The irreconcilable enmity between science and the occult, which scientists now unequivocally consider quackery, is far from obvious. Life talks about how science and technology a hundred years ago, with varying success, tried to reach out to ghosts.
From the end of the 19th century to World War II, new technologies - electricity, wireless telegraph, radio - were perceived as a long-awaited tool capable of establishing a reliable connection with the spirit world. Apparatuses for this purpose were invented and tested by a variety of engineers, ranging from Edison and ending with little-known Danes and Germans.
Invisible waves
In the XIX century, two innovative techniques of communication at a distance were born and developed - the telegraph and spiritualism. Unsurprisingly, the success of electrical "contact" with individuals in other countries and continents influenced the way Spiritists perceived their (certainly controversial) means of communication with the world of the dead. It was believed that the invisible channel of communication between the medium and the ghosts worked on the principle of electric - like a "heavenly" or "spiritual" telegraph. The idea that messages from another world would come in the form of tapping tables and plates seemed quite convincing in the light of Morse code. Finally, the ability of a trance-like medium to record messages from the dead has been called automatic writing - by analogy with numerous automatic transmission devices.
The experimental detection of electromagnetic waves in 1888 and the development of the radio telegraph raised new hopes for a scientific explanation for paranormal phenomena. For the first time, wireless telegraph, and then telephone communication, allowed people to talk at a distance and filled the airwaves with "voices" that were picked up by a properly configured receiver. These technological innovations have given new persuasiveness to occult ideas about communication with ethereal mind (ghosts). In addition, the "ghostly" presence of distant people, provided by radio and telegraph, made many people seriously think that the devices were controlled by the spirits of the dead.
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Curiously, hopes of finding spirits using radio and telegraph appeared at the moment when the project of spiritualist photography collapsed - another powerful attempt to use the latest technology to master the unknown. Enthusiasts pointed to spots, "aura" or even clear images of spirits, invisible to the naked eye, but appearing in photographs. However, according to the results of several examinations, it turned out that such pictures were obtained either as a result of outright fraud, or due to defects in the developer. And those - very numerous - residents of Europe and America, who believed in the reality of ghosts and other occult phenomena, were forced to abandon technology and again rely on unreliable intermediaries (mediums) in communicating with the “other world”.
Ether is a special space between two worlds
Until radio was invented! This technology turned out to be insanely popular: in dozens of science and technology magazines, scientists, engineers, journalists, and self-taught people discussed how to receive radio signals from other planets, whether it is possible to design equipment for reading minds, and how to transmit electricity over radio waves. Excitement for the limitless possibilities of technology in mastering the unknown is read on every page of the Electrical Experimenter, a popular science magazine that was launched in 1913 by Hugo Gernsbeck, an inventor, businessman and editor of the world's first science fiction magazine.
Gernsbek did more than just publish engaging articles on the subject of telepathy and spiritism. In 1917, he presented a draft of his own "thought recorder". Inspired by the positive feedback from Nikola Tesla himself to the idea of recording thoughts by technical means, Gernsbek expressed complete confidence that a working brain emits a special physical energy that can somehow be captured and thereby put telepathy on a scientific basis. The prototype of the device included an "audion" (an apparatus that captures and amplifies (amplifies) the "thought waves" of the brain) and an undulator with a siphon ink supply that traced waves on paper ribbons.
The confidence of Gernsbeck and very serious readers of his magazine in the technologization of telepathy rested on an increasingly pseudo-scientific language used by adherents of spiritualism and other forms of occultism in the early twentieth century. As mentioned above, the stunning success of the telegraph and radio has strengthened the position of spiritualists who have long insisted on the possibility of "communication at a distance." In the 1890s, after Hertz's experiments with electric waves, the discovery of X-rays and Marconi's experiments with the radiotelegraph, William Crookes, a prominent British chemist who discovered thallium and first obtained helium in laboratory conditions, presented to the public a hypothesis according to which the brain emits and receives vibrations in ether, which somehow transfer thoughts and images. This is precisely the physical basis of telepathy.
Crookes' hypothesis was accepted with skepticism by both physicists and occultists. The authors of the technical publication The Electrician wrote ironically in 1893 that "now it is necessary to talk about the focal length of rumors or wave fluctuations of sarcastic remarks." Spiritualists, on the other hand, demanded that at least one thought or picture be transmitted through the "brain waves" during the experiment - otherwise there is no faith in Crookes' hypothesis.
Another prominent British physicist (optics and electrical engineering), William Barrett, who is also interested in the paranormal, clearly distinguished the telegraph and telepathy. The "waves" of the latter do not weaken depending on the distance between the receiver and the transmitter, they represent strong and accurate images of what is being transmitted, no physical energy is spent on their transmission, finally, they are received far from everywhere, but only by some "living receivers". At the same time, both Barrett and his even more famous colleague Oliver Lodge (one of the inventors of the radio, who during the First World War wrote a book about spiritual contacts with his son who died at the front) continued to compare telepathic and radio communication - at least at the level of metaphors.
Until his death in 1940, Lodge defended the idea of an all-pervading ether - a special space where the visible matter of the Universe (and all kinds of waves in it) merges with the invisible world of consciousness, soul and spirit. Lodge, the acknowledged father of radiotelegraphy, the inventor of the radio, the electrodynamic loudspeaker and the electric spark plug, declared that all our influence on matter passes through the medium of the ether. This environment, free from the imperfections of empirically observed matter (friction, radioactive decay, and so on), can preserve the traits of the soul and spirit for an infinitely long time even after the death of the body - the ether guarantees, according to Lodge, life after death and communication with ghosts.
Duhophone, dynamistograph and others
Aether and Reality, Lodge's bestseller from 1925, inspired many radio amateurs to build devices to communicate with the world of the dead. Moreover, in the 1920s and 1930s, the same authors were published in scientific and technical journals (Electrical Experimenter, English Mechanics, Popular Radio, Wireless World) and occult publications (Light, Occult Review). Fans of radio communications were fond of spiritualism, and occultists were always ready to experiment with radio waves and electricity in order to finally "catch" the spirits.
Of course, they were engaged in these magazines and exposing the paranormal. For example, the famous illusionist Harry Houdini wrote an article in Popular Radio about how the voices of "spirits" from pipes and other inanimate objects were obtained thanks to the receiving circuits hidden there, transmitting the voice of a magician's accomplice speaking into a microphone in the next room. But in the same issue of Popular Radio, journalist Hereward Carrington assured readers that photographs of thoughts and emotions taken by French psychiatrist Hippolyte Baradyuk indicate that the activity of consciousness affects the ether and creates tangible vibrations.
And the same Carrington told the readers about the "ghost detector", which in 1916 was designed by the Dutch inventors J. Matla and G. Zaalberg van Zelst. Following the instructions of the spirits themselves, they built a "dynamistograph" - an electromechanical printing device with elements of a wired and wireless telegraph. The main part of the device was a key, printing letters and made so sensitive as to respond to the smallest vibrations, allegedly caused by spirits. Unfortunately, the journalist kept silent about the specific results of communication with ghosts.
At the same time, the dynamistographer seemed to experts to be a more reliable and "objective" apparatus than, for example, David Wilson's "spiritual telegraph" (1915). The device was made from a variety of oscillators, batteries, a telephone receiver, a piece of radium, and a mysterious "metal transmitter". The inventor announced it as a "telegraphic system for communication between worlds", able to do without human intermediaries (mediums). However, the caustic viewers who watched the operation of the apparatus noticed that it only works in the presence of Wilson, which somehow influences the recording of the "messages". After a series of experiments, the inventor himself admitted his "mental effect", after which no one else heard about him.
But already in the 1920s, Thomas Edison himself began building a device for scientifically grounded communication with ghosts - a duophone. Unfortunately, no technical details have survived, we do not know how much the great inventor (convinced of the existence of ghosts and their talkativeness) advanced along this path. But his articles and interviews in the popular science magazine Scientific American inspired Quentin Crowfurd and Cyril Frost, retired British officers and electrical engineers, to patent a radio communication device without antennas in 1929. Four years later, Crowfurd began to design an even more advanced radio receiver, capable of "detecting" waves from the other world - but, as usual, then he did not say anything more about his plan.
Neurotechnology: a new hope
The failure of these projects led to the fact that by the early 1930s occultists and radio amateurs became disillusioned with each other. Early hopes of a clear similarity between electrical and paranormal phenomena were dashed. Parapsychologists abandoned the language of physics and switched to the language of psychophysiology, trying to find an objective basis for extrasensory abilities through laboratory experiments with people, and not with devices.
But the romance of the occult and new technologies did not end so easily. Already during the Second World War, in the wake of the lightning-fast development of electronics, the same tireless popularizer and science fiction writer Hugo Gernsbek predicts the "era of super-electronics", which will allow people to enhance their abilities - both ordinary and psychic. In the 1950s and 70s, scientific and technical journals discussed designs for electronic devices for detecting ghosts - although not as often as in the interwar era.
Finally, already now, in the 2010s, the success of neurophysiological experiments in visualizing the processes occurring in the brain and the transfer of individual sensations from one rat brain to another made the futurists joyfully exclaim again - telepathy is not far off, all that remains is to design nanotechnological implants for transmitting thoughts! But, like a century ago, all these hopes will be mercilessly trampled by objective reality …
Anna Polonskaya