That was over a decade ago, and while Meloy has enjoyed a successful career as a physician, progress on the Orgasmatron has stalled. One stumbling block is the generators used, which cost around $25,000. Meloy is confident that an Orgasmatron could get by on a much smaller power source, sufficient for about an hour’s use per day. “Pulsing constantly for days at a time is not, in my humble opinion, all that necessary to treat sexual dysfunction,” he says. “Some of us have to go to work.” Unfortunately, no suitable alternative exists, and he hasn’t been able to convince any medical manufacturers to design one.

Then there is the issue of who pays for such an implant. “Insurance companies will not pay for anything considered experimental or investigational,” he explains. Although Meloy has fitted hundreds of patients with the devices for pain management (some of whom reported experiencing its famously positive side effect), implanting it specifically to treat sexual dysfunction would be a breach of regulations. Despite the headlines, the device still has not been shown to be an effective treatment for sexual dysfunction, and anyone thinking of faking a painful condition in order to get one risks disappointment. To get approval from the Food and Drug Administration, Meloy would have to carry out a “pivotal trial”, which would cost around $6m. “That’s money I don’t have right now,” he sighs.

Pleasure centre

Strangely, Meloy isn’t the first person to stumble upon the idea of installing a pleasure button in humans. In the 1950s, another US physician, named Robert Gabriel Heath, was treating psychological disorders at the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane University in New Orleans. Heath wanted to develop something that was as effective as a lobotomy – still relatively common in that day – but was far less destructive. He achieved this with electrotherapy, using dentistry drills to cut tiny holes in the skulls his patients, through which thin metal probes were pushed, so that pulses of electricity could be administered directly to the brain.

Heath discovered that by activating the septal region, he could induce a rush of pleasure that subdued violent behaviours in by some of his patients. And when given their own pleasure switch, patients were able to manage their mood swings.

One patient clocked up 1,500 doses in a three-hour period, but overall, they showed surprising restraint. (Unlike rats that underwent the same procedure, which self-administered to the point of exhaustion).

Reportedly, Heath’s pleasure button earned him a visit from the CIA, who wanted to know if the technology could be used to inflict pain instead, to interrogate enemies of the state – or even control their minds. Heath threw the man out of his lab. “If I wanted to be a spy, I’d be a spy,” he thundered to the New York Times in an interview. “I wanted to be a doctor and practise medicine”.

Some of Heath’s contemporaries, however, saw the wider implications of bringing human emotions to heel. Jose Manuel Rodriguez Delgado was another researcher who chanced upon the ability to manipulate pleasurable sensations in patient’s brains. He also paired electronic brain stimulators with radio transceivers, effectively putting the subject under remote control. Famously, Delgado was so confident in his tech that he leapt into a bullring opposite one of his experimental animals. As the bull charged at him, Delgado was able to make it stop, bellow and turn it in circles with a flick of his remote (see video, below).