Wilhelm Reich, a psychoanalyst who had trained and worked closely under Sigmund Freud in Vienna before emigrating first to Scandinavia and then to the United States, developed in the 1930s and 1940s a theory that a single, measurable cosmic life energy, which he named orgone, pervaded the atmosphere, living organisms, and space itself, and that it was directly bound up with sexual energy and specifically with what Reich called orgastic potency, the capacity for full, unimpeded orgasmic release, which he held to be the foundation of psychological health. To collect and concentrate this proposed energy, Reich built orgone accumulators, box-like structures typically the size of a small closet, built of alternating layers of organic material, such as wood or wool, and metal, such as steel wool, on the theory that organic material would attract orgone while metal would reflect and trap it, allowing a person seated inside to absorb a concentrated dose.
Reich claimed the accumulators could treat an extensive range of conditions, from general fatigue to, most controversially, cancer, and marketed and rented the devices, along with associated literature, through mail order to patients and physicians across the United States from his research center in Rangeley, Maine. Reich's theory extended orgone into meteorology as well, proposing "cloudbusting" devices intended to manipulate weather by manipulating atmospheric orgone, a claim that drew him even further from mainstream physics and medicine over the course of the 1940s and 1950s.