It incorporated keys, levers, barrels, batteries, sails,īrass retorts and magnetic fluid, and worked by directing and modulating magnetically charged air currents, rather as the stops of an organ modulate its tones. They were using a machine called an 'Air Loom', of which Matthews was able to draw immaculate technical diagrams, and which combined recent developments in gas chemistry with the strange force of animal magnetism, or mesmerism. Matthews was convinced that outside the grounds of Bedlam, in a basement cellar by London Wall, a gang of villains were controlling and tormenting his mind with diabolical rays. For everyone who has since had messages beamed at them through fillings, mysterious implants or TV sets, or via hi-tech surveillance, MI5, Masonic lodges or UFOs, James Tilly Matthews is Patient Zero.

Haslam's account is still acknowledged as the first example in history of the now-familiar notion of mind control by an 'influencing machine'. His patient's name was James Tilly Matthews, and his view of the world had by this point become one of the strangest ever recorded in the annals of psychiatry. The other was rather more personal: the apothecary, John Haslam, was determined to prove, against a great deal of contrary opinion, that the patient was indeed mad, and by the same token that he himself was the model for a new and specialist category of doctor.

One was professional: the delusions in question were the most unusual and systematic that anyone had ever come across. The Air Loom Gang: James Tilly Matthews and his visionary madness by Mike Jay There were two compelling reasons why, in 1810, the resident apothecary at the Royal Bethlem Hospital - Bedlam - wrote the first ever book-length psychiatric report on a mad patient's delusions.

The Air Loom Gang by Mike Jay