Two hundred years ago James Tilly Matthews described a sinister political plot using the latest technologies to influence official opinion and plunge England into war. He was branded a lunatic and sent to the notorious Bedlam insane asylum. But was Matthews really bonkers, or was he just ahead of his time? Historian Mike Jay says Matthews' dark vision of technology-assisted conspiracy has become a defining idea of our own age. How reality caught up with paranoid delusions.