Many years ago, I read that the great physicist (and pioneer in the understanding of electricity), Prof. Michael Faraday , took a stab at the investigation of the biggest “psychic” phenomenon of his day…mediums. In those days, “psychics’ conducted séances, during which all many of things went on (objects moving, etc.) while peoples hands were clasped together on a table top. Faraday investigated these phenomena, and decided that they were due to physical causes (i.e.,the unconsciously-applied forces of the people’s hands and arms). He did this by constructing a table top, which had layers of cardboard glued together by beeswax. By marking the edges of the layers, he was able to prove that all of the motions detected were actually caused by the participants, not any spirits.
Does anyone know a good site to find the details of this?
In his Biography of Faraday L pearce Williams mentions Farday’s disdain for table-turning, but doesn’t mention any actual experiments Faraday carried out. (It’s on p. 336 of my older edition.) I’ll look around a little more.
Faraday published two letters about his experiments on table-turning. The first, shorter account was published as a letter to the editor in The Times on 30 June 1853. Its full text doesn’t appear to be online, but this site makes available the first sheet of what looks to my eye to be his handwritten draft of this letter. These two sides comprise about half the published text. The complete text as it appeared in the newspaper is handily reprinted in The Philosopher’s Tree (IoP, 1999, p180-3), the rather nice anthology of Faraday’s writing edited by Peter Day.
There’s then a more detailed letter published in The Atheneum. That doesn’t seem to be available online at all.
The other pages on the linked site give additional details about the whole affair. But Faraday’s two letters are a model of clarity and it’s well worth digging them out as the unimprovable account of his debunking.
To correct myself: other than in The Times Digital Archive. Obviously.