The Invisible Rainbow — The Shungite Medium, Chapter 9

The Illness and the Discovery · Chapter summary · from The Shungite Medium by Gary Fong

I went looking for what blocks an invisible field. The answer was old. A Faraday cage is a conductive mesh that redirects an external electromagnetic field around whatever is inside it, demonstrated by Michael Faraday in 1836. That search led me to Arthur Firstenberg's The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life. I present what he documented as correlation, not cause and effect.

His most haunting case was the Morse telegraph operators. Each key press closed a main-line circuit carrying roughly 100 to 160 volts of direct current at fifty milliamps, fed from stacks of gravity cells, and every dot and dash ran that pulse through a fingertip. By the 1870s doctors called it telegrapher's cramp, or glass arm, and a 1911 UK Post Office investigation found it disabling between 5.7 and 14 percent of British telegraphists. In New York the neurologist George Beard catalogued headaches, insomnia, fatigue and palpitations as neurasthenia, with telegraph operators at the top of his list. The literature of the era blamed the pace of modern life. Firstenberg, reading the same record a century later, saw that the symptoms followed the wires.

He carries the pattern forward through radio in the 1920s, radar in the 1940s, satellites and cellular in the 1990s, Wi-Fi and 5G now, tying radio to the respiratory distress of 1918. Mainstream historians have challenged those epidemic claims. The pattern is what stayed with me. His mechanism is porphyrins again, interfering with hemoglobin assembly and oxygen transport.

My doctor was thoughtful and competent and had no category for it. There is no ICD-10 billing code, no blood panel that flags it, and no specialist. The term is electro-hypersensitivity.

From the chapter

The sending operator sat at a wooden desk, finger on a small metal tapper. When he pressed the key to transmit, he closed a main-line circuit carrying roughly 100 to 160 volts of direct current at fifty milliamps, supplied by stacks of gravity cells in the station's battery room, out across copper wire to the next station, sometimes hundreds of miles, sometimes all the way to the front lines during wartime. Every dot and dash he sent ran a real high-voltage pulse through his fingertip. The operators paid a price for the period medical literature documented carefully. By the 1870s, doctors had a name for what was happening to them: telegrapher's cramp, also called glass arm. A 1911 UK Post Office investigation found it disabling somewhere between 5.7 and 14 percent of British telegraphists. That statistic caught my eye. One in seven to one in twenty operators, disabled, in an era when there wasn't even a name for occupational injury.

— Gary Fong, The Shungite Medium, Chapter 9

This is a summary of one chapter of The Shungite Medium: The Groundbreaking Exposé of History's Most Miraculous Stone by Gary Fong, LSH Publishing, first edition 2026, 259 pages. Three chapters are published here complete: What Is Shungite? · The Corporate Sticker · How to Tell Real Shungite from Fake. The reference apparatus is complete too: the studies, the glossary, the bibliography and the endnotes.