Word: nelsons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Besides being a man of varied talents and striking personality, the late Robert T. Nelson was a great talker. Before his death in 1935, he awed his friends' by being able to discourse windily for hours on almost any subject. Among his accomplishments was his "discovery," around 1918, of an "element" now called vrilium, to which he attributed prodigious curative powers. Nelson did not explain exactly what he thought vrilium was, but he did claim that it was "radioactive...
...early 20s, Nelson started packaging a pinch of vrilium inside an ordinary two-inch-long brass cylinder. Popularly called "The Magic Spike," the cartridge was sold to people suffering from a variety of painful diseases. Nelson was always happy to explain how it worked: when the cylinder was attached to the lapel (or hung around the neck), there were "emanations" into the atmosphere for a distance of 20 feet, discouraging all sorts of disease germs. Meanwhile, the vrilium was supposed to "emanate" inward, restoring the buyer's sick body cells to normal...
Last week in Chicago federal district court, the U.S. Government was finally taking official, disapproving notice of the Magic Spike. Inventor Nelson's son, Robert T. Nelson Jr., and his partner George C. Erickson were on trial, charged, under the Pure Food and Drug Act, with "false and misleading" claims about the gadget's powers (maximum penalty: a year in jail...
When young Nelson took the stand, he seemed unimpressed by the fact that his Magic Spikes had got no response out of the Geiger counter. Said he blandly to the jurors: "I believe we have an unrecognized form of radioactivity...
Honored at the first annual National Book Award dinner in Manhattan, for books which the U.S. publishing trade voted the most distinguished U.S. fiction, non-fiction and poetry of 1949: Novelist Nelson Algren, 40, of Chicago, for The Man with the Golden Arm; Biographer Dr. Ralph L Rusk, 61, of Manhattan, for The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson; Dr. William Carlos Williams, 66, pediatrician-poet of Rutherford, N.J., for two books of verse, Paterson, Book III and Selected Poems...