Adventures in the Orgasmatron (38 page)

Though you sat in it alone, Reich’s orgone energy accumulator had certain parallels with the
baquet
. (For his most aristocratic patients, who included Marie Antoinette, Mesmer supplied miniature versions of his famous tubs so that they could take private baths in their own homes.) Reich was disillusioned by the ability of psychoanalysis to treat only one patient on the couch at a time and, after a radical attempt to take psychoanalysis to the “sickbed of society” by instituting a series of free and public clinics, he invented the orgone accumulator as a sort of psychoanalysis machine, with which he hoped more easily to achieve his messianic hopes for social change. Though Reich’s psychoanalytically informed sexual theories were incredibly modern, even his supporters acknowledged that as a scientist he was a throwback to the eighteenth century. William Burroughs compared the orgone accumulator to a Leyden jar, and the legendary anarchist Paul Goodman, who was one of Reich’s most enthusiastic American promoters, compared Reich to Alessandro Volta, who had created the first battery by wrapping metal rods in wet rags, “a device as primitive as Reich’s box.”
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Reich thought that when you sat in his box naked (as he advised), enveloped by orgone energy, a reaction was precipitated between its concentrated orgone system—three to five times as strong as in the open air—and the orgone in one’s own body. He called this vibrant interaction “orgonotic lumination” and compared it to the fusion of energy systems in sexual contact, or when an infant is at the breast.
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We were dealing, Reich asserted, with a “sexual energy,” and—though he would later downplay this when his box became the object of controversy, preferring to emphasize its general health benefits—he claimed that you could feel “sexual excitation” when charged up by the machine.
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“It was put in the basement,” Ilse Ollendorff recalled of being shut in the box, “and I remember the excitement when we all took turns sitting in it and, upon having our temperatures taken, saw Reich’s prediction of a rise in temperature come true.”
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(It wasn’t that the machine functioned as a sweatbox; the temperature rise was recorded even in an empty accumulator.) Reich also discovered that experimental subjects got a salty taste when they put their tongue an inch or so from the interior walls of the box and that they felt a prickling and warmth when they did the same with their palms; they experienced nausea and dizziness if they stayed in too long, for which Reich simply prescribed fresh air. This time limit varied; for repressed, “sluggish individuals” it sometimes took weeks for their bioenergetic fields to be charged up enough to feel these effects, whereas “lively” persons overdosed after only half an hour in the device.
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Reich made such extraordinary claims for his box that even this primitive contraption seemed as futuristic a device as those dreamed up at the World’s Fair. He thought that in charging oneself with orgone energy one could increase one’s resistance to disease and combat ailments from cancer to varicose veins and psoriasis. “It seems even more unbelievable,” Reich wrote of these curative promises, “when one realizes that the accumulator contains no sophisticated components, wiring, buttons, or motors.”
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Reich applied for a patent for his orgone energy accumulator early the next year, but none was ever granted. A patent officer from Virginia wrote back to Reich, incredulously, “Do you think I want to go out on a limb and to make myself look ridiculous?”
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The month before Reich arrived in America, the Hungarian physicists Leo Szilard and Edward Teller had paid a visit to Albert Einstein at his summer retreat on Long Island. They presented him with a moral dilemma that would force Einstein to reconsider his long commitment to nonviolence: scientists in Berlin were stockpiling uranium and experimenting with nuclear chain reactions that would enable them to create superbombs. Einstein’s colleagues urged him to write to President Roosevelt and encourage him to enter this deadly arms race.

Einstein agreed. His letter to the president warned that scientists at Einstein’s own alma mater, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, were experimenting with nuclear chain reactions, and that they now had a monopoly on uranium from the mines in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Unless America stockpiled enough uranium to compete, he advised, Germany would have an insurmountable advantage in the race to make “extremely powerful bombs.”
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The letter initiated the Manhattan Project and launched the nuclear arms race. Later, Einstein would describe it as the “one great mistake in my life.”
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An article published in
Newsweek
in 1947, “Einstein, the Man Who Started It All,” conferred on him the moral responsibility for, as Einstein himself put it, “opening that Pandora’s box.” After American bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, sending mushroom clouds over ten miles into the air and incinerating over 210,000 people, the legendary pacifist told the magazine, “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in developing the atom bomb, I would not have supported its construction.”
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Though Reich thought of his creation—at least initially—as benign, his own box created its own storm of controversy. Reich contrasted his discovery of the healing “life rays” that he thought he could accumulate in his device with the guns capable of firing “death rays” that Nikola Tesla was working on in 1940 and which, as
The New York Times
reported, could supposedly melt a plane at a distance of two hundred fifty miles; Tesla thought that the military could use them to establish an invisible “Chinese Wall of Defense” around the United States.
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Reich would later also oppose his beneficial orgone energy to the deadly atomic forces unleashed by Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project team’s apocalyptic weapon.

Though they’d never met, Reich wrote to Einstein on December 30, 1940, asking if he could meet with him to discuss an “urgent scientific matter,” namely his discovery of a hitherto unknown form of energy. Reich wrote:

Dear Professor Einstein,

…Several years ago I discovered a specific, biologically effective energy which in many ways behaves differently from anything that is known about electromagnetic energy. The matter is too complicated and sounds too improbable to be explained clearly in a brief letter. I can only indicate that I have evidence that this energy, which I have called orgone, exists not only in living organisms but also in the soil and in the atmosphere; it is visible and can be concentrated and measured, and I am using it with some success in research on cancer therapy.

This matter is becoming too much for me for practical and financial reasons, and broad cooperation is needed. There is some reason to believe that it might be of use in the fight against the fascist plague…I hesitate to follow the usual route of sending a report to the Academy of Physics, and you may find my caution strange, but it is based on extremely negative experiences.
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Einstein, full of goodwill toward a fellow émigré and attracted to any idea that might help fight fascism, invited Reich to come to see him in Princeton two weeks later. Writing in 1971, Einstein’s biographer Ronald Clark expressed surprise that his subject did not immediately see through what seemed so obviously a crank letter. But Reich had mentioned that he’d been the late Sigmund Freud’s assistant at the Ambulatorium in Vienna for eight years; this would have recommended him to Einstein, who had met Freud in Berlin in 1926. On the occasion of Freud’s seventy-fifth birthday Einstein had written to him saying that he reserved every Tuesday evening for reading Freud’s essays. His interest was more literary than practical: Einstein preferred to “remain in the darkness of not-having-been-analyzed.” The famous pair had conducted a public exchange of letters in 1932 in which Einstein asked Freud, “Why war?”

At 3:30 p.m. on January 13, 1941, Reich stood on the porch of Albert Einstein’s home in eager anticipation of a meeting for which he had spent the last fortnight preparing. He was half an hour early. Reich thought that he’d discovered the “unified field theory,” or theory of everything, that had so far eluded the famous scientist. (Reich had a legal document drawn up and notarized that laid claim to his unique orgonotic description of the universe.)

The two men spoke for almost five hours. It was, as Reich excitedly noted in his diary, “the first genuine and fruitful scientific discussion in ten years!”
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Reich showed Einstein the telescopic tube, or organoscope, through which Einstein observed the same iridescence as Reich when they put out the lights in the room. “But I see the flickering all the time,” Einstein reasoned when they turned the light back on and the effect continued. “Could it not be in my eyes?”
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Reich assured him that when you looked at the rays through a magnifying glass they appeared bigger, so they had to be objective. Hesitantly, because he feared Einstein wouldn’t believe him, Reich told him about his most astounding discovery—the unexpected rise in temperature he’d observed in the accumulator.

To that he exclaimed: “That is impossible. Should it be true, it would be a great bomb!” (verbatim). He got rather excited and I too. We discussed it sharply and then he said that I should send him a small accumulator, and if the facts were true, he would support my discovery.
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It is notable, considering Einstein’s preoccupation at the time with the atomic race and the specter of apocalypse, that he should have referred to Reich’s alleged discovery of a free-energy machine as potentially a “bomb.” Before departing, Reich asked the famously eccentric physicist if he could now understand why people considered him crazy. To this, Reich recalled in his account of the affair, Einstein uttered the ambiguous response: “I can believe that.”
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Whatever he thought, Einstein decided to give Reich the benefit of the doubt, much as ten years earlier he’d granted Upton Sinclair’s idea of “mental radio” (telepathy) a hearing. Reich had a small orgone accumulator built and took it to Princeton two weeks later. Reich and Einstein assembled the experimental box in Einstein’s cellar without delay, placing it on a small table with a control thermometer hanging three or four feet above it in the air. Reich warned Einstein not to spend more than an hour in the room with the device, and to breathe some fresh air immediately after exposure to it.

“After some time he and I could both see that the temperature above the Accumulator was higher by about one degree than the temperature of the surrounding air,” Reich wrote. “We were both very glad. He wanted to keep the Accumulator for about 2 or 3 weeks and then write to me. After about 10 days he wrote me a letter.”
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Einstein wrote that he’d conducted several days’ worth of experiments on the device, and together with an assistant he had found that there was a convection of heat from the ceiling to the tabletop. They took the accumulator apart and discovered that there was in any case a temperature difference between the areas above and under the table, thereby proving that the accumulator itself wasn’t generating heat. What Reich observed, Einstein concluded, had a common place explanation: it was the result of air circulation and heat transfer within the room. “Through these experiments,” Einstein wrote, “I regard the matter as completely solved.”
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Reich had hoped Einstein would report his discovery to the Academy of Physics and invite him to join the exclusive Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he thought he’d finally be among equals. He experimented frantically with his accumulator over the next fortnight to prove himself right, and wrote Einstein a twenty-six-page letter reasserting his claims and detailing data that summarized the spate of discoveries he’d made since 1934. Then he begged Einstein to help him in a striking formulation that implied the necessary rescue of his invention and his sanity: “I know that this is a great deal to accept all at once,” Reich wrote. “It sounds ‘mad,’ and I cannot cope with it by myself.”
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Einstein did not reply.