If dealing with all the problems of rockets, liquid fuels, payload ratios, aerodynamics, orbital mechanics and all that sort of thing seems too time consuming and messy, then why not take the easy route, chuck all those annoying laws of physics out the window and opt for anti-gravity.  No muss, no fuss, no tedious engineering; just flip a switch and off you go.

H. G. Wells first introduced the idea of an anti-gravity spaceship in his novel The First Men in the Moon in 1901, where a Dr. Cavor invents a substance that is impervious to gravity the same way that a window curtain is impervious to light.  By building a ship with roll-up screens painted with this "cavorite" our heroes are able to leave the Earth and navigate to the Moon by playing with the gravitational attraction of the two worlds.

Wells never took cavorite seriously.  To him it was merely a convenient literary device to get his characters into the story quickly and plausibly.  However, that didn't stop the ever-optimistic Hugo Gernsback from predicting in 1921 that the way to get into space was with a spherical spaceship equipped with an "electrostatic" anti-gravity drive. 

Gravity is actually an inherent property of mass that operates by curving space and in order to produce anti-gravity you would have to produce a negative curve in space and that means producing some sort of negative mass.  How an electrostatic field is supposed to achieve such an impossibility was something that Mr. Gernsback didn't dwell on much, but the steel landing belt around the machine's equator indicates that perhaps the design still had a few bugs to be worked out, so a note of caution was in order.

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