"I am very pleased to be able to report to you that within the week, and after 39 years of work, I have discovered a very important clue that may throw light upon the nature of cycles. To explain all of this I must go back a little in time.
Although cycles come in all lengths (periods) from a fraction of a second to millions of years, interdisciplinary cycles, in which we are interested, come mostly in lengths measured in days, months, and years. For example: 40 months, 5.9 years, 11 years, 54 years, etc. .In 1964 we published Volume I of the Catalog of Cycles (economics) which listed some 1404 cycles lengths and we can also show allegations of many more cycles in other disciplines. Using as source material all those cycles, I then discarded (1) all lengths under 4 years (for simplicity), (2) all lengths of which we had fewer than 3 cycles (to eliminate randoms), and (3) all cycles of which the average phase (timing) had not been determined. This left 301 cycles.
I found that all 301 such cycles could be grouped into 19 what we might call "master cycles," Consequently, I made 19 lists. (See report in Cycles of August 1970.) When these 19 lists were analyzed I found that the crests of all the cycles in all but two of these lists tended to cluster or bunch or synchronize. That is, all 6-year cycles (for example) tended to come at about the same time; all the 9.2-year cycles tended to cluster at their own time — a different time — and so on! This, I think, was the most important single discovery in the first 33 years of work. Nineteen different "somethings" seemed to be influencing all 301 phenomena. What were they?
The thing that I hit upon last week was that all but one of those 19 lengths had lengths that wore multiples of the orbital period of Earth or were unit fraction of the orbital periods of one or another of the five outer planets! For example, the 5.9-year length (of which we have 12 examples) was 1/5 of the orbital period of Saturn (29.48 years), the 9.2-year length (of which we have 30 examples was 1/18 of the orbital period of Neptune (164.7 years), the 9.5-year length (of which we have 40 examples) was 1/9 of the orbital period of Uranus (84.02 years), and so on. One could, by accident, get two or three such correspondences, but to get 18 such correspondences by accident would be "impossible."
These correspondences are extremely provocative. They suggest a line of research that will keep us busy for many years.... If the indications hold up, we have discovered what may be a new source of energy that triggers the ups and downs of animal abundance, weather, earthquakes, business failures, international war, Java tree rings, sugar prices, wheat acreage, common stock, immigration, etc., etc."
– Edward R. Dewey – April 11th, 1976 – Letter to a board member.
