09) The Oscilloclast
There are elements of Abrams invention, the Reflexophone; the use of simple materials, clear headed observation and the willingness to creatively explore possibilities through experimentation, that eerily parallel the discovery of radio. (A brief description of how a crystal radio is designed appears in the appendix, for those readers who are curious to explore the parallels.) In the case of Radionics, the essence of the discovery was denied institutional scientific research. Largely, to this day, it remains in the hands of talented healers and inventors.
Abrams could have stopped here. He could have spent much of his fortune and talent coaxing this knowledge of a strange biological radiation onto a mainstream science that was not at that time as thoroughly mechanistic and deterministic as it is today. But this was not to be the case.
Abrams was not only brilliant and endowed with the stamina of an iconoclast; he was also rich. He had the means to pursue his research and discoveries without the need to justify it to anyone. He didn’t have a shrewd publicist to constrain his exuberance, or a board of directors to answer to for his pay. His freedom accelerated his work, but also brought with it envy and a cruel and debilitating professional skepticism.
Abrams also made some crucial professional miscalculations that considerably weakened his scientific objectivity. One of those was in unwisely popularizing the mysterious attributes of this radiation that he discovered doing oddball experiments for fun and relaxation. In a book titled, New Concepts dozens of off hand and spurious observations were offered by Abrams that made his discoveries seem like more of a parapsychological side show than a serious professional undertaking. All the controversy aroused by Abrams’ extensive publicity cast every person he helped and each new invention he discovered in a surreal light that did not endear him to his conservative profession.
The next critical turning point for Radionics occurred when Abrams obtained clear and reliable readings on his resistance box from a drop of blood. Suddenly he had an entirely new way of diagnosing the individual patient. No longer was it even necessary to visit his office in person. At that time, the early 1900’s, Abrams and his colleagues were unaware that a drop of blood contained a blueprint of the individual’s entire genetic makeup in the form of DNA. The world was decades away from that discovery. Likewise, they could not have fathomed that cells emits measurable radiation in the form of light. *We have discovered this much and more since Abram’s empirical quest first instrumentally probed biological radiation.
At the time however, the mysterious manner by which blood seemed to yield up personal information to a strange instrument had a sinister quality to it. Images of voodoo and the occult came to mind. The more exotic Abrams’ pronouncements were, the more dogmatic he became about their authenticity, the louder the ridicule became and the more his credibility suffered. This began a media circus around Radionics that went on for decades. It also functioned to distract public awareness from the diligent experimentation Abrams had done and the fascinating discoveries that emerged from it.
The reality was that Abrams was referring to the mysterious radiations he was detecting as “energy provided by thought.” In other instances, he would make equally cryptic statements like “Psychic energy passes through metal and all other media thus far tried.” By leaning towards a psychical interpretation of his data, Abrams was guiding Radionics outside mainstream science and into Parapsychology. The result was an inevitable conundrum; one could not adequately study the radiation scientifically because it was in part or in whole a product of the consciousness used to study it!
Regardless, Abrams was able to obtain usable medical information by placing the blood sample, now referred to as the "witness" of the patient, into the ‘well’ of a homemade condenser. Again, he chose to give an ordinary electrical component a peculiar name: the ‘Dynamiser.’ Radionics writer Edward Russell, in REPORT ON RADIONICS describes its construction:
"It was a circular container made of hard rubber about three inches in diameter in the base of which were two electrodes connected to earth. The lid was formed of discs of aluminum with layers of mica between. A wire from the lid was connected to the resistance-box to another wire connected to a pointed electrode with which the patient or an assistant could determine the precise location of the disease.
"Abrams found that the 'Dynamiser' intensified the reactions. These could be made more clear and definite if the Subject stood on two grounded aluminum plates." This discovery proved beneficial in that it eliminated the necessity of having the patient wait while the doctor completed the diagnosis by percussing the Subject.
Just how significant was Abram’s approach to the diagnosis and treatment of disease based upon the energetic vibrations or frequencies of tissue, both healthy and diseased? Consider the words of Dr. Francis Cave, in an article about Abrams written for Pearson’s Magazine in 1922:
“How can vibrations destroy disease? Everything in nature has its natural period or rate of vibration. If one approaches an object with a source of vibration of the same vibratory as itself, the object will also be set in vibration-as shown by the response of the harp to the tuning fork. This forced vibration of the object may attain such magnitude as to fracture or destroy it, and it makes no difference whatever whether the source be a chemical, a pigment, a ray of light, an electrical current, or some other thing yielding the same vibratory rate.
“This brief statement contains in concentrated form practically the entire therapeutic philosophy of Abrams. Prolonged demonstration is proving to be absolutely fundamental and the first successful effort to deal with medical problems on a purely mathematical basis. Disease is merely the expression of a vibratory rate. If this vibratory rate can be measured, something can be found with a similar vibratory rate which can be imposed upon it and destroy it, thereby to a large extent proving the correctness of the Hahnemannian principle of “Simila Similibus Curantur.”
“If we can make it impossible for the vibratory rate of disease to exist, the disease itself cannot exist. Abrams has shown the world not only how to measure out the vibratory rate of disease, but also how to measure out its virulence, a thing which is not possible with any other method known to me. When these things are ascertained, and the application of his therapeutic reasoning is made, the disappearance of the disease is a practical certainty.
“Here is the basis for all therapeutic systems, whether allopathic, homeopathic, osteopathic, or mental. The vibratory rate of the diseased organ or tissue must be changed or recovery cannot ensue. Just how this change is successfully made by the different schools of practice could readily be determined by the application of this process of reasoning to there respective problems. The rise and fall of therapeutic systems and schools of medicine will hereafter be determined by the degree of their acceptance and application of the basic electronic principles and practices first enunciated by that scientist and humanitarian, Dr. Albert Abrams, of San Francisco. He has been the first to supply a definite yardstick by which all other methods can and must eventually be measured.”
In Abrams' era, the term “electronic” had much more of a mysterious connotation to it than it does today; it was far more like the term “psychic energy”. It is important to remember that the vacuum tube had only been invented shortly before, in 1905 and not turned into an amplifier until much later.
The public "mystification" of Radionics began with the idea that alone Abrams' "Black Box" could heal a person of disease. This distortion of fact was in part due to an interesting discovery Abrams made shortly thereafter. When Abrams tested the blood of a malaria patient together with a few drops of quinine, he could obtain no reaction at all on the Subject. The tests suggested to him that “radiations” of the quinine were able to cancel out the “radiations” of the malaria.
Abrams was fortunate enough to hire the very best engineers available to design his variable resistance instrumentation. He reasoned that since all matter was electrical in nature, the specific radiations of the diseased tissue might be energetically reversed and the disease thereby cancelled out.
What Abrams was able to do was obtain the most accurate variable-resistance boxes money could buy. They were so sensitive that some critics contended that his measurements could be due to some variable inductance from the resistance coils themselves. It is a shame that more information about how this criticism was addressed is not better documented.
While a great deal of patient research and good fortune enabled Abrams to carry his early diagnostic work forward, it was tragedy that pushed him to develop an instrument to cure. His Radioscope and Dynamiser had allowed Abrams to calculate both the intensity and the location of a disease. He also discovered that he could detect the existence and severity of a disease long before it took on a physical manifestation. For ten years Dr. Abrams watched in growing horror and desperation as his wife developed and ultimately died from an inoperable form of cancer which he had detected long before it ever appeared in her body.
Stimulated by the painful conundrum of having discovered a revolutionary diagnostic technology which could detect disease but not cure it, Abrams determined to find a solution. To this end, he retained and collaborated with an inventor named Samuel Hoffman. The result was a piece of equipment known as the “Oscilloclast”. The year was 1919.
The Oscilloclast was basically an electrical device designed to subject the patient to a negative electrical charge with radio-frequency electromagnetic pulses in between. A resistance box with different settings for adjusting and controlling the treatment "rates" of the patient was placed in circuit between the Oscilloclast and the electrode attached to the forehead of the "subject". A technical writer of the time (unknown) described it thus:
“Today’s tube Oscilloclast belongs to a class of electrically operated devices known as short-wave treatment instruments. Such instruments are divided broadly into high power and low power devices. The Oscilloclast belongs to the low power class. It differs from the conventional low power devices in that it produces three kinds of energy. One kind is the usual short wave; another kind is an impulse excited damped wave and the third kind is an alternating magnetic energy. All of these energies are of low power and, it is thought, act to help the body overcome pathology and restore normalcy in the tissues by utilizing characteristics of the low power energies themselves rather than to produce heat in the tissues.
“The continuous waves are chopped up into short wave trains without changing the frequency or heights of the waves. This kind of chopping up continuous waves is done to produce dots and dashes in the receivers in radiotelegraphy. The high frequency waves in radiotelephony are not chopped up into short-wave trains as in radiotelegraphy but the broadcasting oscillators are so controlled that their high frequency waves have different intensities or heights. If a line is drawn so that it touches the tops of all of the high frequency waves it will describe a waveform with the waves much longer than the high frequency waves. The high frequency waves are called carrier waves and the longer ones are called modulated waves.”
Treatment could be up to an hour in duration, during which nothing was felt by the patient. It is interesting to note the writer’s observation about how the wave train of signals generated by the device occurred in a digital dot to dash formation used in electrical communications (Morse code). The electrical waves may in fact be carrier waves for the biological information, dependent upon the intent focused upon it by the operator.
As Abrams progressed with his discoveries, more and more it became apparent to adherents and critics alike that some form of Information to Energy conversion was taking place. The information component of the disease was solicited by the doctor by applying percussion to the patient. That information was energetically transmitted along an electric wire to the instrument, where it became information again, but in a more precise form. Likewise, in treatment, the correct healing information was sent back by the Oscilloclast to the patient as radio pulses, triggering the body to heal itself. The whole process was semiotic, a theme we will return to in later chapters.
In point of fact, the Oscilloclast was a very well thought out and built medical device. It may have inadvertently taken advantage of a psychic process inherent in healing itself, but it was designed for reliable, mechanical dependability by any physician trained in its use. Dr. Abrams and other physicians cured many people that had given up all hope with the Oscilloclast. Could they have gained such notoriety had these devices not performed as advertised? To allow the reader to further judge this for himself, we have included several technically oriented papers and commentaries on the Oscilloclast treatments in the appendix.
It is important to the understanding of the technology of Radionics to see how it progressed from a remarkable medical discovery praised by many scientifically trained medical men into a system with much in common with shamanic healing. For understanding the artistic and design potential of Radionics, both methods offer intriguing possibilities.
It is hard to visualize exactly what is being described in a Radionic treatment. Fortunately, we have obtained an article published in Pearson's Magazine in June of 1922 that greatly helps in that regard. Through renowned American writer Upton Sinclair, (courtesy of Borderlands Research Foundation), we have a first hand glimpse into Dr. Abrams’ clinic. (We also include Sinclair's response to the American Medical Association, which had criticized both this article in particular and Abrams' discoveries in general, in the appendix.) The AMA's curt follow up reply to Mr. Sinclair follows.
