For two‑hundred years this Society has celebrated the triumph of electricity.
Maxwell gave us the theory; Hertz struck the first spark.
We strung wires across oceans, then cut the wires and filled the sky itself with invisible currents.
Tonight I stand here to tell you we also—quietly, inadvertently—filled the very cradle of life with a kind of electrical smog, and the bill is now coming due in the bodies of our children.
1 A planet finely tuned for life
Between Earth’s conductive surface and the ionosphere lies a resonant cavity, humming at seven‑point‑eight hertz.
For billions of years that cavity was almost silent—disturbed only by lightning.
It is the Goldilocks zone inside the Goldilocks planet: a shell of calm in which the chemistry of nerves, heartbeats, embryos and forests learned to keep perfect time.
2 When the silence broke
In 1887 Heinrich Hertz brought a kilovolt spark‑gap into a laboratory not much larger than this lectern.
He proved Maxwell right—and within months wrote home of “violent pressure in the head.”
Seven years later he lay dying of a wild autoimmune storm medicine would not name for another forty years.
The pattern did not end with Hertz.
By 1914 Germany’s long‑wave station at Nauen was hurling one hundred thousand watts of the same damped, violent pulses into the Brandenburg sky.
Nurses at the Charité hospital soon recorded “destructive granulomas of unknown origin” in the very villages touched by those waves.
A decade later, commercial radio arrived; city air glowed with continuous RF for the first time.
Almost immediately doctors coined new diagnoses—granulomatosis with polyangiitis, early‑onset dementias, idiopathic leukemias—names that scarcely existed in the medical dictionaries of 1850.
3 What modern biology has since revealed
Non‑ionising does not mean non‑biological.
Weak radio fields pry open voltage‑gated calcium channels, flood cells with calcium, ignite bursts of reactive oxygen that scramble DNA, proteins and the delicate electrical language by which one cell whispers to its neighbour: “I am self; you are self.”
Disrupt that conversation and anything can unravel—immune tolerance, brain development, the choreography of hormones.
That is why today many classrooms teach children who cannot speak, while an 1800s schoolhouse would find this an impossible occurrence.
Our ancestors feared diphtheria and smallpox; we cured those.
Yet in their place we have conjured epidemics of ADHD, infertility, autoimmune disease and early dementia that no Victorian physician ever saw. Not to mention the plague of childhood cancers we have today, which started not long ago.
4 The arithmetic of lost potential
In 1825 a child who survived measles often went on to live fourscore years.
In 2025 a child survives measles, survives polio, survives bacterial meningitis—yet a growing number cannot form sentences or conceive healthy offspring.
With today’s nutrition and medicine, human beings ought to edge toward biblical spans; instead life‑expectancy curves are flattening and, in some countries, falling.
What changed? Not our genes; they cannot mutate this fast.
What changed is the constant, round‑the‑clock spray of organised energy we pump into the air—the entropic waste of a wireless economy.
5 A fork in the road
The good news is that this is not a sentence to return to the telegraph era.
We know how to move high‑power transmitters out into space, how to bring light‑based data into classrooms, how to design phones that shield rather than spray.
We simply have not chosen to do so, because war, profit and convenience shouted louder than precaution.
6 A call from history—and to history
Maxwell’s equations were read in this very society.
If we have learned that they can also wound, it is here that the correction must begin.
I ask for three actions:
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Recognition – declare chronic radio‑frequency pollution an environmental toxin, as we once did with lead and asbestos.
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Research – an immediate, independent programme to chart biological harm at today’s realistic exposure levels, not yesterday’s thermal limits.
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Re‑engineering – a decade‑long transition to wired or light‑based networks wherever human bodies dwell, and strict power ceilings everywhere else.
7 Closing
If we do nothing, the electrical murmur that once guided every heartbeat will drown beneath our own broadcast thunder, and the Goldilocks cavity will cease to host a mind capable of understanding Maxwell at all.
Thank you.
I am sorry to inform you that the truth Hertz, humanity has suffered from the misuse of these discoveries we claim as innovations.
John Coates
