The famous American physicist was not crazy at all. At least, it is unlikely that the holder of more than a thousand patents for serious devices, many of which have made a real revolution in science, can be suspected of dementia.
But there is evidence that Edison was confident in the possibility of communicating with the departed. This was also mentioned by his great contemporaries, in particular, Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla, although the colleagues did not share the “otherworldly” enthusiasm.
In scientific circles, Edison was considered a perfectionist and a terrible bore: since he got something into his head, he would not just give up the idea. “If he needed to find a needle in a haystack, he would immediately begin to examine straw after straw with the feverish diligence of a bee until he found the subject of his search,” Nikola Tesla described his first employer.
By the way, getting a job at Edison Machine Works was, to put it mildly, difficult. Edison, who possessed an encyclopedic amount of knowledge, made fantastic demands on candidates. He once complained to Albert Einstein about the impenetrable stupidity of youth. He decided to look at the list of questions that the applicants had to answer, and after five minutes he returned it with the words: "Perhaps I will not wait for your refusal and I will withdraw my candidacy myself."
Why is it not at all romantic and far from occultist Thomas Edison suddenly carried away by the idea of communicating with the dead? And he even started to develop a device, which he called a duhophone. This is evidenced by the little-known chapter of his memoirs, which was presented in France at the beginning of March this year.
The reason is in Edison's scientific views: he believed that in nature all information exchange is carried out exclusively on an electromagnetic basis. And if so, then every thinking soul posthumously will definitely try to make contact with people dear to it. And to communicate with souls you need a supersensitive telephone set.
At the end of 1870, Thomas Edison made an agreement with his fellow engineer William Walter Dinuiddy that the first of them to die would try to send a second message from the afterlife.
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According to biographers, 8 kg of gold, 20 kg of silver and 150 g of platinum were spent on the research and development of the duhphone. The membranes of the receiving and microphone capsules were made of gold, the thinnest wire was drawn from silver for winding inductors and transformers. Platinum has been used to fabricate cathode plates for high and low frequency amplifiers.
Wire lines took 300 kg of oxygen-free copper. They say that all these technical tricks led to a patent for an invention. It turns out that the idea was embodied in a workable design? However, modern physicists have their own point of view on this issue.
And suddenly the duhphone rang …
In 2009, two strange telephones were discovered by distant relatives of Edison - one in New York, the other in Delhi. Since they could not be connected to the modern telephone network, testing them proved to be difficult. However, enthusiasts claimed that they communicated with their deceased relatives through these spiritophones.
But this has not been scientifically proven. As a theoretical explanation of the phenomenon itself, there is a hypothesis according to which Edison's devices somehow stimulate certain parts of the cerebral cortex, extracting memories from the subconscious and creating the illusion of communication.
SPECIALIST COMMENT
Deception of hearing or scientific tricks
It is quite possible that Thomas Edison designed and even presented his duhphone to the public, the chief researcher of the Institute of Physics of the National Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Professor Yevgeny Tolkachev does not exclude:
- And, most likely, some sounds were heard in this device, which viewers (or listeners), tuned in the appropriate way, could take for highly distorted voices of the deceased. The fact is that our world is completely quiet: the electromagnetic fields emitted by our planet, radio waves, etc. are making noise. There are also noises that we just imagine. For example, if you tightly attach a sea shell to your ear, you can clearly hear the supposedly splash of sea waves.
In fact, this is just the beating of our heart and the noise of blood in the vessels - the shell in this case acts as an amplifier and resonator. And the larger it is, the clearer the noise is. And our brain itself "selects" the analogy most familiar to it - the surf. Thus, in fact, Edison did not deceive anyone, since for sure some kind of noise was heard. And how to interpret it is everyone's personal business.
The relationship between science and finance has remained complex at all times. To raise money for serious research, many scientists were forced to engage in this kind of trick. Many famous people have followed this path. In particular, Nikola Tesla, who was far from being a fool, showed the effect of the glow of his body, having previously placed himself in a high-frequency field. It's a pretty simple trick - St. Elmo's lights.
But, as the famous comedian said, “the public went on a rampage,” and at the same time paid money. In principle, the language does not turn to reproach scientists: Tesla demonstrated tricks, but the funds from these ideas still went to science. It is not for nothing that the unit of measurement of the magnetic field is named after this person.
The theme of the afterlife has always been widely exploited. In the 1970s, I was at a conference in Georgia in the Kutaisi region. I was struck by the local cemeteries - there were radios on the graves. What if you need it? In our country, on Radunitsa, people go to the cemetery and leave treats on the graves so that their ancestors would not be offended.
Now even quite adequate people put mobile phones in the coffins of loved ones - what if they wake up and call? This means that the people still live with the prejudices of previous eras, especially since it was exacerbated in the time of Edison. It is possible, though unlikely, that the inventor himself believed in them. In fact, scientists know absolutely nothing about what happens to us after death. At least for now.
Olga BABENINA
