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Who First Thought Of A Tin Foil Hat?

He described this idea as a "caps of metal foil" in his 1927 story The Tissue-Culture King.


('The Tissue-Culture King' by Julian Huxley)

"THAT a darkest Africa story could contain a wondrous assortment of science and adventure all rolled into one, you would scarcely believe possible, yet that is exactly what Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley, famous English scientist, and himself Professor of Zooology in King's College, London, gives us here."

The tin foil hat idea occurred first to Sir Julian Sorell Huxley (b. 1887, d. 1975), an English biologist, who was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942) and the first director of UNESCO.

He describes "caps of metal foil" used to reduce the effects of telepathic messages:

"...we should give our experimental squad the suggestion to broadcast 'sleep for a week.' The telepathic message would be relayed to each of the thousands of minds waiting receptively for it, and would take root in them, until the whole nation became a single super-consciousness, conscious only of the one thought 'sleep' which we had thrown into it."

The reader will perhaps ask how we ourselves expected to escape from the clutches of the superconsciousness we had created. Well, we had discovered that metal was relatively impervious to the telepathic effect, and had prepared for ourselves a sort of tin pulpit, behind which we could stand while conducting experiments. This, combined with caps of metal foil, enormously reduced the effects on ourselves.
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