Thomas Edison's Apparatus for Talking with the Dead: Imagining Spiritual Technologies in America

8/10/2019 Thomas Edison's Apparatus for Talking with the Dead: Imagining Spiritual Technologies in America

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Columbia University

Secular and Spiritual America

RELIW4805

Spring 2013Professor Courtney Bender

Riley B. Kellogg

646-413-3749

[email protected]

[email protected]

Thomas Edison's Apparatus for Talking with the DeadImagining Spiritual Technologies in America

EDISON ANNOUNCES A NEW APPARATUS

In the year 1920, Thomas Alva Edison announced that he was at work on a telephonicdevice to enable communication with non-corporeal realms or dimensions. The American

public was intensely engaged, and promptly adopted a name for this incipient technology:

the Spirit Phone.1The announcement came in an oblique way, almost off-hand in answer

to questions posed to him at a luncheon honoring him on his seventy-third birthday.2The

press was quick to pick upand embellishthe story. Newspapers and magazines

published interviews and articles: Scientific American,3Cosmopolitan,American Magazine,

Mechanix Magazine,4and others got in on the action. Edison's announcement declared that

he would journey into a realm where some had hoped he would go when earlier

communications technologies were introduced. Edison had apparently already given serious

attention to the theoretical possibilities of such a device, and he continued for some time to

theorize and experiment. But while he spent a great deal of time on developing the

apparatus, no prototype was produced by his laboratoryor, at least, none was offered to the

public. Other inventors had similar ideas, or were quick to jump on the bandwagon that was

created by Edison's announcement; several other Spirit Phones were introduced to the

press. None, however, went into actual manufacture and distribution.

1 Fabris, Gerard, 1998.Mr. Edison's Machine to Talk with the Dead: Spiritualism, Technology and

Imagination in the Post-World War I United States. Unpublished paper, Columbia University. p. 2.

2 New-York Tribune. (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, February 12, 1920. Edison at 73 is the Center of

Reunion.3 Lescarboura, Austin C. Scientific American October 30, 1920. Edison's Views on Life and Death: An

Interview with the Famous Inventor Regarding His Attempt to Communicate with the Next World.

4 Edison's Own Secret Sprit Experiments. Modern Mechanix and Inventions, October, 1933. Accessed athttp://blog.modernmechanix.com/edisons-own-secret-spirit-experiments/

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Some skeptical observers have speculated that in announcing this apparatus, Edison was

pulling the collective leg of the American people and of all Spiritualists and their

sympathizers on both sides of the Atlantic; that he intended his apparatus as a hoax, a self-

debunking technique for the edification and disenchantment of the public. A strong case can

be made, however, that Edison seriously believed in the possibility of successfully

constructing this apparatus for communication with the dead. Iwill proceed by taking the

position (which Ibelieve is the stronger) that Edison's philosophy was sincerely held, and

that his stated hopes for the realization of the apparatus were genuine. Edison made many

statements, both to the press and in his journals, concerning religion, the spiritual,

Spiritualism, and his philosophical understanding of the nature of life. Together, these can

provide some illumination as to his intent in pursuing the project.

This paper will touch upon questions that surround Edison's development of the

apparatus for speaking with the dead: What made the place and time right for this

announcement to be greeted with such optimistic enthusiasm? How did Edison's public

imagine the relationships among life, death, religion, spirituality, and technology? And what

was the societal and cultural setting that would lead a man of empiricism and objectivist-

materialist views to contemplate and pursue such an apparatus? These questions will provide

a context for the main issues the paper will address. The focus will be on Edison's material

conception of the personality, and his questions of its possible persistence after the death of

the gross body in which the personality abides during the human life span. Ihope to explore

the ways in which this conception reformulates and rephrases questions surrounding the

mind-body and spirit-matter binaries that have been so central to various philosophical and

theological debates throughout history. Iwill also ask how, looking through the eyes of

Edison and his contemporaries, these conceptions and questions can suggest how theythemselves saw the relationship between the technical and the spiritual in the inventions of

their era, how our views have come to be as they are, and different ways we might approach

these questions. It is possible that we may have been missing some of the concerns working

as motive forces in the development of mechanical-technical devices. Perhaps by examining

the history of their reception, we may gain a greater understanding not only of our

perceptions and uses of them, but of our own inventive imaginations as well.

SETTING THE STAGE: A century of unsettling innovation

Let's look at the setting for Edison's life as an inventor, and for his startling

announcement of 1920. The pace of change, both technological and societal, had quickened

drastically during the long nineteenth century; old certainties were challenged and cut down;

fear and hope for the future competed for the hearts and minds of the modern world. The



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Civil War in America took a great toll, both in practical terms of destruction and change, and

in emotional terms, unsettling the known and understood forms and functioning of society.

Loss of life on a scale greater than had been known for generations contributed to the sense

of rudderlessness. Mourning, and a yearning for those loved and lost, was felt on a societal

and national level, not only on an individual and family one. In this setting Spiritualism

flourished, holding out the possibility of regaining contact with the dead. The Great

Awakening exemplified a trend toward individualistic seeking for spiritual experience and

conviction, as confidence in established, traditional forms of religion eroded. The Great War,

followed by the global influenza epidemic, intensified the sense of loss and uncertainty

about the future. On the technological scene, inventions in the realm of communications

and, more specifically, in the transmission and storage of facsimiles of sensory datasight

and soundwere transgressing the boundaries of believability.

Imagine the impact on someone who could have lived through all of these: someone

born in 1820 would have seen the invention of the photograph at age six, of electricity to

power industry at seventeen, and the telegraph at eighteen; would have fought in or

witnessed the Civil War at age forty-one, witnessing a huge loss of life;5seen the telephone

at fifty-six, and electric incandescent lighting at 58; the kinetoscope at seventy-one; radio at

seventy-five; projected motion pictures at seventy-six. If they lived long enough, they would

have seen the Great War at age ninety-four,6and the influenza epidemic7at age ninety-eight.

Rare as is must have been for an individual to personally live through all of these, everyone

born during that hundred years would have experienced many if not most of these profound

changes. The wars and epidemic served to unsettle much further the sense of the world

being a predictable and sensible place. The pace of life continued to quicken with

developments in transportation, including the introduction of flight, and further rapidimprovements in communications technologies.

Many of these technologies are ones that make invisible forces visible, intangible

presences tangible. The world through this era was coming to feel both increasingly

governed by scientific principles that could be understood by humans, and at the same time

increasingly full of astonishing wonders. Developments in science far outpaced the average

person's ability to comprehend its products. Electrical technology especially was the

beginning of the black box: you really don't understand how it works but it does these

5 Estimates of fatalities in the Civil War range from approximately 2% of the entire U.S. population to far

higher; at least 10% of the white males of military age in the North and 20% in the South; enough for ademographic shift and accompanying psychological impact.

6 Sixteen and a half million dead worldwide; 1.75% of the world's population.

7 Between twenty and forty million lives lost worldwide. In the USA, 28% of the population was infected,

and 675,000 died; that's ten times more than were killed in the Great War. http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/



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wondrous things commented Paul Israel, an historian at the Edison Papers Project at

Rutgers University.8

As Susan J. Douglas observes of this era,

As the society navigated, and sometimes drifted, toward new horizons,

heroes served as fixed points during an uncharted voyage. White and

black images of good and evil stood out againstand helped make sense

ofthe complicated and subtle processes of industrialization,urbanization, and centralization which began accelerating in the 1870s.

America's ability to cope with great complexity has been accompanied,

and probably strengthened, by a reassuring simplicity in idea and symbol.9

The inventor in the late nineteenth century was a new kind of culture hero; one who

partook of the legacy of the Rugged Individualist model, but with a decidedly modern twist.

Technological innovators such as Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo

Marconi, and Nikola Tesla were unlike earlier heroes. Such inventors personified the

prevalent belief in ever greater social progress through technology.10The inventor was, in

America perhaps even more than elsewhere, the new embodiment of the ideal of the

explorer, a person who uses the principles of modern science to master the unknown not

geographically but intellectually, and improve the lives of society through his discoveries.

Thomas Alva Edison was by far the most prolific inventor America had seen11, and

arguably remains the most influential. The electric light bulb, systems for the storage of

electricity and its delivery safely into homes, the phonograph, the motion picture: each of

these inventions not only completely altered the texture of daily life but expanded its

possibilities in more ways than we are likely aware . He was a pioneer in the manufacture

and marketing of his inventions, and in the management of his work force. Almost entirely

self-educated, he was a model of the self-made man. Edison was the Inventor-Heropar

excellence, and exemplified the man of reason and science to the public of his era.

The inventor-heroand, in particular, the electrical inventor-herowas a new societal

role that was in some ways reminiscent of the shaman-priest model. The inventor confronted

unknown forces and powers, taming them for the comfort, safety, or prosperity of the

society, and enchanted the senses in bringing new developments to everyday living. This

8 PBS History Detectives: Psychophone http://video.pbs.org/video/1143720703/ segment 1with Gwendolyn

Wright, Historian.9 Douglas, Susan J.Inventing American broadcasting, 1899-1922.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1989, p. 3. Cited in Fabris, p. 3.

10 Fabris 1998, p. 3.

11 As measured by number of patents issued. His record of 1093 was not surpassed until the year 2003.



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wave was different from the improvements that the inventions of the Industrial Revolution

had brought, which for many led most noticeably to drudgery being performed with more

efficiency. The boom in electrical and communications invention brought light, music,

movement, laughter into daily life. These inventions addressed not only the practical tasks of

life and progress in production, but the imaginations and dreams of the population. Even

Edison's nickname, the Wizard of Menlo Park (referring to the location of his research

facility in New Jersey), hints at this sense of magic, and the enchantment of the public's

perception of the technological progress of the age.

In tandem with technological and large-scale social changes came changes on the

American spiritual scene as well. Traditional forms of religiosity were transforming.

Church-centered religions were supplemented by a more anarchic trend of individuals

seeking their own pathways to what they felt was a more direct and authentic contact with

spiritual realities and realms. The strong current of Spiritualism and individual spiritual

seeking might appear to have run alongside the very different stream of industrial and

scientific development in technology and mechanization, seemingly like two rivers of oil

and water, rushing along the same social river bed but mixing uneasily when mixing at all.

This is how the two streams look from the vantage point of the present day; but at the time

the division between spirituality and science was not nearly so clear.

The Spiritualist movement had grown rapidly from its beginnings 1848. The practice

clearly touched something in the public's collective psyche; by the end of the Civil War,

some ten million people in America and Europe were engaging in seances or other

Spiritualist pursuits. The sensory and material nature of Spiritualist practicessounds that

could be heard by observers as well as participants in the sance, the movement of objects,

apparently caused by spiritsallowed for public witness and verification, in a way that theprivate revelatory experiences of self-identified mystics did not. This was a form of religious

practice that had a substance other than faith; the objects of belief were theoretically open to

proof. Experiments by many researchers including William James seemed to some observers

to provide scientific verification of the validity of practitioners' claims. In this age of

increasing reliance on scientific verification to determine truth, Spiritualism's material aspect

put it, in the eyes of many of its followers, on the firm footing of materially-substantiated,

objective reality. A number of prominent scientific thinkers and other intellectuals who

investigated and lent varying degrees of support to Spiritualism and its offshoots added to

this perception in some quarters. Alexander Graham Bell was an unabashed believer in

spiritualism, attending seances and writing speculative essays on the future of congress with

the dead; Marie Curie attended seances regularly and believed that there was spiritual

significance in X-rays. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a medical doctor and creator of the paragon



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of cold, rational, logical thought, Sherlock Holmes, was also the most outspoken supporter

of communication with the dead, and a prolific writer on the subject. William James studied

mediums and worked closely with the Society for Psychic Research.

INTRODUCING UNCANNY INVENTIONS

Reading reactions of educated people to the technologies developing through this period

in light of the general experience of the time gives a startling picture of how it must have felt

to be confronted by such radical innovation. In 1878, the newly-invented phonograph was

demonstrated in many cities. Not surprisingly, local newspapers took a keen interest. After

giving a brief explanation of how the phonograph works, one journalist wrote that

many are skeptic and say to the scientific expositor, 'Let me see youshake a piece of iron until it talks!' The wise ones shake their heads, look

and listen a while and and [sic] say, 'It must be so.' Then they are asked

why should the sheet of iron talk, and this, like a hard conundrum, they are

forced to 'give up.' Again we say every one should see and examinepersonally.12

While the wise ones could not understand how it worked, they understood that it had

been made to work through human understanding of natural processes, and was thus

vouched for scientifically. In other words, they took it on faithfaith in the scientific

method.

A United States Congressman, S.S. Cox, responded to the news and demonstrations of

the phonograph in a lecture published in a Washington, D.C. Newspaper in 1878: Suppose

some [explorer], in prowling among the tombs of Greece or Cyprus, should find not merely

the manuscript, but the embalmed eloquence of Demosthenes ... and should, by a turn of the

crank, let us have it in very tone and truth, it would be accounted marvellous [sic], but it is

simple compared to other phenomena now, all too familiar to be marvellous [sic]. If soon

one's words may be made into lightning and then transformed back into audible words, why

may not the dead speak to the living?13Apparently, the ability to speak from beyond the

grave through a material recording made when one was alive was considered just as

improbable and uncanny as the ability to speak from beyond the grave through the volition

of a spirit that survived death. And thus the latter seemed to Mr. Cox an inevitable corollary

12 Explaining the phonograph. (1878, Jun 26). The Daily Constitution (1876-1881). Retrieved fromhttp://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/494690707?

accountid=10226

13 Cox, S.S., The Poetry of the Phonograph, The Post and Union newspaper, Washington, D.C., April 24,

1878.



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of the formera very odd leap in understanding and expectation from our current

perspective, though perhaps understandable from the perspective of the time. The telegraph

and telephone produce contact with those so distant as to be otherwise invisible and

impossible to hear. What these technologies accomplished seemed an occult manifestation to

many minds of the day. Those more open to their marvels thought that perhaps these

technologies would also produce devices that could effect contact with those who are even

further removed from our physical and visual presence: the spirits of the dead.

The permeation of Spiritualism into the cultural fabric during this era gives further

context for this association of ideas. While embraced by only a minority of the country,

acquaintance with the concepts involved in Spiritualism was widespread, even if often

unclear. The principle was that entities from a spiritual, non-corporeal realm could and did

communicate with living persons, and did so usually through a medium, without making

themselves visible. They did so through sound, and by physically affecting material objects,

which were observed to fly through the air, or seemingly to materialize out of nowhere.

Mediums, persons with particular sensitivities to the communications or vibrations of the

spirit realm, received and transmitted the intangible voices of the non-corporeal spirits, or

facilitated their active presence. The development of the phonograph, a mechanical receiver,

amplifier, and recorder of the voices of the living, was a man-made parallel to the human-

spiritual technology of the medium.

Many believed that the spirits of those who had once been living humans were out

there, awaiting the means by which to convey messages they yearned to communicate to

living humans. And not only the spirits of deceased humans, but also other non-corporeal

entities or spirits awaited their reception. Why not imagine that their messages could be

picked up by a new kind of phonograph or telephone, by a non-human receiver / medium?All that was needed was the person who could envision and construct this new apparatus, as

had been done for the invisible forces tapped by the telegraph, the telephone, the

phonograph, and film. Edison's announcement came at the most opportune time. At the

luncheon given for his seventy-third birthday, theNew-York Tribunereported that Edison

was ruminating over new marvels that he promises will be as astonishing to this generation

as his talking machine was to that which thought the idea was a fantastic dream.14

In discussing the genesis of his inventions, Edison described how one development led

him to the next: The phonograph first suggested the motion picture camera. I had been

working for several years on my experiments for recording and reproducing sounds, and the

14 New-York Tribune. (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, February 12, 1920. Edison at 73 is the Center of

Reunion.



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thought occurred to me that it should be possible to devise an apparatus to do for the eye

what the phonograph was designed to do for the ear.15And apparently he eventually came

to think that the same could be done for the personality.

INTERPRETING THE APPARATUS AND ITS PURPOSE

As an inventor and manufacturer, Edison was highly practical: that is, he would

sometimes put ideas on the back burner or abandon them entirely if he felt that they could

not attract investors and consumers. He was a strategic thinker in this way.16He is quoted by

Martin Andr Rosanoff as declaring that An invention is no good unless it's commercial

and people are willing to pay for it.17And it seems certain that this apparatus would have

been commercially successful if it had come to fruition. But Edison often noted that a great

deal of unsuccessful experimentation and investigation was a necessary part of the process

of invention. He attempted many devices that did not pay off. Edison was a scientific

explorer who discovered new continents where prevailing opinion held that none existed. If

sometimes he sailed off the edge of the world, that was part of the risk of exploration.18

The skeptics, materialist-objectivist thinkers who felt that Edison was having a big laugh

over a practical joke on the American people, or at least on the gullible, and on the

Spiritualists (these two groups being conflated by some of the commenters) voiced

strenuous objections to the sincerity of this project. They said that Edison, being a scientist,

would not have been involved in research into spiritual matters in earnest. These objections

seem to be reactions to a misunderstanding of the research, or simply to the name spirit

phone, although this was not how Edison himself referred to the device. Edison took care to

distance himself from psychic researchers and Spiritualism on many occasions; he ridiculed

the notion that his apparatus could be used as a medium on which to call up spirits at will.

There seems to be a parallel to Edison's apparatus in the earlier work of William

Frederick Pinchbeck. This eighteenth-century self-described mechanic and philosopher

was also a showman. More than a century before Edison announced his apparatus,

Pinchbeck produced and exhibited anAcoustic Temple. This elaborate contraption listened,

15 Edison, Thomas Alva.The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison.Dagobert D. Runes, ed.New York: Philosophical Library, 1948, p. 70.

16 He did make some large tactical blunders in protecting certain ideas, or expecting more funding and sales

than they foundsuch as neglecting to patent the kinetoscope in England, and remaining the only US

marketer of a phonograph that did not incorporate radio, when that became an option. Mistakesnotwithstanding, his planning and choices were in the main along tactical lines.

17 Rosanoff, Martin Andr.Harper's Monthly, September 1932. Edison in his laboratory, p 414415.

http://harpers.org/archive/1932/09/edison-in-his-laboratory/

18 Conot, Robert. Streak of Luck. 1979. New York: Seaview Books. Chapter 39: The Freethinker. p. 471.



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through a construction of tubes and trumpets, to whispered questions, and a disembodied

oracular female voice gave answers. But Pinchbeck's purpose in exhibiting theAcoustic

Templewas not to provide spiritual consultation or mystical experience, nor to deceive a

gullible public into believing they were receiving such things. As Lee Eric Schmidt writes in

Hearing Things, Pinchbeck'sAcoustic Temple was presented as a performance that evoked

the magical in order to dispel that very enchantment.19

The Acoustic Temple beckoned natural philosophers and amateurs of science

everyone dedicated to the advance of learning and inventionto a performance of the

enlightenment, a vanquishing of superstition and priestcraft. As one 1805 broadside

proclaimed, 'Attend, and never after give credit to the improbable tales of Witchcraft and

Supernatural Agency.20Where Pinchbeck had the technologies of the speaking trumpet

with which to work his edifying illusion, Edison had the richer tool kit of telegraph, radio,

recording phonograph, and telephone. Schmidt writes that Pinchbeck was a part of the scene

of expanding knowledge of acoustical technologies and performative politics that was

providing the learned with the mechanisms by which a distrust of disembodied voices

could be manufactured.21

Still, Pinchbeck's ambitious program of disenchanting the ear was never completed. How

curious that less than a half-century after Pinchbeck sought to discredit the evidence

presented by disembodied sound, the Fox sisters ushered in a new wave of fascination and

practice directed at precisely those disembodied voices, promoted by devoted mediums and

other practitioners as genuine conduits for communication with non-corporeal entities. And

far more uncanny performances of dis-embodied sounds than Pinchbeck's, through recording

technologies, have continued through Edison's day and into our own, and are now so

commonplace as to be completely unremarked; though they are no less remarkable, whenone thinks about it.22

EDISON'S VISION: TECHNOLOGY IN SOCIAL CONTEXT

Edison seems to have been unequivocally earnest about his desire for the betterment of

the human condition and, particularly, American life and society. He held that one way to

19 Schmidt, Leigh Eric.Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment.Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 78-80.

20 Ibid.

21 Schmidt, 2000, p. 82.22 Groups such as World ITC seek and claim to document and record instances of communications with spirit

realms through technological means, using tape recorder, TVs, radios, computers, telephones, and other

technical devices with the intent to get meaningful information from beyond in such forms as voices,

images, and text. See http://worlditc.org/.



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pursue this was through technological progress. He believed that when repetitive and slow

tasks are replaced with machines, the mind's operations have the freedom to speed up,

resulting in further development and intellectual progress. Technology was, for Edison,

something to be put to the uses not merely as a profit generator for the sake of profit, nor

mainly in the service of entertainment and leisure, but most particularly as a means of

advancing education and the speed of thinking, in order to enable further discovery and

growth. He viewed the promise of, for example, the motion picture as primarily educational;

not in content necessarily, but in its potential to train the mind and the memory to function

more rapidly and more efficiently by its unique method of presenting its message. He was

certain that he had already observed such an effect on society as a whole to a marked

degree.23Economic growth, the growth of human knowledge, and the betterment of the

human condition were inextricably interwoven in his view.

Despite his practical, tactical approach to choosing which projects to pursue, he

expressed the sharpest disdain for confidence men and frauds, snake-oil salesmen who made

money by cheating the public. No, his aim was not just to make money. Though he never

spoke of 'service to humanity' he was unshakeable in a kind of idealism Commercial

demand was his measure of need. By giving, or rather selling, to the world what it needs and

demands, all nations of the earth would long remember him with gratitude and honor him

The fiery passion of his life was to earn permanent fame.24

THE DIARIES & SUNDRY OBSERVATIONS: CHANGING THE STORY

While Edison expressed an aversion to autobiography, he kept diaries and notebooks,

both technical and personal. Some of his personal notes were gathered together into avolume released under the title The Diaries and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva

Edison.

The first section of the book, theDiaries, contains a handful of entries from the 1870s,

and the rest, the Sundry Observations, is composed of various essays dated from throughout

the 1920s when he was in his seventies and eighties. The essays' topics cover a wide range:

education, the history of his inventions, musings about the place of his deafness in his

scientific process, political philosophy, economic theory, copyright protection, and his

intelligence test for prospective employees, among others.25The penultimate chapter is

23 Edison, 1948, p. 79.24 Rosanoff, Martin Andr.Harper's Monthly, September 1932. Edison in his laboratory, p 414415.

http://harpers.org/archive/1932/09/edison-in-his-laboratory/

25 The Sundry Observations section of the book (taking up 200 of the 238 pages) is less well documented than

one might wish. Some of the essays were written for publication in various magazines, but only the date of



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titledFor a Better World, and is mainly a discussion of the political and economic issues

facing Europe and the United States in the era following the first World War. The final

chapter is titled The Realms Beyond, and describes Edison's singular views on the nature of

life, death, personality, and communications with spirits (on which I will elaborate below).

The history of this book is a curious one. It was released in 1948, seventeen years afterhis death, by the Philosophical Library. But it was quickly re-issued in the same year, in a

shortened version. The two final chapters, totaling sixty-three pages, had been removed,

along with the index in its entirety. The inference easily drawn is that the first of these was

considered politically controversial, and the second embarrassingly unscientific. Perhaps his

family asked that the chapters be removed, with the intent of maintaining his public image

as a strictly empirically-oriented objectivist.

EDISON ON RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY, & SPIRITUALISM

Edison's ideas on the materiality of the human spirit were a part of a continuum ofthought that goes back to the classical world. His articulation of his own particular position

on the difficult spirit-matter binary restates the problem in light of the scientific and

secularizing modernity in which he lived. He articulated a perception of life and death as

disparate realms of being, common and natural in the course of human existence. Both states

depend, in his view, upon an organization of energy that could be called soul, spirit, or

personality; that which makes a person the particular human they are. He believed that this

soul could persist beyond the dis-organization of its associated bodily entity. Put another

way, Edison believed that the soul could survive the death of the body, although it was not

necessarily immortal.

It is important to note that Edison, at least in print, confined his plans for his new

apparatus to the spirits, or persistent personalities as he termed it, of dead people, and not

any other kind of spirit that mediums or other spiritual practitioners might aim or claim to be

in communication with. His understanding of spirits and of the means by which they might

communicate were limited by specific philosophical understandings, and by his lifelong

habit of empirical methods of inquiry and process.

In the Autumn of 1920, when Edison made his announcement, his more prolific days of

invention were past. But he continued to work, explore, experiment, and run his companies.

He was at this time, in other words, publicly seen as in command of his faculties and notsuffering from any decline in reason, age-related or otherwise. The public response to this

their writing is given, and there is no indication of the occasion and intended audience for each piece, nor

whether or where these observations were published.



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news was chaotic and intense. To some, it seemed that the scientist had taken leave of his

senses and fallen in with the Spiritualist camp among the mediums and seance-sitters. To

others, it seemed that long-held hopes for such a conduit to other worlds were about to

receive the imprimatur of scientific veracity, and to become a reality.

Edison was indifferent to organized forms of religion, and wrote in his diary on July 12,1885, My conscience seems to be oblivious of Sundays. It must be incrusted with a sort of

irreligious tartr [sic].26And he was publicly skeptical, even derisive, of Spiritualism. He

was high-handedly dismissive of spiritualist claims that non-corporeal beings, or spirits,

could be summoned by the living. But he was curious about the possibility that

communication with the dead could happen, and became involved in Theosophy, attending

Madame Blavatsky's gatherings in New York City often enough to receive a certificate of

membership.27He later repudiated the group, and went so far as to deny having ever been

involved with it. Still, his distinctly individual ideas on human nature and what could be

termed the soul owed much to his introduction, via Theosophy, to the concept of

reincarnation.

In his diaries, he describes his view of the nature of life. He believed the mysterious life

force to be, like matter and energy, un-creatable, indestructible, and eternal. He conjectured

that life had an elemental nature, like matter, and was material in form. Like the material

bodies of living beings , their life-force was, he speculated, made of tiny particles: what he

termed life-entities, analogous to atoms. The universe's supply of life was fixed. Like the

elements, it could be shaped, combined, and recombined into different compounds and

different life-forms, but in his view there was a fixed amount of life in the world.

What are commonly thought of as individual life-forms!

human beings, or other fauna,and flora!are in Edison's philosophy not themselves discrete units, but rather

agglomerations of infinitesimally small life-entities. In both the Scientific American

article28that followed his 1920 announcement, and in a collection of essays, Edison stressed

that he was not taking a position on the question of whether the personality (he never speaks

of the soul) survives the death of the body. Rather, he wrote that he hoped to put a scientific

instrument into the service of the scientific inquiry into this question, as well as into the

hands of the non-scientist for experimentation. If the personality survives the death of the

body, that is to say, if the life-entities maintain their structure as an organized group or, as he

put it, as a swarm, after they leave the body and enter into a new realm or existence,

26 Edison, 1948, p 8.

27Conot, Robert, 1979 p. 427.28 Lescarboura, Austin C. Scientific AmericanOctober 30, 1920. Edison's Views on Life and Death: An

Interview with the Famous Inventor Regarding His Attempt to Communicate with the Next World.



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then he believed that the apparatus he was planning would be sensitive enough to pick up

any communications with the living human realm that such personalities might endeavor to

make. This is a subtle but important distinction: He did not believe that they could be

conjured or summoned by mediums; they could only be presented with an avenue through

which they might communicate if they wished to do so. He mentions that he had an

experimental partner who died shortly before the interview with Scientific Americantook

place, and states confidently that this person ought to be the first to make use of the

apparatus if it should work.

Edison's view of the life entities was a distinctive form of homunculus philosophy, one

which reflects his view of the nature of the human social world. This world-view

particularly reflected his views on business, which he put at the heart of the purpose and

good of the world. He saw in the human personality not one little person running things

from within the human being, but a sort of factory, complete with a workforce and a

hierarchy of workers and managers. As with human businesses, about five percent of the

life-entities are managers or directors which make the decisions, while the rest are

workers that execute the various tasks needed for the functioning of the living being while

it is alive in this realm or existence. Each life-task was attended to by a swarm of life-

entities; they cooperated in a kind of super-swarm to form the whole personality. In his

conjectures on what happens to the personality after death, he is, not surprisingly, most

concerned with the managers, the brains of the operation. Like a shop that manufactures

inventions, such as his own industrial research laboratory in Menlo Park, the staff of the

personality can be replaced but the creatives and executives at the helm cannot.29

Edison vaguely associates his theories with electron theory, giving a quasi-scientific

basis to the assertion that some billions of sentient entities form the undetectable matter andstructure of life and consciousness, but he neither elaborates electron theory for the

edification of his readers, nor explains in what way exactly an electron is analogous to a

sentient life-entity. Nor does he articulate just how an infinitesimally small, irreducible

unit can be so complex as to possess consciousness.

Edison was almost entirely self-taught, through both reading and meticulously controlled

experimentation. (In his typical hyperbolic style, he often claimed never to have attended a

day of school in his life, but as with much of his later reconstruction of his life and career,

29 Certainly he would not have seen his Menlo Park employees as being very easily replaceable. Hisdevelopment of the questionnaire system for identifying promising workers (and especially managers), and

his very vocal defense of this system under strong criticism, demonstrate that he did not see his employees

as drones, a dime a dozen and easily swapped in and out like parts in a machine. They could be replaced,

though it might require effort from the higher-ups.



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this was an exaggeration designed for dramatic effectwhich he held to be more important

than factual accuracy.) He read extensively, and his interests were quite catholic; his library,

preserved at the Edison National Historical Site, contains upwards of 10,000 volumes, and

includes modern literature, physicists, poetry, and philosophy. His opinions on most things

depended on the demonstrability of the theories, arguments, and explanations that were

available. His views on religious issues were also continually changing, developing as his

experience increased the information available to shape them. Yet although he clothed his

views on religion in the language of reason and science, they were highly speculative and

subjective. An interesting note on mortality and the survival of personality after bodily

death, terse though it may be, can be found in his diary entry for July 12, 1885, where he

quotes appreciatively a line fromHawthorne's English Note Bookone of two fine things

he found in the book: Ghostland [lies] beyond the jurisdiction of veracity. He makes no

further comment on this declaration, but his approval would appear to constitute a rare

admission to being without certainty on a matter he finds to be of interest.30Somewhere

during the following thirty-five years, he seems to have decided to bring Ghostland underthat jurisdiction.

A section of theDiary and Sundry Observationsis devoted to a strong endorsement of

Thomas Paine's philosophy. One diary entry laments that many people

carry the idea that a large portion of the Creator's time wasspecifically devoted to hearing requests, criticism, and complaints about

the imperfection of the natural laws which regulate this mud ball. What a

wonderfully small idea mankind has of the almighty! Why can't man practice the teachings of his own conscience, and not obtrude his

purposely created mind in affairs that will be attended to without any

volunteer advice?

Schmidt, inHearing Things, evokes Paine as the exemplar of his age's trend in

theological thinking on the voice of God. In an age of growing mechanization, in which the

world was increasingly understood in terms of the workings of natural laws and

measurements,

The very idea of a God who speaks and listens, a proposition integral to

Christian devotionalism, became a 'monstrous belief' to men like Paine,

and the voice of reason was offered as a mechanically reliable replacementfor these divine attributes. Paine concluded with characteristic

bluntness: 'I totally disbelieve that the Almighty ever did communicate

30 Edison, 1948, p. 5.



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anything to man, by any mode of speech, in any language, or by any kind

of vision.31

Paine seems a most fitting philosophical model for Edison, a man devoted to discovery

and invention in the material world. Edison's view of a purposeful but distant and

disinterested God was very much the legacy of Paine and the American Enlightenment'sDeism. And Edison's research into a possible mechanistic description of the human essence,

the personality or soul, is in accord with this understanding.

Edison made a few earlier statements regarding religion and his philosophy of the

personality, but the most concentrated material is to be found in (this article was introduced

already) the interviews and articles that followed the 1920 announcement, along with a few

of the essays and talks found in the original edition of the Diary and Sundry Observations

Austin C. Lescarboura wrote in Scientific Americanabout the announcement:

Immediately the press of the United States and Europe announced that

Thomas A. Edison had joined the ranks of the spiritists, which nownumber many a prominent scientist, author, inventor, physicist, engineer,clergyman, and so on. Soon the highly imaginative French writers drew

pen pictures of Mr. Edison's apparatus serving as a telephone station or

telegraph office or whatnot, where persons wishing to communicate with

those who have passed on could do so in a positive and prompt manner.

And no one is more sorry than Mr. Edison that this impression has been

permitted to gain ground both here and abroad. 'In the first place, I cannotconceive such a thing as a spirit,' said Mr. Edison to the writer. He meant

it, too. 'Imagine something which has no weight, no material form, no

mass; in a word, imagine nothing! I cannot be a party to the belief thatspirits exist and can be seen under certain circumstances and can be made

to tilt tables and rap and do other things of a similar unimportant nature.

The whole thing is so absurd.'

In fact, it was mainly for the reason of correcting the impression about Mr.

Edison's activities in this latest field of research that the inventor granted

the writer an interview.

To Edison, a non-material spirit was an impossibility. But a life-force, consisting of

material particles, was another matter. There may not have been techniques to measure and

demonstrate those particlesyetbut he intended to develop those techniques . Like

telegraphy, electricity, radio and sound waves, he seems to have been implying, theapparently intangible could be made tangible in this context as well.

31 Schmidt,Hearing Things, p. 6.



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Edison's dislike of the popular name Spirit Phone was due to a feeling that it

misrepresented his experiments, his intentions, and his philosophy. One of Edison's main

points in granting this interview was to clarify that his apparatus was not to be a phone on

which the living could call up the dead at will. The initiating force in the use of the

apparatus would be the surviving personality of the dead, and not a living human. He was

interested in constructing an apparatus that the dead could use as a sort of valve; as an

amplifier of energy that could be activated by the surviving personality with the smallest of

exertion: Since the actual mass of the life-entities was infinitesimal, the personality they

formed, and the force it was capable of exerting, were likewise extremely small. A great

amplification of this force would be necessary for the disembodied personality to make its

efforts apparent on the gross level of the living human. It is similar to a modern power

house, where man, with his relatively puny one-eighth horse-power, turns a valve which

starts a 50,000-horse-power steam turbine. My apparatus is along those lines It was to be

a nearly open conduit, easy for the disembodied personality, with its infinitesimal mass, to

operate.

At one point he relates in his essays, We tried some experiments in mind reading which

were not very successful. Think mind reading contrary to common sense, wise provision of

the Bon Dieu that we cannot read each others' minds. 'Twould stop civilization and

everybody would take to the woods. In fifty or a hundred thousand centuries, when mankind

has become perfect by evolution, then perhaps this sense could be developed with safety to

the state.32That's an interesting comment. Edison appears to have taken for granted both the

workings of evolution and those of a sentient and intentional deity. He also clearly takes a

teleological view of nature, as illustrated or exemplified by evolution, with the end and goal

being the perfection of man. Later, he describes a photograph of a very beautiful girl, andsays that if a fly looks at it, then the insectivorous branch of nature [will] gaze upon a

picture of what they will attain after ages of evolution.33

Regarding the survival of the life-entities after the death of the body, he wrote: The

group of entities which make up a normal man's intelligence seek release from, rather

than prolongation of, existence in the conditions and environments of this cycle [of the

normal human lifespan] so that they may enter another, whatever it may be.34Human

beings seek constant change and challenge; once the opportunities for this are exhausted in

the human life-span, they must turn for change to whatever may come beyond.35Some

32 Edison, 1948, p 20. Diary entry for July 16, 1885.

33 Edison, 1948, p 21.

34 Edison, 1948, p. 179180.

35 Ibid.



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time after a person reaches the age of sixty, though perhaps not until age ninety or so, he

writes: The cycle [of human life] is approaching the end. At about that age the entities

which form that man will be preparing to discard their old abode, which is that man, and

enter upon a new cycle.36He does not conclude here whether the entities remain in the

same swarm that formed the particular personality whose body is being discarded;

presumably some do and are reborn in a new body, and some disperse and reform to make

new personalities.

On his eightieth birthday, Edison was still discussing his philosophy and conjecturing on

the persistence of personality. In an interview with the Washington Post,37he is quoted: The

word God has no meaning to me. But I do believe that there is a supreme intelligence

pervading the universe, and at times I believe that when a man dies the swarms of billions of

highly organized entities which live in the cells, desert the body, go out into space, keep on,

and enter another and last cycle. Man is not the unit of life. Man is as dead as granite. The

unit of life consists of these highly organized entities. This reference to a last cycle is an

interesting development of his beliefs; it seems different from his earlier position, that the

life-entities are immortal, like mass and energy, changeable not in form but only in how they

are organized into swarms. This seems to indicate a notion of evolution of these entities,

separate from the evolution of the bodies in which they reside during their earthly sojourns.

In this interview, unfortunately Edison did not discuss whether he was still working on

developing the apparatus.

CONCLUSION

The history of Edison's apparatus provides an occasion for posing and exploring some

intriguing questions about the ways in which we imagine our powers of creativity,manipulation and interaction with unpredictable realities, and how these understandings

assist in forming our self-understandings as well.

People of our era increasingly sees the progress of humanity as involving the sloughing

off of superstitions, of the irrational, and of any appeal to the supernatural for either

explanation or articulation of human experience. The notion that this is an intrinsic element

of the progression of the scientific post-modern world, essential to the development of a

more educated, objective, rational, accurate perception and portrayal of reality is one I wish

to trouble. We may have been missing something valuable in adopting this course. Or

36 Ibid.

37 Thomas Edison, 80, Puts in Busy Day Detailing Views. (1927, Feb 12). The Washington Post (1923-1954).

Retrieved from http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/149800305?

accountid=10226



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perhaps it is not that we have been missing something that would be valuable to the mindset

we cherish and chase; perhaps that goal is itself missing something of value that we have

discounted. Perhaps there are other elements of our existence that will not be left out; that

irrupt out of our unconscious, through our beliefs and practices, and into unsettling

experiences. Alternatively, these elements may show themselves in more nuanced ways,

through subtle influences on our interpretations and receptions of the world and changes in it

as they occur.

Edison came out of, and acted within, an era of both increasing technological progress,

and increasing belief that all phenomena could be explained by a materialist, scientistic

approach. This era also, however, retained an enchanted view of the worldthe popular

perception had, in a way, simply transferred its perceived source of enchantment from the

unseen and unknowable, reinvesting this enchantment in the unseen but knowable and

achievable. Human ingenuity and its products became an almost-magical source of

understanding and transformation.

The uncomprehending and unquestioning acceptance of greater and greater marvels of

technological innovation is even more prevalent today than it was in Edison's era. The

average American of the early twenty-first century expects to have at their disposal a vast

array of goods and technologies; they do not expect to comprehend the principles that

govern the functioning and construction of these goods and technologies, nor what it would

be like to live without them. We have multiplied the number of black boxes, the

incomprehensible apparatuses that do wonders, in our lives. Yet in doing so, we have taken

the concept further and into a new dimension: We have lost the sense of wonder that these

used to produce; the marvelous has become the quotidian: an expected element of daily life,

and has thus lost its character as a source of marvel and of enchantment.

One of the most striking differences between Edison's age and ours is that the

perceptions of at least some portion of the general populace did not respect a strict boundary

between what we now think of as the scientific and spiritual; this included inventors

themselves. The unknown was seemingly vast and undifferentiated between what might be

brought into the known and what might not. In his ongoing experiments with radio waves in

1920, Marconi received signals whose source he could not ascertain. He speculated that they

may have come from space, and perhaps that they indicated a deliberate attempt to

communicate. Some people thought that he was investigating the existence of intelligent

extraterrestrial life, but these investigations of interstellar radio waves have proven useful tocontemporary astronomical research. The unseen forces that the vast majority of the

populace saw as occult were fair game for the inventors of telegraphy, radio, x-ray and the



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spirit-phone. And the inventions themselves were often seen as occult manifestations, either

marvelous or demonicuntil the public became used to them.

The general openness to his opinions was quite different from what we might expect to

find if a respected scientist or industrialist were to offer such observations and opinions

today. We now draw brighter lines around unapproachable questions, and disdain to dignifythem with consideration, let alone investigation. The extensive coverage given by the

mainstream popular press to Edison's musings about spiritual questions when addressed as

technological problems to be investigated would be unthinkable today. The articles

published about Edison and his announcement, with titles such as Edison at Work on Spirit

Device, Edison Works on Device by Which Living May be Able to Talk With Dead,

Edison Seeks Electric Path to Spirit World would these days be more likely be seen in the

National Enquirerthan in Scientific Americanand The New York Times. While I would not

advocate that some communications company announce that their next killer app will be

iPhone for Ghosts, the prejudged clear division between what is realistic and what is not,

what is achievable and what is not, tends to put a limit on what we imagine and what we

attempt. It also tends to cast the latest marvel in the light of inevitability. The sense of

wonder and awe is a casualty when our certainty of the wall between the scientific and the

spiritual is fortified, with rational man inside, and the spiritual cast outside the walls.

Gerald Fabris,38writing about Edison and his times, put the contrast between that era and

ours this way: Technologically, more is possible today. But, ironically, less is imaginable.

Somehow the boundaries of what is real have become, in our imaginary, coextensive with

the boundaries of the empirically reproducible. For many, what has not been reproduced by

empirical experimentation and thus proven scientifically is not real at all. This seems,

somewhat ironically, to be more true among laymen than among scientists. It seems thatthere is no end to ingenuity and progress of knowledge, and scientific advances are no less

impressive in our day, yet something seems to be missing. Ultimately, Edison's apparatus for

talking with the dead was not realized. But that does not necessarily mean it was a failure in

all respects. Perhaps it is possible to see Edison's investigation of this unlikely apparatus not

merely as a quaint and quirky dream of an aging scientist, but instead as an example of the

importance of keeping our questions and our minds open, of being willing to explore ideas

that may appear far-fetched and unscientific. Preposterous ideas have been known to yield

paradigm-changing results.

38 Fabris 1998, p.19.



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Edison's Own Secret Spirit ExperimentsWeighing a spirit.

Modern Mechanix and Inventions magazine published, in 1933, a purported accountof a 1920 experiment conducted by Edison and his colleagues. That experimentsupposedly attempted to catch a spirit in a trap that would measure when itssensors had been activated by the mass of the spirit. The illustration is intended toshow that Edison's theory of spirits as physical entities entailed a measurable mass,weight, color, and other traits of physical bodies. The illustration took even moreliberties with Edison's ideas than did the article.


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Timeline of some important events and inventions

1826 Photography invented by Joseph Nicephore Niepce

1835 Morse code invented by Samuel Morse

1838 Electro-magnetic telegraph invented by Charles Wheatstone, and also bySamuel Morse

1848 Fox sisters first report of communications with spirits

1861 to

1865

American Civil War

1876 Telephone invented by Alexander Graham Bell (and Elisha Gray, but the

U.S. Patent Office gave the credit and the patent to Bell).

1877 Phonograph invented by Thomas Alva Edison

1880 Photophone invented by Alexander Graham Bell. Forerunner of fiber-optics,

the technology of the day did not permit its development into a useful formuntil many decades later.

1891 Motion picture Kinetoscope developed by Edison

1893 Wireless communication invented by Nikola Tesla

1895 Radio signals invented by Guglielmo Marconi

1896 Motion picture projection

1907 Color photography was invented by Auguste and Louis Lumire

Radio amplifier was invented by Lee DeForest

1920 Marconi speculates that signals he has received have arrived from space

1920 Edison announces the apparatus for speaking with the dead

1923 Sound film invented by Lee DeForest

Television Electronic invented by Philo Farnsworth


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WORKS CITED

Billings, Molly. June, 1997 modified RDS February, 2005. The Influenza Pandemic of 1918.http://virus.stanford.edu/uda/

Conot, Robert. Streak of Luck. 1979. New York: Seaview Books. Chapter 39: The Freethinker.

Cox, S.S., The Poetry of the Phonograph: Its Marvelous Feats and Capabilities -- Its Humors

and Solemnities. The Post and Union Newspaper, Washington, D.C., April 24, 1878.Phonozoic Text Archive, Document 134http://www.phonozoic.net/n0134.htm, accessed

May 3, 2013.

Douglas, Susan J.Inventing American broadcasting, 1899-1922.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1989.

Edison, Thomas Alva.The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. Dagobert D.

Runes, ed. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.

Edison's Own Secret Sprit Experiments.Modern Mechanix and Inventions, October, 1933.

Accessed at http://blog.modernmechanix.com/edisons-own-secret-spirit-experiments/

Explaining the phonograph. (1878, Jun 26). The Daily Constitution (1876-1881). Retrieved

from http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/494690707?accountid=10226

Fabris, Gerard, 1998. Mr. Edison's Machine to Talk with the Dead: Spiritualism, Technologyand Imagination in the Post-World War I United States. Unpublished paper, Columbia

University.

Lescarboura, Austin C. Edison's Views on Life and Death: An Interview with the Famous

Inventor Regarding his Attempt to Communicate with the Next World. Scientific

American, October 30, 1920, Volume 123 No 18 pp 441-460 p. 446, 458460.

New-York Tribune. (New York [N.Y.]) 1866-1924, February 12, 1920, Page 8 Image 8. Edison

at 73 is the Center of Reunion.Image and text provided by Library of Congress,Washington, DC.Persistent link:

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1920-02-12/ed-1/seq-8/

Schmidt, Leigh Eric.Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Thomas Edison, 80, Puts in Busy Day Detailing Views. (1927, Feb 12). The Washington Post(1923-1954). Retrieved from http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?

url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/149800305?accountid=10226

Wright, Gwendolyn:HISTORY DETECTIVES: The PsychophoneSeason 7, Episode 1 Aired:

06/22/2009. http://video.pbs.org/video/1143720703/

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