From Galvani’s frog leg to a cushioned helmet.
The story of TMS is the story of two old ideas — electricity and magnetism — colliding with a long search for kinder treatments for severe mental illness. It is shorter than you might think, and most of it has happened in the last forty years.
The science before the medicine.
In the late 1700s, Italian physician Luigi Galvani noticed that metal touched to a frog’s leg made it twitch. He concluded — correctly — that living things use small electrical signals inside their nerves and muscles. Galvani had discovered that the body itself is electrical.
In 1831, the British scientist Michael Faraday showed that a moving magnet near a wire creates a current — and equivalently, that a current in a coil creates a magnetic field. This is electromagnetic induction, the physical principle every TMS coil depends on today.
But for most of the next 150 years, the only powerful brain treatment for severe depression was ECT (electroconvulsive therapy), introduced in the 1930s. ECT can save lives. It also requires anesthesia and a generalized seizure. Through the mid-twentieth century, scientists kept asking the same question: is there a kinder way?
The full timeline.
- 1780s
Galvani: animal electricity
Italian physician Luigi Galvani shows that nerves and muscles operate on tiny electrical signals — establishing that the body itself is electrical.
- 1831
Faraday: electromagnetic induction
Michael Faraday demonstrates that a changing magnetic field induces an electrical current in a nearby conductor — the physical principle that TMS depends on.
- 1985
Barker builds the first TMS machine
In Sheffield, England, Anthony Barker delivers the first non-invasive magnetic stimulation of the human cortex — observing that a coil over the motor strip can produce a hand twitch with no needles, no surgery, no anesthesia.
- 2008
First FDA TMS clearance — NeuroStar, MDD
The first TMS device is cleared by the FDA for major depressive disorder in adults who have not benefited adequately from antidepressants.
- 2013
BrainsWay Deep TMS cleared — MDD
BrainsWay's H1 coil receives a de novo FDA clearance for major depressive disorder, on the basis of the Levkovitz et al. multisite pivotal RCT (n = 212, World Psychiatry 2015).
- 2018
BrainsWay — OCD (a first)
The BrainsWay H7 coil becomes the first TMS device of any kind cleared by the FDA for obsessive-compulsive disorder, on the basis of the Carmi et al. pivotal RCT (Am J Psychiatry 2019).
- 2020
BrainsWay — short-term smoking cessation
The BrainsWay H4 coil becomes the first brain-stimulation device cleared for any addiction, on the basis of the Zangen et al. pivotal RCT (n = 262, World Psychiatry 2021).
- 2021
BrainsWay — anxious depression
The BrainsWay H1 system receives a label expansion for major depression with comorbid anxiety — the first TMS device specifically cleared for the indication.
- 2024
BrainsWay — late-life depression (ages 22–86)
The H1 indication expands to include older adults — making BrainsWay the only TMS system formally cleared across this age range.
- Sept 2025
BrainsWay accelerated protocol cleared
The SWIFT protocol — five sessions a day for six days, plus a four-week continuation — is FDA-cleared on the basis of a multisite non-inferiority RCT (NCT06357832). It compresses the acute phase from six weeks to six days.
- Nov 2025
BrainsWay — adolescent MDD (ages 15–21)
BrainsWay's H1 system is cleared as adjunctive therapy for adolescent and young-adult depression. With the existing adult clearances, BrainsWay is now the only single TMS device formally cleared across the uninterrupted age range 15–86.
The 1985 moment
In Sheffield, England, on a quiet afternoon, the physiologist Anthony Barker placed a magnetic coil over a volunteer’s head. He pulsed it. The volunteer’s hand moved on its own.
No needles. No surgery. No anesthesia. The magnet, working through the skull, had whispered to the brain. That moment — the first non-invasive magnetic stimulation of the human cortex — is the origin point of every TMS device on the market today.
From mechanism to medicine
It took twenty-three more years of safety studies before the FDA cleared the first TMS device for major depressive disorder, in 2008. Five years after that, BrainsWay received its de novo FDA clearance for the same indication using the H1 coil — and the broader, deeper field of the H-coil opened up a sequence of additional clearances no other TMS manufacturer has matched: OCD in 2018, smoking cessation in 2020, anxious depression in 2021, late-life depression in 2024, the accelerated SWIFT protocol in September 2025, and adolescent and young-adult depression (ages 15–21) in November 2025.
BrainsWay is now the only single TMS device formally cleared across the uninterrupted age range 15 to 86 — the deep clinical reason IPMG TMS chose to deploy both H1 and H7 systems at every one of our 33 Southern California locations.
The next decade.
Several research directions are likely to shape the next decade of TMS:
- Personalized targeting — fMRI-guided protocols (the Stanford SAINT/SNT line of work) that target the specific dorsolateral prefrontal location most strongly anti-correlated with each patient’s subgenual anterior cingulate. This produced extraordinary effect sizes in research settings; the field is working out how to deliver it at scale.
- Closed-loop EEG protocols that time pulses to the brain’s own oscillations.
- Expanded indications — BrainsWay’s Deep TMS 360 platform launched a multicenter trial for alcohol use disorder in late 2025; trials in additional substance-use disorders, generalized anxiety, and schizophrenia negative-symptoms are underway.
- Shorter protocols — the September 2025 SWIFT clearance compresses a 6-week course into 6 days. Expect more of this.
For the citation-disciplined version of all of this, see the Research & Evidence library.
Take the next step.
A consultation with the IPMG TMS team is a careful conversation: are you a candidate, what would your protocol look like, what does your insurance cover, and where in our 33-location network would you be treated. Call (909) 707-6261 and leave a voicemail, or email Jogendra.Singh@inlandpsych.com — a care coordinator will return your message.