Mathison, Volney G
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1897-1965) US chiropractor, inventor and author who began to publish work of genre interest with The Radiobuster: Being Some of the Adventures of Samuel Jones, Deep Sea Wireless Operator (stories 1922-1923 Radio; coll of linked stories 1924), which incorporates a trip to Mars in the episode entitled "The Martian Marvel". Other Sam Jones stories included further work for Radio plus "Sam Jones, Radio Tube Bootlegger" (July 1926 Radio News) and "The Mongolians Ray" (June 1929 Amazing Stories). One of his Inventions, the "Mathison electropsychometer" (based on the psychogalvanometer, or Lie-Detector), was taken over by L Ron Hubbard in the early 1950s to be used as a quasi-religious engineering-based personality monitor in Scientology; it then became known as the E-meter, though it was also called the electroencephaloneuromentimograph (see Pseudoscience). Volney resisted its assimilation into the Church, however, and the device fell out of use between 1954 and 1966, when a modified device was patented, just after Mathison's death, by Hubbard himself. [JC]
Volney G Mathison
born Paducah, Texas: 13 August 1897
died Los Angeles, California: 3 January 1965
works
- The Radiobuster: Being Some of the Adventures of Samuel Jones, Deep Sea Wireless Operator (New York: Frederick A Stokes Company, 1924) [coll of linked stories: hb/]
nonfiction (selected)
- Electropsychometry (Los Angeles, California: Mathison Electropsychometers, 1953) with L Ron Hubbard [nonfiction: pb/]
- Creative Image Theory (Los Angeles, California: Mathison Electropsychometers, 1954) [nonfiction: chap: pb/]
- The Secret Power of the Crystal Pendulum: How to Use It (Los Angeles, California: Institute of Self-Hypnosis, 1954) [nonfiction: chap: pb/nonpictorial]
- The Secret of the Lourdes Miracles Revealed (Los Angeles, California: Mathison Electropsychometers, 1954) [nonfiction: chap: date of publication not secure: pb/]
links
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