Consider this list of ten rightly celebrated men of science, all standouts of the mid- and late-nineteenth century; they include astronomers, physicists, chemists, geologists, biologists, physiologists, and mathematicians. All made breakthrough discoveries that changed the world of science and that have lasting impact today. These ten men also shared one more remarkable trait. Don’t look ahead. Care to take a guess?
Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist, best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection.
John William Strutt was a physicist who, with William Ramsay, discovered the element argon, an achievement for which he earned the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904.
Robert Hare was an early American chemist who developed the “galvanic deflagrator,” a type of voltaic battery for producing rapid and powerful combustion, and developed, with Edward Daniel Clarke, the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe.
Augustus De Morgan was a British mathematician and logician who formulated De Morgan’s laws and introduced the term “mathematical induction,” making its idea rigorous.
Robert Chambers was a Scottish geologist, evolutionary thinker, publisher, author and journal editor who was highly influential in mid-19th century scientific and political circles.
Pierre Curie was a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity and radioactivity. In 1903 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie, and Henri Becquerel.
Charles Robert Richet was a French physiologist known for his pioneering work in immunology. In 1913, he won the Nobel Prize “in recognition of his work on anaphylaxis.”
Nicolas Camille Flammarion was a French astronomer and prolific author of more than fifty titles, and in 1897 he received the Prix Jules Janssen, the highest award of the French astronomical society.
Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge was a British physicist and writer who identified electromagnetic radiation independent of Hertz’ proof and demonstrated an early radio wave detector. In 1898 he was awarded the “syntonic” (or tuning) patent by the United States Patent Office.
Sir William Crookes was an English chemist and physicist who worked on spectroscopy and was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing the Crookes tube, and the Crookes radiometer, still sold today as a science novelty. He was a professor at the University of London, editor of the Quarterly Journal of Science, and president of the British Chemical Society.
Care to guess what else, besides their brilliant discoveries, these men of science shared?
Ready?
They all believed … in ghosts. Not just in ghosts, but most of them, in one way or another, believed that they had seen, and indeed, personally communicated with ghosts and spirits. Each and every one of these world-class scientists supported, or believed some aspects of Spiritualism, which claimed that it was possible to communicate with the spirit realm, and that the existence of an afterlife could be proven by scientific investigation. One of them—Charles Robert Richet, a Nobel Prize winner—is responsible for coining the term ectoplasm. Unfortunately, the evidence these men accepted, and in many cases passionately embraced, consisted entirely of magic tricks performed by professional con artists.
Consider William Crookes. A brief list of Crookes’ research would include meteorology, chemistry, economics, spectrometry, radiation, and cathode rays. But between 1871 and 1874, Crookes also undertook scientific examination and testing of several professional séance mediums—Kate Fox (yes, of the Fox sisters), Florence Cook, Daniel Dunglas Home, and Anna Eva Fay—investigations mostly conducted in his self-constructed home laboratory. For example, he tested Fay in February 1875, having her hold two electrodes in an electrical circuit connected to a galvanometer in the next room. Somehow Fay managed to cause objects in the room to move, and to produce sound from a musical instrument, and Crookes became convinced of her psychic abilities.
Although he was sure that the electrical control had not been broken, skeptical researchers maintained that Fay could have freed her hands to produce the phenomena while using other parts of her body or a resistance coil to keep the electric circuit intact.
Thirty-eight years later, Fay explained to Society of Psychical Research investigator Eric Dingwall how she had fooled Crookes and other researchers, using a repertoire of magic tricks. A decade after that, in retirement, she also shared her secrets with Harry Houdini; the two developed a late-in-life friendship of sorts based on a kind of mutual respect as professional performers and deceivers. Fay told Houdini that in the Crookes galvanometer test she had gripped one handle of the battery beneath her knee joint, keeping the circuit unbroken, leaving one hand free to manipulate objects in the dark séance room.
D. D. Home, who tended to avoid scientists and any sort of challenge testing, also fooled Crookes. Home’s most notorious claim to fame was that he had floated out the window of a third story séance chamber and floated back in through the window of an adjacent room—all without any skeptics or scientists present, and, of course, in pitch-black darkness. The key witness to Home’s levitation is believed to have been Home’s lover, but Crookes somehow overlooked that compromising fact. And when Crookes was investigating the beautiful young medium Florence Cook, who happened to be living in the Crookes’s home—the writer Trevor Hall speculated that Crookes was having an affair with her (while his wife, pregnant with their tenth child, remained bedridden)—that cozy situation didn’t dent his belief that he was impartial. To be sure, it was not unusual for mediums to receive embraces and other amorous favors from the spirits; many, in the darkness of the séance room, engaged in complete sexual encounters with apparitions from the beyond. I suppose you never know what can happen if a spirit is willing . . . and the flesh isn’t weak.
Florence Cook routinely manifested the spirit known as Katie King. While Cook was supposedly tied to a chair in a spirit cabinet or behind a curtain, King would walk among the séance sitters, sometimes touching them, and occasionally even disrobing before them (in order to prove herself human, donchaknow). Many witnesses observed that the spirit of Katie King looked remarkably similar to the medium Florence Cook, and that they were never clearly seen together at the same time, one or the other being obscured or invisible. In one séance, a skeptic grabbed the hand of the spirit of Katie, and a violent wrestling match ensued, leaving the skeptic bleeding. The spirit escaped, and when the lights came on the medium was found once again tied to her chair, albeit dishevelled and with her clothing in disarray.
When all is said and done, one must agree with the conclusions of the science historian Sherrie Lynne Lyons, who determined that Cook had easily tricked Crookes; after all, she had been repeatedly exposed as a fraud and had been “trained in the arts of the séance.” The alleged spirit “Katie King” was on most occasions Cook herself, and at other times was an accomplice. Lyons wrote, “Here was a man with a flawless scientific reputation, who discovered a new element, but could not detect a real live maiden who was masquerading as a ghost.”
And then there was the Italian medium, Eusapia Paladino, widely hailed by spiritualists, who boldly and frequently permitted herself to be examined by scientists in France, Germany, Italy, England, and the United States. (When she arrived in the United States in 1909, she garnered widespread press coverage from the New York Times to Cosmopolitan.) She was exposed as a charlatan in every one of those countries, but that mere problem did not dent her colorful career. Paladino would at times admit to fraud when she was caught in the act, but supporters claimed that while the pressures to produce consistent results from inconsistent spirits sometimes led her and other mediums into fakery, that didn’t necessarily mean they cheated all the time. Yet if ever there was a call for Occam’s Razor to be applied to an explanation, it should be to the claim that just because someone cheats sometimes, it doesn’t mean they cheat all the time. When you weigh the options between (1) mediums always cheat, versus (2) we should upend everything we know about the physical universe since the birth of the scientific method, call me crazy, but . . . I’m going with cheating.
Here’s how she did it. First, she dictated the lighting and “controls” that were to be used in her séances. Second, she used a common trick of the spirit medium, the “medium’s grip,” wherein when all the sitters around the séance table would clasp hands, or touch hands together, the fingertips of her right hand resting upon the back of the hand of one of the “controller” sitters adjacent to her. A second controller seated on her other side grasped her left hand. Her feet rested underneath or on top of the feet of her controllers. Thus, it appeared that she could not use her hands or feet to create spirit phenomena in the dark. But even “controlled” in that way, she could pull a foot out from her shoe prepared for the purpose, and after tipping the table back on one leg, she could wedge her foot under the lifted leg nearest her, and then briefly raise the entire table, making it appear to be floating in the air. As with any professional con artist, the keys to the skill set of a psychic or medium are flexibility—the ability to take advantage of any situation spontaneously—and, above all, boldness. Eusapia Paladino had both in abundance.
Paladino had been invited to England in 1895 by the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), the first organization of its kind, formed in 1882 with the stated intention being “to approach these varied problems without prejudice or prepossession of any kind, and in the same spirit of exact and unimpassioned enquiry which has enabled science to solve so many problems, once not less obscure nor less hotly debated.” William Crookes was a member, along with the previously mentioned physicist Oliver Lodge and Nobel laureate Charles Richet. The organization, which still exists, professed to hold no a priori position on Spiritualism and psychic phenomena, and in its earliest days exposed many fraudulent mediums.
For example, in 1884 the SPR sent its Secretary, Richard Hodgson, to India to investigate Madame Blavatsky, a renowned medium and the founder of Theosophy, which attracted numerous eminent adherents (including William Butler Yeats), and still does. Among the phenomena that Hodgson investigated was the miraculous “Theosophical letters from the Mahatmas,” Blavatsky’s claimed mystical teachers and so-called “adepts” with whom she claimed personal connection. The letters were said to magically appear over a four-year period in a cabinet in the Shrine Room at the Theosophical headquarters in Madras. Hodgson concluded that the letters were fakes and that Blavatsky had not only written them herself but had then planted them in the cabinet via a secret opening in her bedroom located behind the Shrine room.
After that auspicious start, the SPR unfortunately broke into contentious factions, creating frequent and heated debate within the ranks. After the exposure of William Hope and other fraudulent mediums, Arthur Conan Doyle led a mass resignation of 84 members of the Society—not because of the revelation of so much trickery by mediums, but because they believed the Society was opposed to Spiritualism. Science historian William Hodson Brock observed that by the 1900s most of the spiritualists, unhappy about the skeptical stance of most of the group’s investigations, had resigned from the SPR and joined a London Spiritualist Alliance that had been founded about the same time.
For their part, skeptical members also began resigning from the SPR, disillusioned with its credulous approach to investigations. Eric Dingwall resigned and wrote, “After sixty years’ experience and personal acquaintance with most of the leading parapsychologists of that period, I do not think I could name half a dozen whom I could call objective students who honestly wished to discover the truth. The great majority wanted to prove something or other: They wanted the phenomena into which they were inquiring to serve some purpose in supporting preconceived theories of their own.”
And thus, in its later years—like so many parapsychology groups ever since—the SPR became a hotbed of believers attempting to find supportive evidence of their beliefs, rather than pursuing open-minded investigations without foregone conclusion.
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