Vrilium Tube, the Magic Spike



The Vrilium Tube, also known as the Magic Spike, is a brass cylinder containing a quantity of catalytic barium chloride that was formerly marketed for use as a radio-therapeutic instrument, the brand name linking it with vril energy (as detailed in Bulwer-Lytton's The Coming Race). The manufacturers, Vrilium Products Co., promised that wearing the tube around the neck or elsewhere on the body would work to relieve and cure afflictions of the "sinuses, bronchial tubes, thyroid, low red blood corpuscle count, injuries, burned, and illnesses in general."

Abbott E. Kay, who was Robert T. Nelson's sometime partner in the radium business, has been claimed as the original inventor of "Vrilium" (in particular by Martin Gardner in his book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science), though more likely it was purely a product of Nelson's efforts.