A conversation with a friend made me suddenly recall that when I was a kid in the early 80’s, we could occasionally hear a faint rendition of the major local AM station coming from the faucet of the kitchen sink. We lived just a mile or two from the broadcast antenna.
It was very faint and had a spooky sizzling quality, but it was unmistakable. Our wall-mounted telephone also picked it up, but more distinctly. I can understand the telephone noise reason, as there’s an amplifier and speaker. But a faucet? How?
In: Physics
I swear this story ends up being related to the question…
John R. Brinkley was a quack doctor (or at least a quack who falsely claimed to be a doctor) who made a lot of money in the early 20th century by surgically installing goat testicles in humans. He believed that the always-virile goat would imbue human men with its energy and cure all their medical woes.
It should go without saying that this didn’t work. Optimistically, if this kind of thing is done with best practice and sterile instruments, your body will recognise foreign tissue and break it down. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Brinkley was not using sterile instruments and best practice. People got infected and died, and Brinkley was ultimately forced to flee to Mexico.
Unrepentant, he set up a radio station just inside the Mexican border, where he would broadcast country music and ads for his various medical supplements and goat ball treatments. He was actually a major reason for country music becoming popular in the American Southwest. Determined to reach as many people as he could with his broadcasts, and unconstrained due to Mexico’s lack of broadcasting laws, Brinkley built a transmitter that was basically a doomsday weapon.
The transmitter that Brinkley created was so powerful that you could pick up his radio show as far away as Canada. More locally, birds that flew in front of the transmitter would explode in flight. The signal was so strong that any metal object would pick up Brinkley’s station. Field workers could hold up a shovel and hear it. Barbed wire fences would pick it up. Anyone living locally who was unfortunate enough to have metal fillings would be able to hear Brinkley’s broadcasts INSIDE THEIR OWN HEADS, also giving rise to the “crazy people can hear broadcasts on their fillings” joke. Turns out this is actually true under some circumstances.
Eventually the authorities stepped in and made Brinkley dismantle his giant radio tower. Anyway, the lesson is that any metal object can pick up a radio signal, and if you’re a crazy fake doctor with a million watt transmitter, ALL metal obejects will pick it up.
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