it’s conceivable that he would work on a ghost phone. his other inventions had ghostly applications.
phonograph to record and preserve ghostly sounds.
telegraph improvements to spread the news of ghost sitings quickly.
electric light to not get caught in the dark by ghosts.
movie camera and projector to preserve ghost images.
chair with extra rear tilting legs, to sleep sitting up for faster escape from ghosts.
electric hammer to rapidly beat ghost with as he was older and had less strength.
Me too. And though I’ve had some overlap with the telecommunications field, I didn’t hear it there. It’s pretty common in general culture, though probably less so in the modern cellular era.
Yes, it’s true. Edison designed the phone so he could learn authentic Kung-Fu from Native American spirit guides, and thoroughly kick Tesla’s ass.
The myth may come from an interview Edison gave to Scientific American, where he was asked whether his device could communicate with spirits.
If Edison’s reply was sincere, it seems he believed in or did not discount the possibility of the existence of ghosts. Or possibly he just spotted another marketing opportunity…
Likewise. Most people have heard of a trunk call, even if technically they aren’t quite sure what it is.
What it boils down to is a claim that Edison thought that if spirits existed, they would manifest some physical presence which could be detected. So he set up a beam projector and and a photocell in room with mediums summoning spirits, and waited for the spirits to register by crossing the beam. They didn’t.
I remember that one: it wasn’t intended to be a talk-to-the-dead device but was a phonograph-like device that would repeat self-improvement mantras while the [del]sucker[/del] subject slept.
Oh, and I got the trunk call reference only because I read a Hercule Poirot mystery where a person inadvertently reveals that they had spent significant time in America though they denied (or didn’t reveal) it by referring off-hand to a long-distance phone call as such (US usage) rather than as a trunk call (UK usage).
BTW, in the late 19th and early 20th century, belief in spiritualism was not that uncommon. Believers included some rational scientific types such as William Crookes, Alfred Russel Wallace and Lord Rayleigh. And some hardheaded industrialists such as Henry Ford. The whole thing appealed to the mind set of educated Victorians, and the popularity survived into the 20th century.
(It was Ford, BTW, who insisted on capturing Edison’s last breath in a glass tube, providing a plot point for the Tim Powers novel mentioned above.)
