My first attempt was made using the same setup as T. T. Brown describes in his letter to Rho Sigma1. The following diagram shows the setup for this attempt.
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There were two things wrong with this attempt.
The first was that the friction of the pulleys was too much for the device to cause the pulleys to turn. In other words, even if the device got lighter, since the amount it got lighter by was not enough to turn the pulleys, the device did not go up and the counterweight did not go down.
The second problem with this attempt lay with the aluminum foil contact plate and using this type of contact plate in general. Let's say the contact plate was to supply the positive voltage. The plate would be charged up positively, and the positive charge would move onto the contact wire. So now, both the plate and the contact wire were charged positively. Like-charges repel and that is exactly what the contact wire and the device it was attached to did. They repelled away from the contact plate thereby causing lateral movement and reduction in voltage reaching the device.
Due to these problems but mainly due to the first one, this approach was abandoned. That is not to say that this is not a viable approach if the problems could be worked out, just that I didn't have the requisite pulleys, so I moved on. This is in fact the approach the T. T. Brown used successfully.
