For pure daring and imagination, probably no medical device has ever matched Gaylord Wilshire's I-ON-A-CO.

Wilshire was familiar with the media and promotional techniques. He knew what the public wanted. I-ON-A-CO was the first medical device that not only cured but also beautified quickly, neatly, and without pain. Wilshire knew well enough how to sell, but was either unwilling or unable to appease the scientific community in any way. I-ON-A-CO's construction was in itself an affront to engineers and technicians, and Wilshire failed to offer the medical profession even a semi-plausible theory of its function. It was, perhaps for this reason, a short-lived phenomenon.

Although biographical information on Wilshire is less than reliable, he was a man of many talents and great self-assurance. Wilshire was said to have run for political office in the United States, England, and Canada between 1890 and 1904, usually on a Socialist ticket. Meanwhile, according to the same biographer, he had amassed a small fortune from his billboard advertising business and founded Wilshire's Magazine in Los Angeles. He also had the foresight to buy up the land between downtown Los Angeles and the ocean, supervise its development, and affix his name to it.

Impressive as his accomplishments were to this point, they would not seem suitable preparation for medical research. In 1926, however, Wilshire announced the discovery of a "simple and effective method of using magnetism for the cure of human ailments" and the invention of I-ON-A-CO. Full-page newspaper advertisements carried the tidings to sufferers on the West Coast.

The American Medical Association was quick to voice its opinion, comparing I-ON-A-CO's therapeutic value to that of "the left hind foot of a rabbit caught in a churchyard in the dark of the moon". The AMA also alerted the Better Business Bureau. Local bureaus in Portland and Seattle selected a committee of physicians, x-ray technicians, and engineers to examine I-ON-A-CO. The report read, in part:

The I-ON-A-CO is a coil of insulated wire, worth about $3.50 [I-ON-A-CO sold for $58.50], 18 inches in diameter, with a plug that permits the coil to be attached to an electric light socket. With it is a smaller coil that performs no part in the alleged curative use of I-ON-A-CO but plays an all-important part in the magical features of the scheme by impressing the purchaser with the marvelous potentialities of the larger coil."

When the Underwriters and Credit Bureau of New York City took a closer look at Wilshire's past, it found some striking irregularities. The Bishop Creek Gold Company promoted in Wilshire's Magazine, and the Aremu Company of British Guiana, which specialized in "gold and rubber enterprises," had both undergone post office investigations at the request of Wilshire's colleagues. The charge was stock-jobbing.

Later in 1927, I-ON-A-CO sales offices began to close and sales dropped off, probably as a result of investigations and various statements from the AMA and the Better Business Bureau. Wilshire died in September of that year at age 66, putting a definitive end to I-ON-A-CO. Within five years after Wilshire's death, medical devices were added to the list of items falling under FDA jurisdiction.

Ironically, Wilshire had neither the first nor the last word on the phenomenon he exploited. Homer Clark Bennett had invented the magnetone two decades earlier, which applied exactly the same magnetic treatment. One of Wilshire's associates ran away to the Midwest and produced a clone of I-ON-A-CO: the Theronoid magnetic belt. (Could Wilshire have successfully sued him over that, one asks?)

Today, in the twenty-first century, sixty-cycle magnetic fields fill the "villain" niche in popular culture. Wilshire would have had an interesting time advertising his way around that.

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© The Bakken Updated: April 6, 2007