The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [11]
A LETTER IN the Times of London, also published in 1853, signaled that other combatants were prepared to do battle with talking tables. The letter was signed by the physicist Michael Faraday, whose talent for invention had helped power the industrial revolution. His letter served notice that the science community was paying attention to the paranormal, but not in the way that Catherine Crowe had hoped.
Faraday was a prototype of the brilliant nineteenth-century scientist. He’d been revolutionizing science at the Royal Institution in London since 1808. He experimented with chemistry, showing how to liquefy chlorine (demonstrating that an element could transit from gas to liquid, a transition known as a phase change). He isolated the compound benzene, which became a critical component in motor fuels. Faraday followed these feats by developing an electric generator in 1831, a device he called a dynamo, and a prototype electric motor. He went on to design a simple battery and to experiment with creating a transformer. Many doubted that industrial production could have advanced so rapidly without him.
Faraday’s letter to the Times concerned another experiment he had just completed that had nothing to do with invention at all. It was a laboratory test of a talking table.
For this particular study, Faraday took two flat pieces of wood and placed glass rollers between them. He fastened the device together with India rubber bands. With the rollers tucked in place, if a person pushed on the upper board, it would slide over the lower board. An instrument attached to the upper board was set to record even the smallest motion. Faraday then asked sitters to gather themselves around the table, fingertips resting on the edges of the upper board. It moved, despite the insistence of participants that they were sitting perfectly still. But there was no mystery to it, he declared, no spiritual magic.
As the instrument recorded, again and again, the people touching the board were pushing it sideways, sliding it along the rollers. The experiment showed that table tilters were often unaware of their own actions. As Faraday explained it, the board was responding to unconscious muscular twitches, “mere mechanical pressure exerted inadvertently by the turner.”
In his letter to the Times, and in another to the Athenaeum, Faraday dismissed every theory put forward by the spirit believers. There was no ghostly energy guiding the tilts, no electrical force generated by dead-to-living communication, he said. He didn’t want to hear any more pseudoscience from people who “know nothing of the laws” of electricity and magnetism. He’d been pestered enough by the superstitious, and his aim in writing the public letters was to restore some sanity to the discussion: “If spirit communications, not utterly worthless, should happen to start into activity, I will trust the spirits to find out for themselves how they can move my attention.”
FARADAY’S SOBER call to sanity did not have much effect—at least not the effect he had hoped for—on a public caught in the thrall of spiritualism. People seemed instead to be attracted to yet another medium, even more eerie than the Fox sisters—the impossible, unearthly Daniel Dunglas Home.
Born in Scotland in 1833, Home had emigrated from Edinburgh to New York as a child. Raised by an aunt and uncle, he grew up a soft-spoken child with a gentle, affectionate manner. When he was seventeen, his aunt threw him out of the house anyway. He’d become a child of the devil, she said. Tables floated when he entered a room, and he laughed when his frightened cousins shrank from an airborne chair. He wasn’t safe to have around.
By the time he moved to England, Home swirled mystery around himself like a magician’s cape. Tall and slim, so