Thoughts and spirits by wireless: imagining and building psychic telegraphs in America and Britain, circa 1900–1930

Abstract

This paper revises current understandings of the connections between electrical and psychic forms of communication in the early twentieth century. It builds on and moves beyond scholarly studies that explore the metaphorical and analogical uses of electrical communication in understanding telepathy, spiritualism and other psychic phenomena. I argue that in American and British cultures of wireless telegraphy, electrical experimentation, psychical research and spiritualism, there were sincere attempts to extend electrical-psychic analogies into technological thinking and realisation. Inspired by debates about telepathy, brain waves and other psychic effects, members of these cultures imagined and constructed electrical communication technologies that would address a range of psychic puzzles. Although the technological solutions to psychic puzzles ultimately proved inconclusive, they provide historians with striking insights into the role of ‘irrational’ topics in shaping imagined and actual technological development.

Keywords:

• Wireless
• radio
• spiritualism
• psychical research
• telepathy

Acknowledgements

For their stimulating comments on earlier drafts of this paper I would like to thank Simone Müller-Pohl and Heidi Tworek. For some helpful comments and references I would also like to express my indebtedness to Jon Agar, Phillippe Baudouin, Jaume Navarro and Leslie Price. For permission to quote from material in their archives I thank the College of Psychic Studies.

Notes

1. Miller, “He Sends Thoughts”.

2. Dunninger quoted in Miller, “He Sends Thoughts,” 43. For discussion see Sconce, Haunted Media, 76–77; and Douglas, Listening In, 53.

3. For discussion of this influence see Carroll, Spiritualism in Ante-Bellum America, 134–137; Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines, 184–218; Sconce, Haunted Media, 21–58; and Stolow, “Salvation by Electricity”.

4. On mediums as telegraphic and other machines see Enns 2012.

5. Good examples are Melton, “Telephonic Communication”; Prescott, History, 342–343; and Wander, 2MT Writtle, 4–5. For discussion see Cooper, Telephone Calls, 19–45; and Sconce, Haunted Media, 64–75.

6. Andriopoulos, “Psychic Television”; Campbell, Wireless Writing; Carroll, Spiritualism in Ante-Bellum America, 134–137; Douglas, Listening In, 40–54; Enns, “Psychic Radio”; Galvan, Sympathetic Medium; Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves and Writing Machines, 184–218; Luckhurst, Invention of Telepathy, 135–147; Marvin, When Old Technologies were New, 56–62; Otis, Networking, 180–219; Peters, Speaking into the Air, 110–108; Sconce, Haunted Media; Sollors, “Dr. Benjamin Franklin’s Celestial Telegraph”; Stolow, “Salvation by Electricity”; Stolow, “Wired Religion”; and Thurschwell, Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking.

7. Galvan, Sympathetic Medium, 9.

8. Douglas, Listening In, 46.

9. Pfau and Hochfelder, “Her Voice a Bullet,” esp. 57–67.

10. Maskelyne, Modern Spiritualism, 72.

11. Gauld, Founders of Psychical Research; Oppenheim, Other World.

12. Myers, Human Personality, volume 2, 249.

13. Luckhurst, Invention of Telepathy.

14. Mauskopf and McVaugh, Elusive Science.

15. Cerullo, Secularisation of the Soul, 57–87.

16. Chéroux et al., Perfect Medium, Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead; and Tucker, Nature Exposed, 65–125.

17. Wallace, Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, 182–183.

18. Jolly, Faces of the Living Dead; and Tucker, Nature Exposed, 65–125.

19. Chéroux, “Photographs of Fluids”; and Lachapelle, Investigating the Supernatural, 52–58.

20. Noakes, “Instruments”.

21. Cook, “Relations of Spiritualism to Science,” 130.

22. See, for example, “The Great Calamity”; Shaw, “Wireless Telegraphy”; and Span, “Ethereal and the Material”.

23. There is an enormous literature on early wireless but see especially Aitken, Syntony and Spark; Dalton, Story of Radio Part 1; Douglas, Inventing American Broadcasting; and Headrick, Invisible Weapon, 116–137.

24. For the size of the amateur interest see Dalton, Story of Radio Part 2, 81–82; Godfrey and Leigh, Historical Dictionary of American Radio, 191; and Bartlett, World of Ham Radio, 80.

25. Douglas, Listening In, 52.

26. This can be established from Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years; and Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years.

27. Bowler, Science for All; Broks, Media Science Before the Great War; and Burnham, How Superstition Won.

28. On Gernsback see Ashley and Lowdnes, Gernsback Days.

29. Carrington, “Crookes’s Psychical Researches”; Gernsback, “Thought Recorder”; “One Reader’s Experience”; and Merlitz, “Mental Telepathy”.

30. Gernsback, unsigned editorial in Carrington, “Crookes’s Psychical Researches,” 407.

31. Ibid.

32. Gernsback, “Imagination versus Facts”; and Gernsback, “Nikola Tesla”.

33. Gernsback, “Thought Recorder,” 12 and 84.

34. Ibid.

35. Mauskopf and McVaugh, Elusive Science, 1–24.

36. Harrison, Wireless Messages from Other Worlds; and Murray, “The Soul’s Future,” 7–8.

37. See, for example, “Electricity and the Unseen”; and Grumbine, Telepathy, 39–48.

38. For an illuminating recent survey of the historical development of ideas relating to brain waves and other human radiations see Alvarado 2006.

39. Crookes, “Some Possibilities of Electricity”; and Crookes, “Address by the President,” 352.

40. Craufurd, “Electro-psychics”; Fotherby, “Retrospect and Forecast”; and Lynd, “Telepathy”.

41. “Notes,” 588. cf. “Electric Waves”.

42. Crosland, “Professor Crookes”.

43. Lodge, “Presidential Address,” 19.

44. Barrett, Psychical Research, 107.

45. Ibid.,109.

46. For examples of other criticisms of the brain wave theory see Crosland, “Brain Waves”; Hyslop, “Observations,” 139; and Johnson, “Second Report,” 262.

47. Barrett, “Address,” 333.

48. Barrett, Threshold of the Unseen, 118; and Lodge, Survival of Man, 90 and 114. Lodge’s text used a term he coined to described tuned wireless circuits – ‘syntony’ – to refer to the capacity of individuals to share thoughts independently of recognised channels of sensation.

49. Lodge, “Interstellar Ether”; and Lodge, My Philosophy. For analysis of Lodge’s writing see Wilson, “Thought of Late Victorian Physicists”.

50. Lodge, Ether and Reality, 179.

51. Lewis, “Spirit Communication”.

52. Frost, Wireless Manual, 11; and Frost, “Wireless and the Next World”.

53. See, for example, Collings, “Wireless”; Daly, “A Radio Divining Rod”; Free, “Have ‘Brain Waves’ Been Discovered?”; “Is the Brain a Broadcasting Station?”; “Notes of the Month,” Wireless World 2 (1914–1915), 304; Vesme, “Human Brain Waves”; “Notes of the Month,” Occult Review 28 (1918), 187–203; “Radio Psychometer”. The American monthly magazine Experimental Science was billed as being “The American magazine of Wireless Telegraphy and Telephony” and also featured articles on psychical research. See advertisement in Wireless Age, March 19, 1921, xxv.

54. Wireless practitioners’ interests in psychic phenomena can also be gleaned from the activities of their clubs: See, for example, “Wireless Club Reports,” 68–69; “News from the Clubs”.

55. Stead, “Wireless Telegraphy”; and ‘M. A. B.’, “Mental Radiation”.

56. Risdon, “Psychic Phenomena and Wireless,” 238. Risdon reiterated much of this in his popular manual: Risdon, Wireless, 347–351. I owe this latter reference to Jaume Navarro.

57. Barrett, “Sir W. F. Barrett”.

58. Houdini, “Ghosts that Talk”. cf. Dunninger, “Magic by Radio” and Hort, “Wireless Tricks”.

59. Carrington, “Will We Talk to the Dead by Radio?” 94.

60. “Notes of the Month,” Occult Review 25 (1917), 247–263, 256.

61. Ibid., 257.

62. Craufurd, “Unknown Force”.

63. Craufurd’s views on ‘professors’ were doubtless inflamed by the SPR’s later dismissal of his researches on the electrical responses of living beings to ‘outside stimulus’: Craufurd, “Crisis in the SPR”. In private Lodge expressed disbelief in Craufurd’s ‘Morse code communications’ from spirits and related ‘theories and inventions’: Oliver Lodge to Mercy Phillimore, 14 July 1928, College of Psychic Studies Archives. I owe this reference to Leslie Price.

64. This is clear from Blyton, “Dynamistograph” and “Notes of the Month,” Occult Review 25 (1917), 247–263, 259.

65. Carrington, “Instrumental Communication,” 82. See also Carrington, “Mechanism of the Psychic”.

66. Carrington, “Will We Talk to the Dead by Radio,” 94. See also Carrington, “Are the Dead Trying to Reach us by Radio?”

67. “The Psychic Telegraph,” Light 35 (1915), 293.

68. Crawford, “New Wave Detector”; “The Psychic Telegraph,” Light 35 (1915), 549. For a discussion of Irish poet and occultist W. B. Yeats’ investigation of Wilson’s machine see Blake, “Ghosts in the Machine”.

69. Wilson, “Psychic Telegraphy”. On Wilson’s reputation see Carrington, Story of Psychic Science, 233.

70. Lescarboura, “Edison’s Views,” Scientific American, 446. See also “Mr. Edison’s Life Units”. For an excellent study of Edison and the context of inventions that mediated spirits of the dead see Baudouin, “Machine Nécrophoniques”.

71. Lescarboura, “Edison’s Views on Life and Death,” 446.

72. “Edison’s Own Secret Spirit Experiments”. I owe this reference to Phillipe Baudouin.

73. Carrington, “Will We Talk to the Dead by Radio?” and Carrington, “Are the Dead Trying to Reach Us?”

74. Craufurd and Frost, “Psychic Communication”. This may well have been the same instrument with which Craufurd claimed to have received communications from fairies: “Wireless and the Fairies”. For Craufurd’s interests in fairies see Young, “History of the Fairy Investigation Society”.

75. Craufurd, “Vibrations”.

76. Craufurd and Frost, “Improvements”.

77. “Wireless and Mediumship Problems”.

78. An example of an advertisement for Psychon Radio is in Light 52 (1932), 645. For an image of one model of a Psychon Radio see UK Vintage Radio and Restoration (website; accessed August 25, 2015). http://www.vintage-radio.net/forum/showthread.php?t=65320/.

79. Rhine, Extra-Sensory Perception, 118–125; Carington, “Implications,” 59–60; and Tyrrell, “Normal and Supernormal Perception,” 17.

80. Carrington, Story, 234.

81. In the early 1950s a controversy erupted among British spiritualist circles over an electronic machine that its promoters claimed produced ‘super-rays’ that rendered an individual susceptible to spiritual influence and replace mediums altogether. Critics insisted that the machine’s performance was due entirely to the power of suggestion of its promoters over witnesses: Nelson, Spiritualism, 168.

82. A widely-known example is Sinclair, Mental Radio.

83. Gernsback, “Super-Electronics”.

84. Dyne, Electronic Communication; Holman, “Telepathic Communication”; Lawrence, “Electronics and Parapsychology”; and Raudive, Breakthrough. Citation from Busignies, “Growth and Amplification”.

85. Recent examples of electrical, electronic and information technologies being used to study ‘psi’ effects see Braga, Electronic Projects for the Next Dimension; Ellison, Science and the Paranormal; and Persinger et al., “Correlated Cerebral Events”.

86. Mitchell, “Telepathy,” 331.

87. Quoted in Andriopolous, “Psychic Television,” 634.

88. Andriopolous, “Psychic Television,” 623.

89. This may explain the apparent lack of interest by engineers in parapsychology: Jahn, “The Persistent Paradox,” 140.

90. Carrington, Laboratory Investigations; and Sudré, Treatise, esp. 209–325.

91. De Lauretis, Huyssen and Woodward, Technological Imagination; Balsamo, Designing Culture.