Orgone

I attended a concert this week–on a Tuesday! It was great, but not the point. The point is that, upon returning to my car, I found this mamajamma:

Now that is some tight ad copy. Eternal optimism and increases gas mileage! It got me to thinking–how have I not covered orgone on my blog yet??

So let’s start with a basic history lesson. Orgone is the fantasy of one Willhelm Reich, born in what would today be called Ukraine and later migrated to the U.S. He founded an Institute and was later shut down by the FDA for making unsupportable medical claims. The whole idea is that there is energy field that surrounds everything, and that you can manipulate that force to do things like control the weather–or apparently increase your car’s performance! Since today is May the Fourth, you can think of it like the Force, but sexier.

Reich even invited Einstein to evaluate his ideas. Einstein apparently did take a look, but thought it was bullshit and told him to stop calling.

After it fizzled in the U.S., pseudo-scientists in Germany apparently took up the banner and kept the dream alive. It has been on the fringe of wingnuttery in the past decades but apparently still has its adherents.

But what of the patents? Not much has been done in the United States, but there have been attempts in Europe to secure orgone-related patents. One example is this Slovenian patent for an orgone-irradiated bottle:

The idea is that you blast a glass bottle with orgone, which gets retained in the silicon of the glass somehow and then conveys healing properties to water contained inside. Those wavy lines are not just a design feature! In particular, they’re supposed to evoke a woman’s body, which I guess helps? In the inventor’s own words:

The beneficial thoughts stimulated by the look at the shape of the female body, which are apparently shaped by vertical recesses (4), represent at the same time the positive transfer of the force from our energy field to the bottle and through it to the medium in it, such as water can be.

SI 23318, translated by Google

Another example is this device for use in bione or orgone therapy:

The device is basically a patch of rubber or plastic that you stick onto your skin. The material of the patch has “enriched” quartz dust mixed into it, which was zapped with UV light at some point and which, I guess, emits orgone? This application was rejected on the basis that quartz can’t be “enriched” and that the specification doesn’t enable any such thing. My German is a little rusty, but it looks like they appealed the rejection multiple times before they gave up.

In the end, orgone is just one example of a whole category of goofy “energies” that people have claimed to use for healing. It isn’t surprising that the 19th and 20th centuries were overrun with these theories, given how weird the actual science that people were actually discovering was. Invisible rays that control the weather doesn’t sound too implausbile when you’ve just learned about magnets and X-rays.

Anyway, for your viewing pleasure, here’s my favorite product from Miracle Miles’s website, the Orgone Nexus Zapper:

I provide this solely for the purpose of amusement. Please don’t buy anything from his site. I will never forgive you if you do.