The Invisible Rainbow – Review by Jennifer Wood

Reprinted from Environmentalists Against War, May 19, 2018

The Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life, by Arthur Firstenberg, is not only a marvelous opus. It is one of those once-in-a-millennium books that turn into classics.

Easy to read, hard to put down, sublimely poetic and scientifically rigorous, with a bibliography almost one-third the size of the book itself, this is a history of electricity which has never been told. It’s not only that it has been written from an environmental and biological point of view; nor that it’s mostly unspoken reverence for life is so understated that its power is hard to resist.

In the end, the power of this book lies in the meticulous care with which the author has done his research, corroborated his data and revealed his stunning findings.

We rediscover not only the ancient Chinese Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine but western doctors and scientists from the 1700s to the present day: what they’ve had to say about electricity, how it has been harnessed, and which direction it has taken in the west and in the east.

We meet Yuri Grigoriev, first assigned to research the biological effects of atomic weapons at the Institute of Biophysics in the former Soviet Union before going on to write a book about the dangers of microwave radiation from cell phone use; Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtalnd, three-time Prime Minister of Norway and former head of the World Health Organization who banned cell phones from her office for health reasons; and Dr. Samuel Milham, who showed that rural electrification caused a shocking increase in cancer rates during the 1950s.

In light of imminent plans to bring us all 5G cell phone technology on the ground and to launch thousands of satellites into space to provide wireless Internet on a global scale, The Invisible Rainbow could not have arrived at a better time.

Expecting to read about the groundbreaking work on the bioeffects of non-inonizing radiation by scientists like Martin Blank, author of Overpowered, I instead found new, comprehensive, and thoroughly documented information dating back to the 1700s.

Prior to 1889, for example, we learn that influenza epidemics occurred not annually but years or decades apart and were highly correlated with sunspots, and that the 1889 pandemic of influenza, which altered that pattern occurred in the exact year the widespread use of alternating current began.

“In that year exactly,” Firstenberg writes, “the natural magnetic activity of the earth began to be suppressed.” The earth’s magnetic field now bore, for the first time in history, the imprint of power line frequencies and their harmonics. The marvelous harnessing of electricity for humans had begun but it had a byproduct: certain precautionary measures could perhaps have been taken but were not. Each step in that development had important consequences.

I found the story of influenza particularly riveting. We go on to learn that in 1918, the radio era began, ushered in by the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic. The radar era, we learn, began in 1957 with the building of hundreds of powerful radar stations in the northern hemisphere “hurling millions of watts of microwave energy skyward;” low-frequency components of these waves rode on magnetic field lines to the southern hemisphere as well.

The radar era was ushered in by the Asian Flu pandemic of 1957. In 1968, we learn the satellite era began with the launch of dozens of satellites “with relatively weak broadcast power but since they were already up in the magnetosphere they had as big an effect on it as the small amount of radiation that had managed to enter it from sources on the ground.” The satellite era was ushered in by the 1968 Hong Kong Flu pandemic.

At the end of the twentieth century came the beginning of the wireless era and the establishment of the High Frequency Auroral Research Program (HAARP). Firstenberg describes the environmental effects of these two technological developments in depth. He brings together history, epidemiology, and cutting edge science, but he does much more. He goes to the heart of his subject, documenting the path that led to the public health crises we are facing today.

Brilliantly researched, The Invisible Rainbow explains why cancer, diabetes and heart disease rose from their previous rarity to become major killers of humanity, painting a vivid picture of what is happening at the cellular level in terms everyone can understand.

The author is uniquely situated to write such a book, perhaps by temperament, certainly by education, fate and circumstance. A top student whose medical career was cut short by injury from x-ray overdose, the author experienced firsthand, in the early 1980s, the effects of radiation poisoning, and experienced them again in 1996 with the advent of widespread commercial cell phone use. He was not alone. As he has carefully documented, millions of people were affected.

Firstenberg writes with a passion and tenacity that only a man with his particular background could summon. This is science at its best, supported by an untold personal story that few of us know or could imagine. That Firstenberg could write such a remarkable book under the appalling conditions in which he has lived for over three decades is astounding.

Rarely do we see such an unusual and integrated work of both art and science, augmented with tables, line graphs, historic etchings and contemporary photographs. Centuries of forgotten knowledge and the careers of important scientists — from Isaac Newton to Luigi Galvani to Albert Szent-Gyorgyi to Robert Becker — are woven into an unforgettable story.

The story of electricity and its previously ignored effects on humans, plants, animals and the earth’s magnetosphere open the door to a better, more informed future. Despite thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies, much of the population is presently unaware of this issue.

This book is an awakening: perhaps the equivalent to the Yellow Emperor’s Classic for our age of electricity. Buy the book and read it. You just might come to realize that your life and the life of our planet are literally, if invisibly at stake. Gaining knowledge is humanity’s first step toward taking preventative measures. The Invisible Rainbow has made not only the path behind us much more visible, but also the one ahead.

Jennifer Wood is an architect who has lived and worked throughout the world. In 1996, she experienced radiation poisoning resulting from over-exposure to widespread commercial cell phone use and other forms of wireless technology while writing a long novel that attracted the attention of the film director, Oliver Stone.

After three near-bouts with death, and weighing 77 pounds, she was forced to move to the National Radio Quiet Zone in Green Bank, West Virginia. Exiled in the forest, she built her own tiny, non-electric cabin, solo, by hand. Away from power lines, WiFi and cell phone radiation, she regained much of her health and began researching numerous scientific studies in depth, becoming an environmental health advocate.

She has been filmed and interviewed by Time Magazine, Werner Herzog, Russia Today and over 80 other international journalists and filmmakers at her cabin and in Washington DC where she initiated and co-organized a protest at the Supreme Court in 2017.

Jennifer is the originator of the GROW Village for Refuge from EMR, a concept which is yet to be realized in the wake of total global WiFi currently being built and deployed from space, leaving no square inch of earth uncovered by microwave/RF radiation.

Much of the media has censored, or omitted the many scientific facts related to EMR that she has continued to relay to the public. Jennifer is also the author of Fighting Faustian Fission, the story of an elderly police officer who helped shut down New York’s Shoreham nuclear power plant before it opened commercially in New York.

Her shorter writings include The Canaries, An Afterward for a photography book on environmental illness and exile. (Thilde Jenson, Lena Publications) and Deep in the Dream of Time (Adams Media Publications) under the pen name Langley. jenniferwoodshed@gmail.com