Music and the Microbe
Cloudbuster uses organ to kill bacteria; PLUS Umbrella murder, Escape from Ponar, Beatles book, Substack Nazis
In 1936, newspapers reported a claim from Norway that “music played on the organ will prevent foodstuffs from going bad.” According to the reports, certain musical notes could kill microbes that cause food to decay. While scientists were “divided in their opinion”, one “official chemical expert”, Herr Bruff, related an experiment with “surprisingly favourable results”.
“He cut up some fresh meat and distributed the bits into six hermetically sealed boxes. Three of these were subjected by the experimenter to the influence of sounds played on his organ for about 30 minutes, and then placed in a fairly warm atmosphere side by side with the other three. After a week, the boxes were opened, when it was found that whereas the meat in the boxes which had undergone no treatment was badly decayed, the contents of the ‘doctored’ boxes were all right.”
The discoverer of this theory was named as Herr Minaas, who had been reading about pilgrims being cured of diseases after bathing in the River Ganges.
“It struck him that there was one thing all the sacred bathing places had in common; each of them was near some falls or in a deep gorge which the rushing waters filled with a thundering roar. From this, he drew the conclusion that it must be the tremendous volume of sound which killed the microbes of sickness and so affected the cures.
He began imitating the sounds of waterfalls on an organ, and the results seemed to prove his surmise correct. Though he at first earned nothing but ridicule with his idea, years of patient experiment and research have at last brought it to a point where men of science think it worth developing, or at least speculating about.”
Scientists had already proved in the 1920s that ultrasound could destroy algae. The idea that individual musical notes could destroy certain microbes was eventually abandoned, but it was replaced by the broader theory of acoustic cavitation, in which sound waves generate shock waves and heat to kill bacteria. Today, we use ultrasound to treat wounds, fight drug-resistant superbugs, and pasteurise foods.
The names in the 1936 report, Bruff and Minaas, seem to have been lost to history. However, several Austrian scientists were living and working in Oslo at the time, including the controversial psychiatrist and scientist Wilhelm Reich, who was conducting “microbe killing” experiments in 1936. It seems likely that Bruff and Minaas were associates of Reich, perhaps misnamed or misidentified.
Wilhelm Reich moved to New York in 1940, where he developed modified Faraday cages that he claimed could help to cure cancer. He also claimed he could control the weather and combat UFOs (Reich believed the planet was under attack from extraterrestrials) using devices called “cloudbusters.” (Reich and his devices inspired the Kate Bush song Cloudbusting. The Cloudbusting music video features Donald Sutherland as Wilhelm Reich.)
In 1947, the US Food and Drug Administration issued an injunction against Reich, calling his work “fraud of the first magnitude”. He was jailed for breaching the injunction in 1956 and died in the Lewisburg penitentiary of heart failure in the following year.◆
Recommended
A couple of book recommendations: First up, The Umbrella Murder by Ulrik Skotte, a tremendous true crime investigation into the infamous 1978 murder of a Bulgarian dissident on Waterloo Bridge with a poison-tipped umbrella. Skotte peels back numerous layers of cover-ups, clandestine operations, and conspiracies to track down and eventually confront the assassin.
Also, No Road Leading Back by Chris Heath, the remarkable story of 12 men who escaped from an almost unimaginable Nazi killing site in the forest at Ponar, Lithuania, where they were enslaved to exhume and burn the bodies of 70,000 murdered Jews. Chris Heath wrote for the super-influential British pop magazine Smash Hits in the 1980s, and wrote books about the Pet Shop Boys and Robbie Williams, before pivoting to writing narrative non-fiction features for US magazines. This is his first “serious” book, and it’s a riveting and rigorous read that also addresses the difficulties of telling such a story honestly and accurately.
I’m currently reading John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie. I’m a sucker for Beatles books, and this one is living up to its billing as one of the best in decades.
I’ve not added any of these books to the Singular Discoveries Amazon bookshelf because Jeff Bezos is one of the worst people on the planet. Instead, buy them from your local independent bookshop or Bookshop.org.◆
Notebook
In the week that another major article was published about how Substack makes money from hosting Nazi newsletters, I’m actively looking to move away from this deeply flawed big tech platform. I’ve written previously about the problem Substack has with actual Nazis, and its refusal to deplatform them. (Seriously, if anyone really needs any reminder of why platforming Nazis might be a bad idea, read No Road Leading Back.) As a free publication, Singular Discoveries does not fund Substack nor any of its Nazi content. But I do intend to switch to a new platform as soon as I figure out which one it might be. The shift should not cause any inconvenience to current subscribers.
I’m also considering the frequency of this newsletter. Currently, it’s published at least once a month. But I’m of the firm belief that there is too much content, online and in our inboxes. So I’ll likely adopt a more casual publication schedule. Roughly once a month, but likely less often. I’ll only send out a newsletter when I’ve got something worthwhile to say.
Finally, whatever happened to the Singular Discoveries podcast? The podcast features some AI-generated voices alongside human voices. I no longer use generative AI in any of my work, so I’m no longer promoting the podcast. I think it’s still a worthwhile listen. For the time being, you can find all eight episodes on Soundcloud. But I’ll be removing links to it from the newsletter.◆
More next time, which might be in a month and might be on Substack, but also might not. Thanks for reading. Please do share and subscribe to help sustain this free newsletter.
Main source: Balonne Beacon, 30 Jan 1936.
I've had a pretty good luck with Buttondown since I moved to it from here. As for too much content, this is one of the monthly newsletters I look forward to.
Different,very good.