Wilhelm Reich was once Sigmund Freud's most promising protégé — a brilliant young Austrian psychoanalyst who, by the 1930s, had drifted so far from mainstream science that he ended his life in a U.S. federal prison, his books literally burned by the FDA. The instrument of his undoing? A Faraday cage repurposed as a cosmic energy collector.

Reich's early work was genuinely respected. He coined the term "sexual revolution," wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism (a sharp analysis of why working-class Germans embraced Hitler), and developed character analysis techniques that influenced generations of therapists. Then, in the late 1930s, he claimed to have discovered a primordial cosmic life force he called "orgone" — a blue-tinged energy that pulsed through everything, was responsible for the color of the sky, and could be harnessed to cure cancer, impotence, and the common cold.

Here's where the Faraday cage enters. Reich observed (or believed he observed) that cancer-stricken mice kept inside Faraday cages showed remarkable improvement. Faraday cages, of course, do something very real: they block external electromagnetic fields by distributing charge across a conductive enclosure. Reich's leap was to conclude that the cage wasn't just blocking radio waves — it was concentrating orgone energy inside. So he built human-sized versions: wooden boxes lined with alternating layers of organic material (wool, cotton) and metal (steel wool, sheet metal). These were the infamous orgone accumulators.

Patients sat inside. Reich claimed measurable temperature differentials. He sold and rented the devices across America. Albert Einstein actually corresponded with him briefly, tested one, and concluded the temperature effects were explained by ordinary convection — a politely devastating rejection.

The story gets stranger:

• Reich built a "cloudbuster" — an array of hollow metal pipes pointed at the sky — claiming it could break droughts by manipulating atmospheric orgone.
• He believed UFOs were powered by orgone and that he was engaged in cosmic battle with them from his Maine compound, "Orgonon."
• The FDA pursued him for fraud. When Reich defied the resulting injunction, he was jailed. In 1956 and 1960, federal agents oversaw the burning of roughly six tons of his books and journals — one of the most extensive acts of government-ordered book destruction in modern American history.

Reich died of heart failure in Lewisburg Penitentiary in 1957, days before his parole hearing. His grave at Orgonon bears the inscription he chose: nothing.

His legacy splintered. Mainstream psychology quietly absorbed pieces of his early body-oriented therapy work (it lives on in somatic experiencing and bioenergetic analysis). The counterculture canonized him — William S. Burroughs, J.D. Salinger, Norman Mailer, and Saul Bellow all owned orgone accumulators. Kate Bush wrote a hit song ("Cloudbusting") about him. Meanwhile, "orgone energy" became permanent furniture in the fringe-physics aisle.