"The Kansas City Star" (Missouri) Sunday, October 17, 1897 FREE ELECTRIC BATHS. Bathing in electricity is the daily amusement of a number of men in a big office building in this town. Several times a day the men saturate themselves with static electricity, and one of them is getting fat on it. The others haven't been bathing long enough to know whether they will get fat or die. The process was discovered by a man who was paying a doctor $2.50 three times a week for electrical treatment for nervousness. He is chief engineer of this building. One day he crawled into the pit beneath the big belt that draws the elevator and dynamo machinery. When he desired to come out he handed his assistant a metal lamp he was carrying. The assistant got an electric shock that made him see violet stars. After that, the engineer forsook the doctor and saved $7.50 a week. Static electricity is that produced by friction, and is just what the doctor was furnishing from the brush machine at $2.50 a dose. The great belt in its swift revolutions produces and stores the electric fluid by friction. To steal the electricity the men stand close to it holding over it a magnet made of copper wire wound on a spool with both ends of the wire loose. To complete the circuit a copper wire is fastened to an iron water pipe nearby and a silver dollar placed in a loop in the loose end. This is passed up and down the body creating a circuit of the electricity and literally bathing the whole system in the fluid. One of the men who takes these electric baths has relieved himself of rheumatism. Another is treating himself for a nervous disorder, while others take it for a tonic. ====================================================== neirbo7