.
Each time Weygers sent his designs to a manufacturer, he simply requested that
they be returned if the company was not interested. He mailed dozens of packages.
Only a handful came back.
***
Rejected and ignored, the Discopter seemed destined to fade away.
Then came 1947.
The first highly publicized sighting of an unidentified flying object came on June
24 of that year when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed he spotted a string of
nine shiny objects flying past Washingtons Mt. Rainier at speeds he clocked at
1,200 miles per hour. Although Arnold never specifically used the term flying
saucer, he was quoted at the time saying the shape of the objects he saw was like
a saucer, disc, or pie plate. Arnold described them as a series of objects with
convex shapes, though he later revealed that one object differed by being crescentshaped.
Newsweek was the first magazine to report a saucer outbreak. On July 14, 1947, the
magazines headline screamed, Flying Saucers: Spots Before Their Eyes? A
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week later, a Life magazine headline told the story of the summer: Flying Discs
Break Out Over U.S. By that fall, respected publications like Science Digest were
publishing long features on saucers, and the flying saucer craze was off and
roaring.
In the spring of 1950, the Monterey Peninsula Herald ran an article about a
working flying platform created by the Hiller Helicopter Company in nearby
Palo Alto. The next morning, Herald reporter Ritch Lovejoy received a phone call
from a Carmel Valley man who spoke in a voice chopped with a Dutch accent.
Twenty-seven years ago, the man said. I began working on an invention that
makes the flying platform look like a Model T.
Weygers invited Lovejoy to his property, where for the first time he revealed to the
media his vision for the Discopter. On April 13, the Herald splashed Weygers
Embarcadero drawing across its front page beneath a banner headline that read,
Carmel Valley Artist Patented Flying Saucer Five Years Ago: Discopter Patented
in 1945; May Be in Production.
In the story, Weygers implied that his designs may have been appropriated by
other manufacturers.
I am puzzled and surprised that no one has approached me, he said. I would be
happy to make it possible to use any of my ideas. Why they circumvent me, I do
not understand.
As for why he chose that moment in time to reveal his designs to the public,
Weygers said, There is no use to push an idea ahead of your time. The day comes
when a need is shown, a gap is made, and then the gap is filled. It might now be of
value to come out of hiding.
News of the Heralds story was picked up around the world. An Italian newspaper
wrote of Weygers City in the Air. Stateside, a front-page story in the Idaho
State Journal expressed skepticism over Weygers claims:
Weygers said his flying disc, which he calls a Discopter, was patented
(two) years before the first flying saucer report came out of the Northwest.
Weygers, a Dutch-born engineer and sculptor, admits his saucer is still in the
paper-design stage. He has never made a model of it. But the design, he
insists, is aeronautically sound.
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Blueprints show a craft that resembles a percolator top or a covered shallow

bowl with a bubble on top. The bubble would be the pilot's compartment,
which Weygers said could be enlarged for "unlimited passengers." Enclosed
in the circular metal frame or rim are gasoline engine-driven rotor blades,
similar to the rotors of a helicopter. The push of the rotor would propel
Weygers' craft just like the helicopter. The rotors and power-plant
compartments are enclosed in the Discopter, the designer said. The craft has
holes on its top through which air is drawn by the rotors, giving it the needed
thrust out of the bottom expulsion holes. Weygers said he believes jets can
be used in place of the rotors.
He said his design was rejected by at least one manufacturer as "too
advanced."
***
Weygers students would listen to his Discopter saga with mouths wide open.
At first youd think, This is outrageous, said Marty Oppenheimer, who studied
blacksmithing under Weygers in 1972. Then you looked around. His house and
studio were round. He told us at the beginning that he learned as a ships engineer
that a curve was the strongest shape. And then you looked at his sculpture around
the house. It was all low-relief with no protrusions exactly like the Discopter.
There was total continuity between his art and his science when you looked at it
the right way.
Weygers had been rejected by the establishment, then suffered the additional
indignity of watching from the sidelines as his concept consumed the global
consciousness. He explained to his students that hed retreated completely from the
fast-paced technological world. The future had caught up with him, and it was not
quite how hed once pictured it.
At first, I like a lot of people saw technology as a savior of civilization, he
said. Then I began seeing it as a mixed blessing, or at least more realistically.
Weygers did get some manner of satisfaction in 1984 when his waterfront drawing
and Discopter schematics were featured in a traveling Smithsonian Institution
exhibit called Yesterdays Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future.
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Weygers went to his death bed believing his design was simply too advanced for
the period. They told me I was too far ahead of my time, he said. But I thought,
An inventor always is, isnt he?
As it turns out, Weygers Discopter design might have been right on time.
Fifteen years after Weygers death, a document titled Project 1794 Final
Development Summary Report 30 May 1956 was declassified. The paper
described how in the 1950s, a small team of engineers set to work on a secret
program called Project 1794, which was a supersonic flying saucer.
There was a pervasive belief at the time that the Germans had developed some
form of saucer-like aircraft a belief that likely stemmed from stories and
newspaper articles that appeared in the early 1950s. The stories turned out to be
bogus, but they seemed reasonable. During World War II, Hitlers engineers had
outpaced the Allies on several forms of aeronautical aviation. Fearing that flyingdisc technology was being developed in Moscow, and worried that North America
might fall behind, the American military commissioned an aircraft that could take
off from primitive airfields to intercept Soviet long-range bombers.
The premise behind the Project 1794 which was shuttered when a prototype
failed wind-tunnel tests - was that engine exhaust could be routed across the
fuselage to the area just beneath the saucer, where it would form a cushion of air
on which the craft could hover.
In other words, Project 1794, which was pursued by a Canadian aviation firm
called Avro Canada, relied to a suspicious degree on science very much like that
which was detailed in Weygers Discopter patent.
Alex always existed on a higher plane, said his niece, Sheri Weygers Tromp. I
suppose the Discopter literally proved it.

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