On the other hand there`s this: RECYCLING THE FUTURE - WOLFGANG HAGEN Lecture: "Around 1890, the Catholic professor of physics Edouard Branly from Paris went to the Salpetri?re every morning to practise the therapy that was always also an experiment: Branly, the physicist, applied electric shocks to women suffering of hysterical fits. He administered local shocks to their bodies, using the rheophor, the electrical brush. [SLIDE 9] At lunchtime, Branly retreated to his university laboratory to repeat in an experimental model what he had done to living persons in the morning: applying electricity to nerves. In the morning, he treated live nerves with electric shocks, in the afternoon he did research on electrical models of nerves. This is how the first receiver in radio history was developed. [SLIDE 10] Branly succeeded in producing a china bottle filled with strange scobs which conducted electricity under electromagnetic radiation and became non-conductive again when the radiation was interrupted by means of a little mallet: the Branly tube. Branly had found what could be termed the model of a hysterical neurospasm. When the radiation hits the bottle, the coherer, as it came to be called later on, neurospasm, catalepsy, catatonia set in. No radiation: normal state."