The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [25]
Home’s supporters had shut down all further discussion with Faraday, and ever since, the famed medium had avoided the mainstream British science establishment. But at Wallace’s urging, Home agreed to allow Crookes to set up some tests in the chemist’s home laboratory and agreed that he would have no chance to inspect the laboratory in advance.
For one test, Crookes stretched a piece of parchment across a wooden hoop, attaching the hoop to a device that would etch any movement into smoked glass. He positioned Home near the experimental drum, not touching it but close. Crookes then took one of the medium’s hands and held it a careful ten inches above the parchment. A friend of Crookes held Home’s other hand at a similar level. The surface began to jiggle, pulling down, springing up. It looked as if an invisible hand was pushing at the surface of the parchment, lightly beating the drum, etching an uneven record into that glass plate.
In a similar test, Home was asked to stand by a mahogany board, set horizontally, but not to touch it. One end of the board rested on a pivot. The other was suspended from a spring balance. To guard against cheating, Crookes asked volunteers to hold the medium’s hands and feet.
“Can you make it move?” Crookes then asked.
He’d attached a measuring instrument to the board, so that each movement would be again scratched onto a smoked glass plate. Home stood silent, Crookes reported, just stood there, hands and feet held tight, while the board rose and fell and the needle scratched a jagged line, peak after valley after peak, across the darkened glass.
As a result of those and other experiments, Crookes reached a conclusion shocking to his fellow scientists: that some kind of as yet unexplained “psychic force” existed, and that “of all persons endowed with a powerful development of this Psychic Force, Mr. Daniel Dunglas Home is the most remarkable.”
In the next issue of London’s Quarterly Review, a journal known for its dedication to the political status quo, came the response from the leaders of British science.
The article was unsigned, but its author claimed to know Crookes well as a scientist of “purely technical” ability but with a sad lack of real intellect. The writer then added, with finely honed innuendo: “We speak advisedly when we say that the Fellowship of the Royal Society was conferred upon him with considerable hesitation.” Innuendo rather than truth; in reality Crookes, after he discovered thallium, had been elected as a fellow of the Royal Society by unanimous vote and, it had been noted at the time, without debate.
Like Wallace before him, Crookes was naive about how his colleagues might see his paranormal investigations. He’d expected demands for replication, perhaps competition from those who wanted to conduct their own studies of Home. He had anticipated criticism of the equipment he’d used, suggestions for better tests. He’d not expected to be slandered by anonymous report—or to see his friends slandered with him. Crookes had received help from an electrician named Cromwell Varley in designing and building the equipment used to test Home. The forty-two-year-old Varley worked as a consultant to the Atlantic Telegraph Company and had just finished working on the 1869 installation of the first trans-Atlantic cable, a feat that made telegraph communication possible between Europe and North America.
The anonymous article in the Quarterly Review (widely known to be authored by a physiologist and friend of Huxley’s) also warned readers of “grave doubts” concerning Varley’s ability, serious enough to prevent the electrician from being admitted to the Royal Society. At the time of publication, however, Varley had been a member of the society for three months.
Enraged, Crookes stormed down to the journal offices, demanded a retraction, and demanded that the author be publicly identified. The editor of