I-ON-A-CO

The boulevard’s namesake turns to belts

His advertising introduced him as ‘Originator of Beautiful Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles’ and ‘Inventor of I-ON-A-CO’ — a developer’s name and a healer’s claim in one breath. Henry Gaylord Wilshire (1861 to 1927) was a real-estate developer, publisher, and well-known socialist, not a physician. Jesse La Tour’s 2024 Fullerton Observer profile records that Wilshire and his brother speculated in Southern California real estate, that Wilshire Boulevard is named for the Wilshire brothers, and that he was a prominent socialist who published his own magazine. He brought the device to the public not through clinical channels but through extensive press announcements, free public lectures he delivered himself, and radio talks. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, summarized the figure in his 1932 Fads and Quackery in Healing by characterizing Wilshire as a charlatan and noting that twenty-five years earlier he had first attracted notice selling gold mines to socialists on time payments. The authority projected was that of the famous-name inventor with a branded appliance, not a medical credential.

A free treatment at the office, then a coil for the home

Access was a branded consumer appliance sold and demonstrated directly to the public, bypassing the medical profession. The I-ON-A-CO was offered from company offices (in San Francisco at 150 Powell Street and in Oakland at 1924 Broadway, per the device’s own advertising) with the inducement of a ‘free, delightful treatment’ on the premises or a free demonstration at home, and a free booklet by mail for out-of-town buyers. Wilshire lectured on the device in person on a fixed weekly schedule and broadcast over radio station KTAB. The belt itself was a self-applied home appliance: the buyer plugged it into an electric-light socket and wore it around the body over the clothing. This is the same direct-to-consumer, doctor-bypassing retail logic seen in Otto Overbeck’s contemporaneous Rejuvenator and, earlier, in Perkins’s metallic tractors, here built around a famous promoter’s name and a network of demonstration offices.

Magnetizing iron that cannot be magnetized

The proposed mechanism borrowed the vocabulary of electromagnetism without its physics. The I-ON-A-CO was a coil of insulated wire connected to the household current; the advertising explained that it ‘magnetizes the iron in your body and thus increases oxygen brought to the tissue cells,’ so that ‘this oxidation purifies the blood-stream and tends to restore the Ionaco user to perfect health.’ Fishbein recorded the same pitch in 1932: that a magnetic field ‘controlled all disease by magnetizing the iron in the blood,’ and that the wearer was told he might be rid of any chronic disorder simply by placing the device around the neck and turning on the current. The claim has no physiological basis. The iron in the blood is organically combined within the haemoglobin molecule, not free metallic iron, and is not meaningfully magnetizable; even if it were, magnetizing it would not relieve tuberculosis, heart disease, or kidney disease. Arthur J. Cramp, director of the American Medical Association’s Bureau of Investigation, examined the apparatus and rechristened it the ‘magic horse collar.’

Inventor, president, and pitchman in one man

Wilshire was at once the named inventor of the device, the president of the Iona Company that sold it, and its public lecturer and pitchman. Fishbein records that the belts were sold for $55 cash or $65 on time payments and that thousands of them were sold by these methods of promotion. What the sources support is the concentration of inventor, company head, and promoter in one person, and a direct-to-consumer model (offices, home demonstrations, lectures, radio, mail-order booklets) that monetized a low-cost electrical appliance while bypassing the professional scrutiny a prescribed treatment would have drawn. The sources support the concentration of roles and the direct sales model rather than any figure for net profit.

A coil of wire, and a death from kidney disease

The device was rejected by organized medicine and faded quickly. Arthur J. Cramp and the American Medical Association analyzed the I-ON-A-CO and dismissed it as quackery, and the apparatus, on examination, proved to be nothing more than a coil of wire incapable of the effects advertised. No controlled outcome data were ever produced; the evidence offered was testimonial, gathered for advertising. Fishbein records that Gaylord Wilshire died of kidney disease in a New York hospital shortly after launching the device, in 1927, ‘no doubt without the benefit of his own invention,’ and that imitators followed his death. Imitative belts (sold under names such as the Theronoid) carried the same idea into the 1930s. The magnetic-cure and perfect-health claims are refuted.

Notes

In the mid-1920s Gaylord Wilshire — the Los Angeles real-estate developer and socialist publisher behind Wilshire Boulevard, and no physician — marketed an electromagnetic appliance he called the I-ON-A-CO, a coil of insulated wire that the buyer plugged into an electric-light socket and wore around the body over the clothing. It was sold not as a remedy for one ailment but as a general restorer of health: the advertising headed ‘New Road to Good Health’ told readers that the device ‘magnetizes the iron in your body and thus increases oxygen brought to the tissue cells,’ so that ‘this oxidation purifies the blood-stream and tends to restore the Ionaco user to perfect health,’ with no bathing, dieting, drugging, or exercising required. That promise of disease-free, restored vitality, sold to a lay public as the route to a longer and healthier life, places the device in the dietetic-and-vitalist tradition this archive documents, alongside the electrical home appliances of the same decade.

The commercial form was a branded consumer appliance demonstrated and sold directly to the public. The device’s own advertising listed company offices in San Francisco (150 Powell Street) and Oakland (1924 Broadway), offered a free demonstration at the office or in the buyer’s home, and promoted free public lectures delivered by Wilshire himself on a fixed weekly schedule, along with a radio talk over station KTAB every Thursday and a free booklet by mail for out-of-town customers. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, recorded in his 1932 Fads and Quackery in Healing that the belts were sold for $55 cash or $65 on time payments and that thousands of them were sold by these methods of promotion. Wilshire was at once the named inventor of the appliance, the president of the Iona Company that sold it, and its lecturer and pitchman. What the sources support is that concentration of roles in one person and a direct-to-consumer model that bypassed the medical profession.

The proposed mechanism had no physiological basis. The iron in the blood is combined within the haemoglobin molecule rather than present as free metallic iron, and is not meaningfully magnetizable; even if it were, magnetizing it would not relieve the chronic diseases the device claimed to cure. Fishbein described the apparatus as a coil of wire connected to the house current, sometimes fitted with a small light to fix the user’s attention, and recorded the pitch that a magnetic field ‘controlled all disease by magnetizing the iron in the blood.’ Arthur J. Cramp, director of the American Medical Association’s Bureau of Investigation, examined the I-ON-A-CO and rechristened it the ‘magic horse collar.’ J.R. Basford’s 2001 history of electric and magnetic therapy in the Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation places such appliances in a long line of electromagnetic devices marketed for health on claims that outran any demonstrated physical effect.

No controlled outcome data were ever produced; the evidence offered for the I-ON-A-CO was testimonial, assembled for advertising. The organized medical profession rejected it, and Fishbein records that Gaylord Wilshire died of kidney disease in a New York hospital shortly after launching the device, in 1927, ‘no doubt without the benefit of his own invention.’ After his death, in Fishbein’s account, imitators brought out similar belts under names such as the Theronoid, carrying the magnetic idea into the 1930s. The magnetic-cure and perfect-health claims are refuted. The case belongs to the electrical-and-vitalist sub-lineage of this archive beside Overbeck’s Rejuvenator and Abrams’s Electronic Reactions of the same period, and further back to Perkins’s metallic tractors and Mesmer’s animal magnetism; its ‘increased oxygen’ and ‘oxidation purifies the blood’ language echoes the oxidation-cures-all motif of Radam’s Microbe Killer. Its distinctive feature is the marriage of a celebrity real-estate name to a mass-marketed electrical belt, health and renewed vitality sold over the radio and across an office counter, disconfirmed by the plain fact that a coil of wire could do nothing the advertising promised.