In the late 1880s a Prussian immigrant to the US named Willam Radam had found a cure for many diseases and illnesses, making a fortune out of a tonic called "Microbe Killer" (aka Pink Lightning or Blitz Wine). He had suffered malaria, rheumatism, and psychological problems associated with the death of two of his children. But being a farmer in Austin, Texas he looked at how one would kill insects affecting his cabbage crops. Destroy them with poisons. But since poisons would kill a human host he looked to lightning which sterilizes the surrounding atmosphere. He then worked hard to develop a machine to simulate its chemical effects and yet use primarily 99.381 percent water for the base liquid. He constructed an internal heating element inside a sealed tank filled with water, sulfur, sandalwood, maganese oxide, nitrate of soda, and other substances until the mixture was purified and mixed with a small amount of wine to produce a pinkish elixir. He tried it on himself and cured himself of all disease and then marketed his product, becoming a millionaire and moving to NY with a mansion on Fifth Avenue. 17 manufactuign plants were operating to produce the elixir for both sides of the Atlantic in the 1890s forward. The "Microbe Killer" was so popular that many counterfeits came along and gradually the original formula was lost after strich health laws were passed in 1906 and reinforced in 1912. Radam was labeled a quack and forced out of business even though there was no explanation for his cure or the thousands of testimonies of being cured by purchasers. Word, however, spread back to Germany and the Kaiser had scientists working on it. They could not duplicate his machine nor methods which varied by batch number and missed several ingredients. So it was largely forgotten until the Third Reich which turned the old notes over to the SS medical experimentation authorities tied to Dachau. But even as the works were studied, the Germans were the first to make the connection between smoking and cancer and other research into methamphetamines and exotic synthetic pain killers. So Radam's work was forgotten and is now lost to history...

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