Thomas Edison's Spirit Phone

Here's a fun article from Atlas Obscura. It seems that Thomas Edison invented a "spirit phone" that was intended to communicate with spirits of the dead. In the 1920's spiritualism was still going full-force, and researchers were very interested in the implications of apparently physical manifestations that occurred during seances.

In 1920, the inventor shocked the public when he told American Magazine: “I have been at work for some time, building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.” Edison, who was known for having hundreds of patents of inventions and creating an efficient version of the light bulb, added that this new invention would not function by “any occult, mystifying, mysterious, or weird means, employed by so–called “mediums”, but by scientific methods. I am engaged in the construction of one such apparatus now, and I hope to be able to finish it before very many months pass.”

Edison’s idea became known as a “spirit phone”, and caused a media storm. For years many historians believed the invention to be a joke or a hoax; no blueprints or prototypes of a spirit phone could be found. But while he may not have actually contacted the dead, there is evidence he experimented with the idea. In 2015 the French journalist Philippe Baudouin found a rare version of Edison’s diary in a thrift store in France. This version includes a chapter that was not printed in the widely known 1948 English edition, called the Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. This missing chapter was dedicated to his theory of the spirit world, and how it might be possible to contact it. Baudouin re-published the French edition as Le Royaume de l’au-delà.

Edison was such an extreme self-promoter that it's hard to imagine him not taking credit for contacting the spirit world if his device ever worked. That fact alone suggests that it never did. The article goes into more detail about Edison's model of how he thought the spirit world worked, and from that account I think I can see what the problem was. Detector sensitivity would have beem an issue with the electronics of the time, but beyond that I doubt something based on Edison's model would work even with the latest technology.

Speaking to loved ones beyond the grave may have appealed to the public, but for Edison this was a matter of strict science. Edison believed that life was indestructible, and that the “quantity could never be increased or decreased.” He theorized that like our bodies, our personalities have a physical form, made of tiny “entities” similar to our current view of atoms. He thought these entities might exist after humans passed away—a personality-based residue of loose memories and thoughts, containing part of who a person was during life. If these particles existed, he reasoned, they could collect together in the ether around us. Possibly they could be amplified by his device like a human voice could be amplified and recorded by a phonograph.

Parapsychology research in both the United States and the former Soviet Union established pretty comprehensively that paranormal phenomema do not involve any sort of particle that can be measured by standard means. Those findings don't necessarily preclude some sort of exotic particle that evades most measurements, but even so, Edison's apparatus would have been unable to detect those as well. Much more advanced detectors available from the 1950's through the 1970's remained unable to detect any particles associated with spirits and/or psychic phenomena.

My own experiments suggest that conjured spirits can affect a modern EMF detector, though it has to be used on the most sensitive setting and it's not clear Edison would have had anything that precise. Last year the Minneapolis Institute of Art hosted an exhibit called "Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art" . One of the items on display was device that used EMF to detect spirits. I tried to see if I could trip it using some covert spellwork, but to no avail. I later looked up the specifications on it and found that it was less precise than even the low sensitivity setting on my EMF detector, which I already knew spirits were unable to affect.

The point in bringing that up is that this particular device at the MIA exhibit was built more recently than the Edison spirit phone would have been, and it used better and more precise techology. Still it was not anywhere near as sensitive as my cheap EMF detector that found on Amazon a few years back. The EMF approach appears to be closer to the right track based on my own work, but it also is clear that if you go too far back you are not going to have access to the components that you would need to build a working prototype.