"In the pantheon of Thomas Edison’s inventions, few are as enigmatic—or as controversial—as his so-called “spirit phone.” The fabled device, rumored to connect the living with the dead.
Known as “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” he was the mastermind behind the phonograph, the electric light bulb, and numerous other groundbreaking inventions.
Edison was a scientist to his core, but he was also a businessman and, perhaps unexpectedly, a spiritual seeker.
Edison was one of several ostensibly intelligent people who got caught up in the turn-of-the-century religious fad known as spiritualism.
The movement attracted tons of people we consider to be pretty smart, from scientists and Nobel Prize Winners like Pierre Curie (husband of Marie Curie) to famous authors like Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle..... the religion saw a boost in popularity after World War I. Lots of people had lost loved ones and they were desperate to be able to speak with them one last time. In the face of such widespread grief, a wave of quacks posing as mediums swept through the United States and elsewhere, claiming they could conduct séances to put people in contact with the ghosts of their loved ones.
As Halloween in 1920 quickly approached, Thomas Edison had quite the “treat” to share with the public. In an October 16, 1920, interview published in The American Magazine with Bertie Charles Forbes, the founder of Forbes magazine, Edison boldly revealed,
In his diary, Edison theorized that life, like matter and energy, was indestructible. He envisioned tiny life-based particles continuing to exist after death, forming a personality-based residue—memories, thoughts, and impressions that once defined a person. If these particles persisted, Edison speculated, they might gather around us
within the space-time continuum, or what he called the “ether.”
Edison believed these particles might produce vibrations detectable by sensitive instruments—a scientific approach that he thought could bypass the subjectivity and unreliability of mediums and psychics.
He envisioned the “spirit phone” working like a finely tuned electrical device, capable of detecting the subtle “etheric” forces that supposedly linger after death.
By the time of his death in 1931, no one had publicly demonstrated a working device, and the project seemed to fade into obscurity. Yet the idea refused to die. In later decades, researchers in electronic voice phenomena and instrumental transcommunication would point back to Edison as a kind of intellectual predecessor, someone who had envisioned a scientific bridge between the living and the dead long before technology could even begin to approach such a possibility.
Edison died in 1931, and his posthumous memoir The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison was published in 1948. According to Tech Times, the final chapter of that book included the inventor's designs for a "spirit phone." That chapter, however, was never published in English. It had been removed from the original text before publication, and in its absence scholars and scientists believed Edison's statements about making tech to talk to ghosts were simply his odd way of making a joke or trying to pull a fast one on the public.
But that chapter wasn't removed from the book entirely. It was never edited out of the French translation, and in 2015, Edison's true beliefs about the next plane of existence were brought to the attention of French readers via a book titled Le Royaume de l'Au-dela (The Kingdom of the Afterlife). Radio personality and philosopher Philippe Baudouin, who wrote the preface to the book, said that Edison made a deal with an audio engineer named William Walter Dinwiddie in which the first of the two to die "would try to send a message to the survivor from beyond." Baudouin said that the chapter reveals that Edison "imagined being able to record the voice of another being, to be able to make audible that which isn't — the voice of the dead."
TheDebrief/PanicD
As Halloween in 1920 quickly approached, Thomas Edison had quite the “treat” to share with the public. In an October 16, 1920, interview published in The American Magazine with Bertie Charles Forbes, the founder of Forbes magazine, Edison boldly revealed,
“I have been at work for some time, building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us. There are two or three kinds of apparatus which should make communication very easy. I am engaged in the construction of one such apparatus now, and I hope to be able to finish it before very many months pass.”
This so-called “spirit phone” would not involve ghostly apparitions or the theatrics of a séance. Instead, Edison speculated that if the human spirit persisted after death, it might exist as “subtle particles” capable of affecting the physical world, albeit on a microscopic level.In his diary, Edison theorized that life, like matter and energy, was indestructible. He envisioned tiny life-based particles continuing to exist after death, forming a personality-based residue—memories, thoughts, and impressions that once defined a person. If these particles persisted, Edison speculated, they might gather around us
Edison believed these particles might produce vibrations detectable by sensitive instruments—a scientific approach that he thought could bypass the subjectivity and unreliability of mediums and psychics.
He envisioned the “spirit phone” working like a finely tuned electrical device, capable of detecting the subtle “etheric” forces that supposedly linger after death.
By the time of his death in 1931, no one had publicly demonstrated a working device, and the project seemed to fade into obscurity. Yet the idea refused to die. In later decades, researchers in electronic voice phenomena and instrumental transcommunication would point back to Edison as a kind of intellectual predecessor, someone who had envisioned a scientific bridge between the living and the dead long before technology could even begin to approach such a possibility.
Edison died in 1931, and his posthumous memoir The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison was published in 1948. According to Tech Times, the final chapter of that book included the inventor's designs for a "spirit phone." That chapter, however, was never published in English. It had been removed from the original text before publication, and in its absence scholars and scientists believed Edison's statements about making tech to talk to ghosts were simply his odd way of making a joke or trying to pull a fast one on the public.
But that chapter wasn't removed from the book entirely. It was never edited out of the French translation, and in 2015, Edison's true beliefs about the next plane of existence were brought to the attention of French readers via a book titled Le Royaume de l'Au-dela (The Kingdom of the Afterlife). Radio personality and philosopher Philippe Baudouin, who wrote the preface to the book, said that Edison made a deal with an audio engineer named William Walter Dinwiddie in which the first of the two to die "would try to send a message to the survivor from beyond." Baudouin said that the chapter reveals that Edison "imagined being able to record the voice of another being, to be able to make audible that which isn't — the voice of the dead."
TheDebrief/PanicD