Eclectical Engineering

An “alternative entrepreneur” seizes on a popular new communications technology and uses it to promote dubious and potentially dangerous wares; when his drumming gets too shrill, even the government is forced to sit up and take notice, and they promptly shut him down. Undeterred, he moves his operations outside the country and finds that he can actually reach even more people with his pitches, and becomes vastly wealthier. Sounds like internet spam, right? Well, yes it does, but it is also an apt summary of the career of the infamous John Romulus Brinkley, a quack doctor who used the infant technology of AM broadcast radio throughout the first half of the 20th century to advertise his controversial (and medically groundless) treatments to improve male virility. (more…)