The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [88]
At his university laboratory, meanwhile, Lodge was pursuing one of the most exciting new ideas in physics. In 1873, the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell had put forward a theory that electromagnetic waves could be produced in a laboratory. In 1887 German physicist Heinrich Hertz successfully demonstrated Maxwell’s theory by both generating and receiving such invisible waves. Lodge was at the forefront of physicists envisioning these “Hertzian waves” harnessed, put to use in sending and receiving messages. By the end of 1889, he had built a crude, short-distance wireless telegraphy system based on Hertz’s work. He would soon design an improved device for detecting Morse code signals transmitted wirelessly. Called the coherer, Lodge’s invention would become a standard part of the earliest radio receivers, including those used by the young Italian Guglielmo Marconi.
Despite such pursuits, or maybe because of them, Lodge remained intrigued by psychical research. He thought of his coherer as an exceptionally acute ear, able to receive invisible waves that might carry messages. Could this concept of unseen paths of communication—wavelengths yet undiscovered—explain some of the most stubborn questions in psychical research?
In telepathy, Lodge speculated that one person’s mind might be sending such waves, another’s receiving them. Perhaps a first-class medium such as Leonora Piper was an exceptional natural receiver, a better, finer-tuned listener than the average person—a “coherer” in the psychical sense.
When Myers began to organize Mrs. Piper’s visit, Lodge thus saw an opportunity. He promptly offered to host her visit, exasperating his wife Mary, who, as she confessed later, feared she would be entertaining some kind of carnival freak. Lodge dismissed such concerns. It was a chance to test his theories of mental transmission firsthand, against the best mental medium so far known.
He proceeded to further try Mary’s patience with fanatical preparations for the medium’s arrival. He insisted on replacing the entire staff of their home, hiring new servants before the Piper family arrived. He locked away the family Bibles and photograph albums. Upon their arrival, he searched the Pipers’ luggage. He insisted on reading all their mail before they saw it. He monitored the most casual conversation at meals, driving Mary crazy with his insistence that she talk about nothing but general current events—Gustave Eiffel’s tower, erected at the World Exposition in Paris, or the record winter tormenting Europe. He dedicated his study as a place for the sittings and put a paper sign on the door reading “SILENCE.” Years later, Alta Piper still remembered with amusement Lodge’s two-year-old daughter cautioning, as they trooped by, “Hush! Papa’s smilence is on the door.”
Alta remembered playing with the Lodge children and cozy evenings of stories and hot milk served with cake before bed. For her mother, however comfortably housed, it was a very different kind of stay. Despite Myers’s promises of a “pleasant visit,” being a medium under scientific investigation guaranteed long hours and physical discomfort. No medium would say different. The Fox sisters had been searched to the waist, tied at the ankles, balanced on pieces of glass; Anna Eva Fay had been bound to metal rings; Florence Cook’s hair had once been nailed to the floor so that William Crookes could be sure of her