Stanley Jungleib

You are not going to get any names because I promised my counterpart confidentiality.

Over the holidays I noticed in an otherwise reputable catalog one of those $30-dollar cell phone add-ons promising to protect you from virtually all radiation. I jumped on it. The marketing manager proved to be extremely reasonable and open to discussion. He even offered to send me one to examine. I declined, because it was pointless in the absence of the claims documentation. (And I could pretty much predict what I would find—a small coil or capacitor, maybe a tiny IC.) How do you test a featureless hoax?

Of course, that the device’s claims could not actually be substantiated made my job easy enough, but specifically upon learning the following, the gentleman without hesitation removed the item from this year’s catalog, with my deep thanks and appreciation.

• If you check the fine print that comes with the phone, it recommends non-use as the best alternative.
• Besides that, the best safety is a wired headset because it moves the transmitter away from particularly your head. (On the argument that the wires still carry radiation, acoustic headsets are available, but a bit arcane for general use.)
• Bluetooth comes in a very weak second because it permanently mounts a transmitter on your skull.
• Even if you protect yourself via any of the above measures, you are still exposed to ubiquitous towers and everybody else’s phone (and wi-fi), so how can that little button possibly protect you in a real environment?
• The cell system is actually already set up for minimum exposure because they want you to have maximum battery life.
• The system controls the power each phone sends, according to the conditions: if you have line-of-sight to a tower, your transmission power will be low. But if you are in marginal conditions, much farther away, or particularly, within a car, the system must crank up the power from your phone—and into you.
• Therefore, adding anything to the phone at best blocks its multi-band antennae and at worst detunes them, in either case counter-productively driving more power into your head.
• Finally, depending on the provider, cell systems typically operate by millisecond-rate switching over a range of two-dozen different channels. And, in multiple bands from 800 to 2100 MHz. This makes talk of somehow simplistically counter-resonating ‘cell phone radiation’—falsely reifying into a simple sound bite what is in fact an extremely dynamic and complicated process—well, simply ridiculous.

Now of course, SJL has worked intensely developing technology that formerly made the same claims. But we have not made them. If there is such an effect, it is totally unproven. And there is no solution involving linear thinking: shielding with the phone won’t help (which is what your car does). You aren’t going to talk many people into wearing protective tower-climbing or lineman suits, nor metal-screened wetsuits with grounding straps. The only way to theoretically cancel an electromagnetic wave is to generate one of equal frequency and opposite phase exactly in line with its approach. Practically, under controlled conditions with a few signals this is quite difficult, and under uncontrolled real-world conditions, impossible. Considering the variety of signals with which you are bombarded as you move around (literally, thousands), do you think a deftly-priced sleek $30 plastic puck contains the required light-speed supercomputer?

The science and the evidence just isn’t there, and I was extremely glad to earn agreement on this point to the benefit of both the seller and their loyal customer base.

The only authentic antidote of which I know is correct information, starting with Cross Currents by Dr. Robert O. Becker. For an introduction to the realpolitik and regulatory issues I recommend Cell Towers by Blake Levitt.

Finally, I’m obliged to remind everyone that SJL has a patent pending through which it is hoped the technology can be developed to address this very serious issue non-linearly:

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