Hell yeah! Last month Coming Anarchy posted this photo of 1930s Japanese ‘war tubas’, a sort of military listening device, presumably keeping their ears open for incoming aircraft:
They followed it up this morning with the Russian version (originally at Soviet Russia) which were constructed as anti-zeppelin devices:
For those of us old enough to remember it, here’s the cover of Kate Bush’s 1985 single ‘Cloudbusting’, from the Hounds of Love album:
And Bush got the idea from Wilhelm Reich’s cloudbusters, which distributed the energy streams collected by an ‘orgone accumulator’ which, of course, was also a song by Hawkwind …
And so it goes, from military science to pseudo-science. As luck would have it, the missus is putting aside her better instincts and taking me to the Kent sound mirrors later this week. Expect a report.
Filed under: war
The cloudbuster is not psudoscience.
Kate Bush did not get “the idea” from Wilhelm Reich,; she read Peter Reich’s “Book of Dreams” and got it from there.
The Russian and Japanese “listening devices” have nothing whatsoever to do with Reich’s invention, or his work on the cloud/DOR-buster. Their purpose and construction is compleatly different, and totally unrelated.
I defy you to explain how cloudbusting is not pseudoscience. Also, I’m sure that Kate Bush was completely unaware of Wilhelm Reich having read his son’s book about his father’s work.
At no point did I make a functional connection between the military hardware and anything Reich came up with. A cursory glance at the photos will tell you that any connection is based solely on formal similarities.
I feel a nipple erection coming on
[...] plethora of photographs of various weird and wonderful acoustic listening devices. Like the ‘war tubas‘ I posted before, these presumably represented cutting-edge military technology before radar [...]