In 1653 doctors recommended the following as treatment for a female condition known as "hysteria" which dates back to the time of Hippocrates: "... we consider it necessary to ask a midwife to assist so that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside using oil of lilies, musk root, crocus or [something] similar. And in this way the afflicted woman can be aroused to paroxysm ... most especially for widows, those who live chaste lives, and female religious ... it is less often recommended for very young women, or married women, for whom it is a better remedy to engage in intercourse with their spouses."

The treatment wasn't generally thought of as sexual, but rather as ho-hum therapy. Not surprisingly, it was a cash cow for the medical profession. Women had to return week after week, year after year. But doing it by hand was exhausting, tedious work; some women had to be massaged for an hour before they reached paroxysm. As a result, in the early 1800's doctors experimented with other strategies for arousing women including rocking chairs, a swing, and vehicles that bounced the patient rhythmically on her pelvis.

Around 1870 a wind-up vibrator was made available to both spas and physicians, but it had a tendency to run down before the treatment was "complete".

In 1872 an American physician patented the "Manipulator" - a steam-powered massage and vibratory apparatus. He warned that treatment should be watched to avoid over-manipulation.

Paradoxically, while female patients were being massaged to paroxysm week after week, men prone to excessive onanism and unwholesome nocturnal secretions were diagnosed with "spermatorrhea." Torturelike contraptions were contrived to strap and zap them back to normal. Men fortunate enough to be diagnosed with more amorphous ailments were sometimes treated with vibrator massage. The legendary naturalist John Muir patented his own vibrator for men in 1899.

In the 1880s, a British doctor stepped in to invent the first electric vibrator, an industrial-size contraption meant to be a permanent fixture in a doctor's office.

Other physicians followed suit with contraptions intended to serve as vibrators. Articles and textbooks on vibratory massage technique praised the machine's versatility for treating nearly all diseases in both sexes and saving physicians time and labor. These vibrators reduced the time of "getting there" from up to an hour to approximately 10 minutes. Vibrator innovation was in fact a driving force behind the creation of the small electric motor. Hamilton Beach of Racine, Wis., patented its first take-home vibrator in 1902, making the vibrator the fifth electrical appliance to be introduced into the home, after the sewing machine and long before the electric iron.

In 1905 convenient portable models became available, permitting house calls, and by 1917, there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes. Dozens of patents were issued for new designs between 1900 and 1940. Manufactured long before the era of engineered obsolescence, these machines were built to last. During this period, vibrators were advertised in Home Needlework Journal as a health and relaxation aid with which "all the pleasures of youth will throb within you."

Starting in the 1920s, stag reels blew the vibrator's cover, revealing it to be the sex toy that it was. The most famous of these flicks was The Nun's Story (not to be confused with the 1959 Audrey Hepburn film of the same name). It starred the wife of bodybuilder Vic Tanney, who disrobes from her nun's habit and then reclines luxuriantly with her electric vibrator until a virile but clean-cut Peeping Tom shows up. At this time, physicians also realized that orgasm didn't necessarily involve penetration. Once they connected "arousal to paroxysm" with eroticism, the vibrator's era as a medical appliance ended.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, the vibrator became what academics like to call a camouflaged technology. Mail-order catalogs full of household devices featured beautiful women with long, silky hair loosening their tight shoulder muscles with banana-shaped vibrators. Also popular were vibrators that doubled as nail-buffer kits, hair brushes, backscratchers, and some that were designed as attachments for vacuum cleaners. Most of them were cheesy, battery-operated devices that came in shag-carpet hues: avocado, gold, and burnt orange.

In 1973, Betty Dodson started masturbation groups for women to raise their sexual consciousness, and she introduced them to the wonders of the Hitachi Magic Wand, which she contended could wake the most somnambulant clitoris. Her book Sex for One was translated into eight languages. That same year, Eve's Garden, a sex shop for women, opened in New York City. Good Vibrations followed nearly five years later in San Francisco.

Vibrators came back into the mainstream in the 1990s, thanks not to radical feminists but to the Reagan administration. With the public health threat of AIDS looming, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop mailed out a list of safe-sex options to every household in the land in the late 1980s. Vibrators were on it.

In 1999, Rachel Maines published The Technology of Orgasm, a provocative history of the vibrator that she spent 20 years researching. Maines started out studying needlework but was intrigued to discover that the backs of old sewing magazines were filled with vibrator advertisements. In addition to treating hysteria, these early vibrators were multipurpose: They ostensibly relaxed furrowed foreheads, cured sore throats, and restored plumpness to bony arms. Fearing that her new line of academic inquiry might offend alumni, Clarkson University fired Maines. The Technology of Orgasm has become one of the best-selling histories of technology of all time.

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