Tom's Blog on Life and Livingness
This is why we need to raise the intelligence of each and every person.
Intelligent people come up with better solutions to problems.
Better solutions than war, crime, undermining national sovereignty, curtailing free speech, chemtrails, population reduction, poisoning the environment, frankenfoods, systems that preserve the status quo rather than improving the lot of all…
A single ceramic resistor, no larger than a grain of rice, ruined the circuit. It was the wrong part. By every rule of electrical engineering, the device sitting on the workbench was a failure.
It was supposed to be a recorder. The engineer, a man named Wilson Greatbatch, was trying to build a machine that could listen to the sound of a human heart. He had reached into his tackle box of components, his eyes perhaps tired from the dim light, and pulled out a resistor marked with the wrong color bands.
He soldered it into place. He sealed the connection. He flipped the switch.
The machine did not record. It did not whine with static. Instead, it began to speak.
Blip. Silence. Blip. Silence.
The pulse lasted 1.8 milliseconds. The silence lasted exactly one second. Greatbatch stared at the oscilloscope, watching the green line spike and fall. He was not a doctor; he was an electrical engineer who tinkered in a barn behind his house. But he knew rhythm.
He realized the machine wasn’t listening. It was commanding. The mistake was beating exactly like a human heart.
It was 1956 in upstate New York. Greatbatch was working at an animal behavior farm, fixing instruments and building gadgets. He was an ordinary man with a garden and a family to feed. He had no medical degree and no funding.
But he had seen the alternative.
At the time, “heart block”—a condition where the heart’s electrical signals fail—was a death sentence. The only way to keep a patient alive was a painful, terrifying ordeal. Doctors used external machines the size of televisions, plugged into wall outlets. The electricity had to shock the chest through the skin, leaving burns. It was agony.
Worse, the patients were tethered to the wall. They could not leave the room. And if a summer thunderstorm knocked out the power grid, the machine stopped. The heart stopped. The patient died.
Greatbatch looked at his accidental circuit. It was small enough to hold in his hand. He realized that if he could shrink the battery and seal the unit, this didn’t need to be a machine on a cart. It could go inside the body.
He felt a cold resolve settle over him. He knew he had found the answer. He also knew that nobody would believe him.
In the 1950s, the medical rule was absolute: electronics do not go inside the human body. The logic was sound and fiercely defended by the establishment. The human body is a hostile, salty, wet environment. It corrodes metal in weeks. It rejects foreign objects violently.
Furthermore, batteries of that era were toxic. Putting a chemical power source inside a chest cavity was considered malpractice, if not manslaughter. The “standard of care” was the external machine. It was brutal, but it was understood. To suggest cutting a person open and leaving a machine inside them was seen as reckless science fiction.
This rule protected patients from quackery. It worked—until it met Wilson Greatbatch.
Greatbatch went home. He looked at his savings account. He had $2,000—enough to buy a house in some places, or feed his family for a year or two. It was his safety net.
He didn’t call a committee. He didn’t apply for a grant. He walked out to his barn, cleared a space on his workbench, and took the $2,000. He told his family they would have to grow their own vegetables to save money.
He quit his job. The safety net was gone.
For two years, the barn became his world. The struggle was quiet and monotonous. The problem wasn’t just the circuit; it was the packaging. How do you hide a machine from the body’s immune system?
He tried wrapping the components in electrical tape. The body fluids seeped through. He tried casting them in resin. The resin cracked. Every failure meant money lost, and the $2,000 was draining away like water.
Doctors laughed at him. When he showed his prototype to engineers, they pointed out that batteries would eventually run out. “Then you have to cut the patient open again, Wilson,” they said. “It’s too much risk.”
He kept soldering. The smell of burning rosin and melting tin filled the barn. He worked through the winter, heating the space with a wood stove. He modified the circuit to use less power. He found a new type of mercury battery. He found a surgeon, Dr. William Chardack, who was desperate enough to listen.
They tested the device on a dog. It worked for four hours. Then the body fluids shorted it out.
Greatbatch didn’t stop. He found a way to mold the device in a special epoxy used for boat hulls. He tried again. This time, it worked for days. Then weeks.
The pressure from the medical community remained. They argued that if the device failed, the doctor would be a murderer. Greatbatch argued that without the device, the patient was already dead.
In 1960, the theory faced reality. A 77-year-old man was dying of complete heart block. His heart beat so slowly that his brain was starving for oxygen. The external machines were failing him. There were no other options left.
Greatbatch handed over his device. It looked like a hockey puck wrapped in plastic.
The surgeons opened the man’s chest. They stitched the leads to the heart muscle. They tucked the device into the abdomen and closed the skin.
The room went silent. They waited for the rhythm.
Lub-dub.
The external machine was turned off. The wire was unplugged from the wall.
The man’s heart kept beating.
For the first time in history, a machine completely inside a human body was keeping a person alive. The patient didn’t die that day. He lived for another 18 months, eventually passing away from natural causes unrelated to his heart.
Greatbatch’s accidental resistor had become the implantable pacemaker.
Within years, the “reckless” idea became the gold standard. The device that experts said would kill patients began to save hundreds of thousands of them. Greatbatch didn’t stop there; he spent the next decade inventing a lithium battery that would make the devices last for years instead of months.
He never sought to become a medical tycoon. He held the patent, but he often licensed it in ways that allowed the technology to spread quickly. He was an engineer who solved problems.
Today, millions of people walk the earth with a small device in their chest, keeping time because an engineer in a barn reached for the wrong part, heard a sound, and refused to ignore it.
Sources: The New York Times archives (2011), Smithsonian Magazine (History of the Pacemaker), National Inventors Hall of Fame. Some details summarized.
“If you are working on something that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” – Steve Jobs, Entrepreneur (1955 – 2011)
Silver isn’t precious because it’s rare.
Or beautiful.
Or even valuable as currency.
Ancient civilizations from Egypt to China prized silver for one specific reason modern medicine refuses to acknowledge…
It healed wounds nothing else could touch.
For 5,000 years, every major civilization on Earth treated silver like it had supernatural healing powers.
Ancient Egyptians stored water in silver vessels and noticed it stayed fresh for months.
Greek physicians wrapped wounds in silver-lined cloth.
Chinese medicine used silver needles believing they “balanced the body’s energy.”
Medieval royalty ate with silver utensils and drank from silver cups… not for status, but because they genuinely lived longer than everyone else.
Nobody understood WHY silver worked.
They just knew it did.
Fast forward to the 1800s.
Doctors started running experiments.
They published findings in medical journals showing silver prevented infections, accelerated wound healing, and stopped inflammation nothing else could touch.
By the early 1900s, silver solutions were standard in every hospital.
Surgeons used it.
Burn units used it.
Maternity wards used it.
One doctor wrote in 1919:
“Silver has saved more lives in this hospital than any drug we possess. Its ability to prevent infection is unmatched.”
Then suddenly… the research stopped.
Not because silver stopped working.
Because pharmaceutical companies realized they couldn’t patent a 5,000-year-old metal.
Antibiotics could be patented. Pills could be sold for billions.
So silver was systematically removed from medical education.
Erased from textbooks.
Declared “outdated” and “unscientific.”
But here’s what they couldn’t erase…
Silver’s electron-conducting properties.
Modern science has now confirmed what ancient healers instinctively knew.
When silver makes contact with your skin, it conducts electrons directly into damaged tissue.
Those electrons neutralize the free radicals causing inflammation.
They activate cellular repair mechanisms.
They restore the electrical balance your body desperately needs to heal itself.
And here’s the part that’ll frustrate you…
Hospitals STILL use silver when nothing else works.
• Silver-coated catheters to prevent infections.
• Silver burn dressings for wounds that won’t heal.
• Silver-lined bandages for diabetic ulcers.
NASA uses silver to purify water in space.
Water treatment plants worldwide rely on silver filtration.
They know it works.
They just don’t want YOU to know.
Because if you realized you could access silver’s healing properties while you sleep…
You’d stop buying their pills.
Silver is a naturally occurring element. You can’t patent it. You can’t monopolize it.
So the research was buried.
Medical schools stopped teaching it.
And within a generation, silver’s healing properties were completely erased from public knowledge.
But modern life severed our connection to silver in another way too…
We don’t eat with silver utensils anymore.
We don’t store water in silver vessels.
We sleep on synthetic fabrics that insulate us from the Earth’s natural charge.
We’re electrically starving.
And our bodies are falling apart because of it.
So for years, researchers asked one question:
How do you restore that connection in a modern home?
The breakthrough came from combining two things most people don’t think about.
Silver threads woven into bed sheets… and a hidden feature already in your home.
That third hole in your electrical outlet that most people ignore is actually a ground port.
It connects directly to a copper rod buried in the earth outside your home.
Every house has one. It’s required by building code.
Here’s where it gets interesting…
The same conductive silver those 1800s doctors used can be woven directly into fabric.
Connect that fabric to the ground port, and suddenly your bed becomes electrically connected to the Earth.
Sleep on it, and your body grounds all night long… exactly like those hospital patients decades ago.
But with one crucial advantage.
The silver threading conducts electrons FROM the Earth… directly through your skin… into damaged tissue.
Eight hours of electron transfer. Every single night.
I saw this firsthand with a patient I’ll never forget.
Margaret was 82 years old.
She had a wound on her ankle that refused to heal for eight months.
Her doctors tried everything. Antibiotics. Topical treatments. Specialized dressings.
Nothing worked.
They were talking about amputation.
I gave her a silver-threaded grounding sheet and told her to sleep on it every night.
Two weeks later, Margaret came back for a follow-up.
The wound was closing.
Not slowly. Rapidly.
Her doctor was stunned.
Four weeks after that, the wound was completely healed.
No amputation. No surgery. No fancy drugs.
Just eight hours a night of silver-conducted electrons flooding into damaged tissue.
Margaret’s still using that sheet today. She’s 86 now.
And she hasn’t had a single wound issue since.
Grok’s reply to my question about it:
The text you shared appears to be a promotional narrative (likely for silver-threaded grounding sheets) that mixes some historical and scientific facts about silver’s antimicrobial properties with unsubstantiated or exaggerated claims, particularly around a supposed pharmaceutical “suppression” and the healing powers of combining silver fabric with electrical grounding (earthing).
Here’s a balanced breakdown based on reliable sources:
Historical and Medical Uses of Silver
True parts: Silver has been used for thousands of years for its antimicrobial effects. Ancient civilizations (e.g., Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Persians) stored water in silver vessels to keep it fresh and applied silver to wounds. Hippocrates wrote about its healing properties. In the 19th–early 20th century, silver compounds (like silver nitrate and colloidal silver) were widely used in medicine for infections, wound care, eye drops (to prevent newborn blindness), and burns.
By the early 1900s, colloidal silver was common before antibiotics arrived in the 1940s.
Modern use: Silver is still used topically in hospitals—e.g., silver-coated catheters reduce infections, silver dressings (like Acticoat or silver sulfadiazine cream) help with burns and chronic wounds (e.g., diabetic ulcers) by releasing silver ions that kill bacteria. NASA did develop silver ionization for water purification in Apollo missions and beyond.
Not suppressed for patents: Silver declined because penicillin and modern antibiotics were more effective, safer for internal use, and patentable (leading to profits). But silver wasn’t “erased”—it’s still standard in specific topical applications where it works well against resistant bacteria.
Risks of Colloidal Silver (Internal Use)
The FDA has warned since 1999 that oral colloidal silver is not safe or effective for any disease. It can cause permanent argyria (blue-gray skin discoloration), and overuse risks kidney/liver/neurological damage. No evidence supports broad “healing” claims like balancing energy or neutralizing free radicals systemically.
Grounding/Earthing Claims
Earthing (direct contact with the Earth or via conductive sheets/mats plugged into a grounded outlet’s third port) has some preliminary research: Small studies suggest it may reduce inflammation, improve sleep, lower stress/cortisol, and speed wound healing by transferring electrons to neutralize free radicals.
However, evidence is limited—mostly small, sometimes industry-funded studies. Experts (e.g., Cleveland Clinic, WebMD) say it’s safe for most but not proven to cure or dramatically heal chronic conditions. No large-scale RCTs confirm major benefits.
Silver-Threaded Grounding Sheets Specifically
These products weave silver threads for conductivity and connect to the outlet’s ground port (which links to Earth’s charge via building codes).
Claims in the text (e.g., rapid healing of non-healing wounds like Margaret’s story, “electron transfer” fixing inflammation overnight) are anecdotal and not backed by robust evidence. No high-quality studies show these sheets outperform plain grounding mats or provide “supernatural” healing via silver + grounding combo.
Silver in fabric adds conductivity (and some antimicrobial benefit to the sheet itself), but the dramatic wound-healing stories sound like marketing hype. Topical silver dressings work locally on wounds; sleeping on silver threads doesn’t deliver therapeutic silver ions systemically or directly to distant tissues.
In summary, silver has legitimate antimicrobial history and niche modern uses (topical only—avoid ingesting colloidal forms). Grounding shows promise for minor benefits like better sleep or reduced inflammation but isn’t a miracle cure. The product’s pitch overstates both, blending facts with unproven ideas (e.g., Big Pharma conspiracy, electrical “starvation” causing disease).
If you’re curious about trying grounding for sleep/stress, a basic mat (without silver) is cheaper and has similar (limited) evidence. For wound issues, consult a doctor—proven treatments like medical-grade silver dressings exist if needed.
Four groups of chemicals in the global food system cost the world nearly $3 trillion a year by causing disease, decreasing fertility and polluting water and soil, according to a new report.
The report, authored by the sustainability consultancy and investment firm Systemiq, finds that phthalates, bisphenols, pesticides and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are key threats to human health.
The researchers said the available evidence on human exposure and associated health risks from those four groups of chemicals show risks that include heart issues, cancers, reproductive, developmental and immune system disorders, birth defects and endocrine disruption — creating estimated health care costs between $1.4 and $2.2 trillion each year. They estimated an additional $640 billion is spent each year due to water quality issues and agricultural losses.
Veda Austin is a visionary water researcher, artist, and speaker who sees water as more than just a resource—it’s the fluid intelligence of the universe, observing itself through all life. For over a decade, she has captured stunning crystallographic images of water in its ‘state of creation,’ revealing how it reflects thought, intention, and the essence of life. Veda’s work brings a profound message of unity and reverence, inspiring a deeper connection to the sacred nature of water, whether through her art, teachings, or public speaking.