Orgone

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.

Following press exposes and complaints, the United States Food and Drug Administration investigated Reich's orgone accumulator claims and in 1954 obtained a federal injunction barring the interstate shipment of the accumulators and of the literature describing them, on the grounds that the therapeutic claims made for the devices were false and had no scientific basis. Reich refused to appear in court to contest the injunction, arguing the FDA had no authority to judge a scientific question, which resulted in a default judgment against him; when he and an associate continued shipping accumulators in violation of the order, Reich was tried and convicted of contempt of court in 1956, sentenced to two years in federal prison, and the court additionally ordered that his accumulators and a substantial body of his books and publications be destroyed, a rare instance of book destruction ordered by an American federal court.

Reich died in Lewisburg federal penitentiary in Pennsylvania on November 3, 1957, of heart failure, after serving roughly eight months of his sentence, an outcome historian Christopher Turner documents in detail in Adventures in the Orgasmatron, situating Reich's case within the broader twentieth century history of sexual science and its collision with American law and medicine. No controlled study since has found evidence for orgone as a distinct physical energy, and Reich's case is now most often cited as a cautionary example of how far a genuinely trained scientist's claims can diverge from testable science, and of how severely the American legal system responded once those claims were judged to cause public harm.