The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life

Product Information

In the 4th and most speculative category, Firstenberg believes all life is part of a global electric circuit and that the ongoing launch of (eventually) thousands of SpaceX Starlink satellites (with pulsing EMF) into the ionosphere, which are meant to provide internet access to the entire world, will disrupt this natural circuit, and END all life on this planet! After more than half a century of unceasing popularity, electrotherapy fell temporarily out of favor during the early 1800s in reaction to certain cults, one of which had grown up in Europe around Anton Mesmer and his so-called magnetic healing, and another in America around Elisha Perkins and his electric tractors—three-inch-long metallic pencils with which one made passes over a diseased part of the body. Neither man used actual magnets or electricity at all, but they gave both those methods, for a while, a bad name. By mid-century electricity was again mainstream, and in the 1880s ten thousand American physicians were administering it to their patients. A book which provides compelling evidence for how electricity causes many health problems, including anxiety, flu, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc. Most of these conditions were never heard of or extremely rare before electricity. After you were thus bathed, the machine would be stopped and you might be treated with the electric wind. Electricity discharges most easily from pointed conductors. Therefore a grounded, pointed metal or wooden wand would be brought toward your painful knee and you would again feel very little—perhaps the sensation of a small breeze as the charge that had built up in your body slowly dissipated through your knee into the grounded wand. What can be done? Sadly, not much except to stop “progress.” But if progress is killing us by making a huge percentage of population ill, is it worth it?

Line engraving c. 1750, reproduced in Jürgen Teichmann, Vom Bernstein zum Elektron, Deutsches Museum 1982 At the end of the twentieth century came the beginning of the wireless era and the establishment of the High Frequency Auroral Research Program (HAARP). Firstenberg describes the environmental effects of these two technological developments in depth. He brings together history, epidemiology, and cutting edge science, but he does much more. He goes to the heart of his subject, documenting the path that led to the public health crises we are facing today.

Influenza, in its present form, was invented in 1889, along with alternating current. It is with us always, like a familiar guest—so familiar that we have forgotten that it wasn’t always so. Many of the doctors who were flooded with the disease in 1889 had never seen a case before. ONCE UPON A TIME, the rainbow visible in the sky after a storm represented all the colors there were. Our earth was designed that way. We have a blanket of air above us that absorbs the higher ultraviolets, together with all of the X-rays and gamma rays from space. Most of the longer waves, that we use today for radio communication, were once absent as well. Or rather, they were there in infinitesimal amounts. They came to us from the sun and stars but with energies that were a trillion times weaker than the light that also came from the heavens. So weak were the cosmic radio waves that they would have been invisible, and so life never developed organs that could see them. Firstenberg is a pioneer in the sense that Rachel Carson was a pioneer.” —Chellis Glendinning, PhD, author of When Technology Wounds

In the end, the power of this book lies in the meticulous care with which the author has done his research, corroborated his data and revealed his stunning findings. From their experiences Winkler took away the lesson that electricity was not to be inflicted upon the living. And so he converted his machine into a great beacon of warning. I read in the newspapers from Berlin, he wrote, that they had tried these electrical flashes upon a bird, and had made it suffer great pain thereby. I did not repeat this experiment; for I think it wrong to give such pain to living creatures. He therefore wrapped an iron chain around the bottle, leading to a piece of metal underneath the gun barrel. When then the electrification is made, he continued, the sparks that fly from the pipe upon the metal are so large and so strong, that they can be seen (even in the day time) and heard at the distance of fifty yards. They represent a beam of lightning, of a clear and compact line of fire; and they give a sound that frightens the people that hear it. The even longer waves, the low-frequency pulsations given off by lightning, are also invisible. When lightning flashes, it momentarily fills the air with them, but they are almost gone in an instant; their echo, reverberating around the world, is roughly ten billion times weaker than the light from the sun. We never evolved organs to see this either. Imagine you were a patient in 1750 suffering from arthritis. Your electrician would seat you in a chair that had glass legs so that it was well insulated from the ground. This was done so that when you were connected to the friction machine, you would accumulate the electric fluid in your body instead of draining it into the earth. Depending on the philosophy of your electrician, the severity of your disease, and your own tolerance for electricity, there were a number of ways to electrize you. In the electric bath, which was the most gentle, you would simply hold in your hand a rod connected to the prime conductor, and the machine would be cranked continuously for minutes or hours, communicating its charge throughout your body and creating an electrical aura around you. If this was done gently enough, you would feel nothing—just as a person who shuffles their feet on a carpet can accumulate a charge on their body without being aware of it. Its inventors were not the only ones who tried to warn the public. Johann Heinrich Winkler, professor of Greek and Latin at Leipzig, Germany, tried the experiment as soon as he heard about it. I found great convulsions in my body, he wrote to a friend in London. It put my blood into great agitation; so that I was afraid of an ardent fever; and was obliged to use refrigerating medicines. I felt a heaviness in my head, as if I had a stone lying upon it. It gave me twice a bleeding at my nose, to which I am not inclined. My wife, who had only received the electrical flash twice, found herself so weak after it, that she could hardly walk. A week after, she received only once the electrical flash; a few minutes after it she bled at the nose.

A sensation of sight was just as easily elicited, by four different methods, using the same one-volt battery: by applying the silver armature on one moistened eyelid and the zinc on the other; or one in a nostril and the other on an eye; or one on the tongue and one on an eye; or even one on the tongue and one against the upper gums. In each case, at the moment the two metals touched each other, Humboldt saw a flash of light. If he repeated the experiment too many times, his eyes became inflamed. Prior to 1889, for example, we learn that influenza epidemics occurred not annually but years or decades apart and were highly correlated with sunspots, and that the 1889 pandemic of influenza, which altered that pattern occurred in the exact year the widespread use of alternating current began. Consider that today we are accustomed to handling nine-volt batteries with our hands without a thought. Consider that millions of us are walking around with silver and zinc, as well as gold, copper, and other metals in the fillings in our mouths. Then consider the following experiment of Humboldt’s, using a single piece of zinc, and one of silver, that produced an electric tension of about a volt:

Similarly, the Van Allen belts that protect us from cosmic rays have already been altered by our electrical activity – and it may be that these double belts were originally only a single belt which, under the influence of the human emission of electric charges into space, has been depleted at its centre. Few other scientists made any attempt to explain the differences. They simply reported them as fact—a fact as ordinary as that some people are fat and some thin, some tall and some short—but a fact that one had to take into account if one were going to offer electricity as a treatment, or otherwise expose people to it. If this kind of insight stimulates more interest please allow me to introduce you to: Royal Rife, Georges Lakhovsky, Elmer Nemes, Nikola Tesla, Steven A. Ross Few individuals today are able to grasp the entirety of a scientific subject and present it in a highly engaging manner, in plain English, without losing any of the details. In The Invisible Rainbow, Firstenberg has done just that with one of the most pressing but neglected problems of our technological age. This book, which as a medical doctor I found hard to put down, explores the relationship between electricity and life from beginning to end: from the early eighteenth century to today, and from the point of view of the physician, the physicist, and the average person in the street. Firstenberg makes a compelling case that the major diseases of civilization—heart disease, diabetes, and cancer—are in large part related to the pollution of our world by electricity.” —Bradley Johnson, MD, Amen Clinic, San Francisco

Customer reviews

Jennifer is the originator of the GROW Village for Refuge from EMR, a concept which is yet to be realized in the wake of total global WiFi currently being built and deployed from space, leaving no square inch of earth uncovered by microwave/RF radiation. Johannes Mygge noticed that his migraines almost always happened “on the day of, or one day before, a sudden severe rise or drop in the value of the atmospheric voltage” (83). In The Invisible Rainbow , Firstenberg traces the history of electricity from the early eighteenth century to the present, making a compelling case that many environmental problems, as well as the major diseases of industrialized civilization--heart disease, diabetes, and cancer--are related to electrical pollution. Firstenberg's 'Invisible Rainbow', in addition to being a fascinating read from a historical perspective, is much more than a mere telling of the history of electricity. Stunning in it's scope, it constitutes an absolutely devastating, paradigm-shattering critique of man's obsession with modern technology, right up there with Jerry Mander's 'In the Absence Of the Sacred'. Aside from attempting to cure deafness, blindness, and other diseases, early electricians were intensely interested in whether electricity could be directly perceived by the five senses—another question about which modern engineers have no interest, and modern doctors have no knowledge, but whose answer is relevant to every modern person who suffers from electrical sensitivity.