Lights Out

The gadget was as flashy as a jukebox, and paid off even better. It was called the "Spectro-Chrome." A 1,000-watt bulb was propped up in the back of it, shining through red, yellow, green, blue and violet panes of glass. The instructions that came with the box reflected sunny assurance: it would "measure and restore radioactive and radio-emitive equilibrium by attuned color waves." It would also cure all diseases that man is heir to.

Patients were told to give up drugs, forget about surgery, depend on diet and the colored lights. Diabetics should eat raw and brown sugar, expose their bodies to alternate yellow and magenta light; the yellow light was also effective for worms, magenta for heart disease, indigo for pain. Purple would decrease sex desire, scarlet increase it. Gonorrhea could be cured, in early cases, by green or turquoise, in later cases by lemon; syphilis, by two weeks of green plus four weeks of lemon. No matter what was the matter with them, said the gadget's inventor, patients should sleep with their heads pointed north, give up meat, fish, fowl, eggs, honey, coffee, tea, alcohol, tobacco, and stare at the Spectro-Chrome.

Gold in a Gadget. The Spectro-Chrome (TIME, June 2, 1947) soon became a million-dollar business for white-goateed, bespectacled Dinshah Pestanji Framji Ghadiali, born in Bombay 74 years ago and a naturalized U.S. citizen* since 1917. Since 1920 he has sold at least 10,000 memberships at $90 apiece (recently hiked to $100) in his "Spectro-Chrome Institute." Members got the machine, plus a "favorscope" which tells the best time for starting treatment; for $3.50 a year they could get up-to-date guidance from Ghadiali; for another $10, they could get new panes if the old ones broke (they could have bought them much cheaper at a five-&-dime store).

Since 1945 the Federal Food & Drug Administration has been trying to douse Ghadiali's lights. Last January, in Camden, Ghadiali was convicted of introducing a misbranded article into interstate commerce; he was fined $8,000, the institute $12,000, and given until the next week to pay. Ghadiali appealed, brought in 112 patients who claimed they felt better. The Government countered with grimmer testimony: a son testified that his father, a diabetic, died after three weeks' treatment; the husband of a woman with tuberculosis said his wife lost 40 pounds, then died; a woman said her son died before her eyes while she was giving him the lights treatment.

Search for the Gullible. Last week Food & Drug agents moved in on the block-long institute building at Malaga, N.J., impounded every Spectro-Chrome in the place. Then they trucked five tons of Ghadiali's instructions, magazines and correspondence to the Camden city incinerator. The FDA has also filed 25 suits to recover other known machines elsewhere, but has no idea how many others are still in use.

*In 1934 Ghadiali dazzled a federal court into believing he was a Parsee-Zoroastrian, thus a Caucasian and therefore eligible for citizenship under the law then in effect.

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