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The Secret of Life: Foreword by Michael H. Brown
In the late 18th century Alessandro Volta discovered the effect that electricity had on the leg of a dead frog. Volta also invented the storage battery, the device that we use in our cars and flashlights today. Volta's work with animal electricity (today called "electro-biology") earned him nothing but ridicule. He was often referred to as the "frog's dancing master."

The 19th century saw tremendous strides in the advancement of electrical knowledge. Almost all of the systems we use today for electrical production and transmission of power were developed then-oil-filled condensors, transformers, 3-phase power, and the rest. Nikola Tesla either invented or discovered most of these systems.

In the early 20th century Tesla invented a system of wireless telegraphy. A young Italian electrical engineering student, Marconi, then used Tesla's notes and took credit for the discovery.

Communications and power production adaptations of Tesla's works continued to proliferate. The effect of electrical current, voltages, and radio frequencies on living organisms continued to be largely ignored by all but a handful of engineers and medical doctors. Nikola Tesla was one of those engineers.

Another one of those handful of electrical engineers was a Russian emigrant living in Paris in the 1920s, Georges Lakhovsky. Lakhovsky compiled his observations about the effect of electricity and radio waves on living organisms in this book, which he first published in 1935. Many of Lakhovsky's theories were subsequently confirmed in The Body Electric by Becker and Selden, published in 1987.

Lakhovsky also built a device he called a Multiple Wave Oscillator. The purpose of this device, a very short-range high voltage transmitter that broadcast a multiplicity of frequencies at once, was to induce currents and voltages of very high frequency into living organisms for the treatment of disease. At least, that's what it was supposed to do. Lakhovsky's first units simply didn't work.

In 1931 a thoroughly frustrated Lakhovsky asked Nikola Tesla for help. Tesla journeyed to Paris that year and appeared to rework all the circuitry in Lakhovsky's oscillator.

Ten years later Lakhovsky traveled to New York to visit his friend Tesla. Lakhovsky was hit by a limousine and knocked high into the air. The three men in the limousine took Lakhovsky to a hospital against his emphatic demands to be left alone. Three days later Lakhovsky died in the hospital.

Shortly before his death in 1942, Tesla showed a young OSS officer how to make what he, Tesla, called the Lakhovsky oscillator. This same OSS officer, now retired, showed one other person how to build the Lakhovsky oscillator-who in turn showed an electrical engineer.

Once the electrical engineer got a hold of the prints and a huge set of books titled Nikola Tesla: Lectures, Patents, Articles, evidence began to surface that the Lakhovsky oscillator was, in fact, the creation of Nikola Tesla.

One of Tesla's articles in the two-volume set was titled "High Frequency Oscillators for Electro-Therapeutic and Other Purposes." The article was one Tesla had read to the 8th annual meeting of the American Electro-Therapeutic Association at their meeting in Buffalo, New York, on Sept. 13 to 15, 1898. What intrigued the electrical engineer was that the circuits described, including the illustrations, were identical to those in the Lakhovsky device-over 30 years before Lakhovsky, with Tesla's help, got his device to work.

Nikola Tesla may have been a much more modest and unassuming man than anyone has ever suspected. When he was informed that Marconi had used his work, Tesla merely smiled. When George Westinghouse told Tesla a contract they had signed, worth millions to Tesla, would ruin him (Westinghouse), Tesla merely smiled, tore up the contract, and dumped it in his wastebasket. Did Tesla simply install the circuitry he had developed decades before into Lakhovsky's machine and then allow Lakhovsky to take credit for the design?

The evidence in that article in that set of books indicates that this is exactly what happened. However, we will never know for sure.

A picture from The Secret of Life of Lakhovsky's Multiple Wave Oscillator

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Read part of the Epilogue to The Secret of Life

In the nineteenth century many traveling salesmen peddled what we now laughingly refer to as "snake oil" or "patent" remedies. Wagonloads of this stuff were snapped up by desperate people untrained in medicine or chemistry. Most of the time what they got was simply syrup laced with alcohol. Occasionally a legitimate herbalist came along and actually did do people some good.

Today the "snake oil" salesmen once again threaten to engulf legitimate scientists and researchers. This time the "snake oil" salesmen are peddling a plethora of electronic devices that, while often snapped up by a gullible public, are simply objects of amusement to those trained in electronics.

How do you tell the difference between today's "snake oil machines" and devices-such as the Russian LIDA (a 40 MHz transmitter that acts as an electronic tranquilizer and stress reliever)-that actually do what they're supposed to do? It's not hard if you apply a few basic yardsticks.

First, "frequency" is a somewhat meaningless term for most people. For example, 60 Hz is the frequency that the generators in our public utilities use to deliver power to us. "60 Hz" simply means that if you had a bar magnet rotating past two magnets-a north and a south-fastened to the inside of a drum (a moving magnetic field creates electricity) every time the bar magnet, assuming it revolves 60 times in one second, creates "60 Hertz" of frequency. A generator would then have to revolve at 3,600 rpm (60 times 60 seconds) to put out 60 Hz of AC (alternating current) power. Put in two bar magnets and four opposing magnets ("poles" or "fields") and the generator only has to turn at 1,800 rpm.

Second, you have to understand the difference between electricity and electronics. Electricity is the production and transmission of power, via generators, transformers, or power lines. Electronics is the transmission of information over the airwaves. The confusion is understandable since, while the information is transmitted via the air, the incoming signals must be amplified by devices powered by electricity for us to be able to retrieve them.

Third, all electronic transmission must be from a transmitter to a receiver. In order for a transmitter to transmit, or a receiver to receive it, it must have an antenna. And this is how you eliminate the "snake oil" salesmen and recognize them for what they are. Antennas must be certain lengths to transmit certain frequencies. The higher the frequency, the shorter the antenna. The lower the frequency, the longer the antenna.

For example, let's say you wanted to transmit or receive a frequency of 195 MHz (195 million Hertz, or cycles per second). You would simply take the speed of light in meters, or 3 x 108 ( 8 meaning 8 more zeros) and divide it by 195 MHz (195 x 106). Your quotient would be 1.5 meters. Your antenna would then have to be 1.5 meters (quarter wave). A wave is simply the sine wave you see on an oscilloscope, representing one complete rotation of the bar magnet in the drum.

You can transpose the antenna length (full wave only) measurement with the frequency to solve for frequency if you have the antenna length and not the frequency. For example, if you have an antenna that is 10 meters long, your frequency would be 30 MHz. This may sound terribly complicated. However, all you have to do is press the buttons on a pocket calculator.

Which brings us to the plethora of devices that purport to operate at extremely low frequencies that are "good" for you. Let's apply the formula. Let's take a device claiming to transmit at 10 Hz, for instance. The speed of light divided by 10 Hz equals 30 million meters. Even with a quarter wave antenna we still need a 7½ million-meter antenna to transmit this frequency through the atmosphere. Our Navy manages to transmit a 75 Hz frequency to our submarines but has to use a 768-mile long quarter-wave antenna in Wisconsin to do it.

All this device does is act as a "beeper." The submarine still has to surface to get its messages from a satellite. The longer a radio wave is, the less information it will carry. Long waves will follow the earth's curvature; shorter waves go in a straight line.

Which makes me a little skeptical of machines that claim to broadcast such low frequencies. If you really wanted to dose yourself with such low frequencies, you could simply set up a transformer and use a frequency divider. You should also be able to measure the output on an oscilloscope.

A lot of so-called "Rife machines" and the like are merely transformers. It's easy to determine if the device is a transformer, as opposed to a transmitter. When using the device, if you have to make physical contact with it, it is a transformer. It won't have an antenna. Your basic transformer is simply an iron doughnut or hollow square with copper wire wrapped around each side. For example, a 120-volt electrical outlet can provide 240-volts simply be wrapping twice as much copper wire around one end of the iron doughnut as the other. Of course, your amperage will be cut in half. Turn the transformer around and you double your amperage but halve the voltage. In short, a lot of these gizmos are the technological equivalent of an electric blanket and frequency divider (or multiplier) from Radio Shack.

However, as Robert Beck points out in THE BODY ELECTRIC, people living next to transformers have a 22% higher incidence of suicide. In one study 693 out of 700 people working around transformers developed nervous disorders.