Thomas Edison – Le Royaume de l’au-delà (The Realms Beyond)
Précédé de
Machines nécrophoniques
par Philippe Baudouin
Editions Jérôme Millon (Mars 2015)
Although many of the inventions of Thomas Edison (1847-1931), such as the incandescent lamp, the electric chair or the gramophone, are very well known, the same cannot be said about his psychic research. While most of his biographers have explored many facets of his thousand engineering patents, they have generally remained silent about the experiments that Edison conducted during the last ten years of his life in the field of communication with the dead. The work of this self-made man in the field of psychic sciences is linked to his work on sound reproduction by an interest in the phenomenon of the voice and its electrical double. What would the phonographic machine reveal about the occult dimensions of the means of mechanical reproduction? Back to the forgotten history of the “necrophone,” Thomas Edison’s most mysterious invention. Thomas Edison belongs to the group of “thanato-technicians.” Throughout his life, he never ceased working on the engineering of death. Most of the technical objects he invented or perfected led to a resurgence of that sense of the spectacular and the mysterious that had occurred in relation to the discovery of electricity, which popular Mesmerism and spiritualism had exploited in their time.
apparent in his invention of the Kinetoscope in 1888 and Kinetograph, which prefigured the cinema of the Lumière brothers, creating visual traces of electrical ghosts. At this time Edison was engaged in a fierce battle against the AC system of George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla. To convince the public, Edison staged several public electrocutions of animals - most famously killing the elephant Topsy in 1903, filmed by his own employees - in order to show the dangers of AC electricity. This obsession with the destructive power of electricity continued to haunt Thomas Edison, who developed another “thanato-technique” - the first electric chair of the State of New York. The first test in August 1890 resulted in a scene of screaming and blood that the few witnesses to the experience found unbearable. The condemned man, William Kemmler, died after an agony of several hours during which he was administered the shocks of increasing intensity. But this obsession with death reached a climax in a final project that occupied Edison during the last ten years of his life: the creation of a device to communicate with the dead. There are few traces left by what we could call the “necrophone.” Edison discussed this mysterious device in a curious chapter titled “The Kingdom of the Beyond” in his posthumous memoirs, published in French in 1949, in which he addressed the issues of the survival of the soul, spiritualism and the technical possibilities for communication with the dead. But what was his mysterious “necrophone”? What he was able to hear?
Photography and Spiritualism
Edison’s particular interest in the question of the survival of the soul seems to have developed quite early in his life, even if the facts in this regard are limited to a few reports. The writer Martin Ebon recalled that the inventor’s parents were well-known spiritualists who regularly organized séances with a medium in their family home to try to communicate with the beyond. In his book The Invented Self: An Anti-Biography from Documents of Thomas
Alva Edison, David Nye tried to identify the works related to psychic phenomena that were in
the inventor’s library. There were the works of Theosophist Helena Blavatsky, the records of the Society for Psychical Research, From Heaven and Hell by Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), famous for his tales of visions in which he conversed with angels, the strange book The
Evolution of the Universe, supposedly “dictated” by the spirit of the physicist Michael
Faraday (1791-1867), the pioneer of electromagnetism. However, Edison’s interest in psychic science was not limited to the field of communication with the dead. His research also related to the phenomena of “remote sympathy” that are generally grouped together under the name of “telepathy.” It involved several experiences with Bert Reese (1851-1926), a magician whose fame was built around what he presented as authentic psychic faculties.Although forced bitterly to acknowledge the failure of his own attempts, Edison did not give up on the field of telepathy. According to the illusionist Joseph Dunninger (1892-1975), with whom Thomas Edison was in regular correspondence, the inventor conducted experiments during which “he focused on one person and he came to see him or focused on the idea of a particular action and this was transmitted to the person concerned without using any verbal information.”
M etaphysics of sound recording
millions of “living units,” which were so infinitely small as to be beyond the microscopic observation:
“The small size of the units is necessarily limited by the ultimate fineness of the material. (...) The electron theory answers this question quite satisfactorily. I made rough calculations and I am now in possession of the results. I am sure that the existence of a very complex entity, consisting of one million electrons and yet too small to be visible to the most advanced microscope is a perfectly possible thing.”
By adding these “swarms” together, these groups of “living units” would amount to a living being. When the person died, “living units” would disperse quickly into the aether to form a new swarm.According to its inventor, the necrophone would be able precisely to detect the last words of the living units dispersing into the aether before they come together to form another living being. The principle of this machine, Edison said, was based on a kind of valve whose design would amplify all energy, however small it was, allowing the spirit to make itself manifest. This is in a sense the same principle of amplification that the inventor already achieved with his telephone and phonograph devices. However, his device has nothing to do with spiritualist folklore and Ouija boards, Edison insisted:
“Some of the current methods are so simplistic, so childish and unscientific one can only be astonished to see that many sensible men believe them. If ever we need to be successful in contact with people who have left our world, it certainly will not be using one of those childish ways that seem so naive to an educated man.”
Yet despite this determination to distinguish his ideas from such “childish” and “absurd” beliefs, it is clear that they are not so different from Edison’s inventions. Remember that at this time mediums did not hesitate to use various techniques of sound reproduction during their seances. If the language of Samuel Morse telegraph inspired the “knocking” of the poltergeist phenomena observed in 1848 by the Fox sisters, the same could be said of the way that Anglo-Saxon mediums used the horn of Edison’s phonograph. Indeed, the “spirits’ trumpet” that they used looked surprisingly similar to this part of Edison’s apparatus. In his History of Spiritualism, Arthur Conan Doyle points out that these “aluminium cones were used in mediumistic sessions to amplify the voices and also [...] to form a small dark room in which the true vocal cords used by mind [could] be realized.”
As far as the appearance of the “nécrophone” is concerned, Edison has always remained discreet. However, one can still see some sketches of the device in two old American magazines. The magazine Modern Mechanix and Inventions in October 1933 reveals some of the characteristics of the machine:
Similarly, an article by Wainwright Evans for Fate magazine in 1963 included a sketch of a strange device that strangely resembles both Edison’s phonograph and “spirit trumpets.” Edison’s Machine is presented as a strange “psychic telephone.” The reporter described a curious device in which a microphone was placed in a wooden box on top of which was a large aluminium trumpet, filled with potassium permanganate and crossed by an electrode. An electric wire connected right through the microphone to the trumpet and a radio antenna. Placed in an aluminium trumpet, potassium permanganate was to act as an electrolyte solution, Evans wrote, to amplify the waves assumed to be the voice of the wandering souls.
If one had to sum up the importance of Thomas Edison’s necrophonic experiments, it would probably be this: the phonograph and other devices for electrifying speech are “machine phantoms.” Domesticated by man, electricity is unique in that it can both serve and enslave mankind, or even annihilate it and then recreate it in the form of magnetic avatars. Edison was able to seize upon this unique link between sound recording techniques and so-called occult phenomena, by wanting to risk recording the voice of the dead. Recording here must be understood here as the act of wresting the voice from the body that emits it. Recording is to reduce our identity to that of a ghost. Sound technologies have made possible what Murray Schafer called the phenomenon of “schizophonia.” Phonographic devices have allowed the separation of the voice from the speaker’s body, creating a disturbing experience for listeners. Listening to the radio is literally hearing voices. Radio is “structurally hallucinogenic,” the art critic Florent Lahache has argued, in that it “puts the listener into delirium.” Once recorded, the word is no longer part of our body. We are somehow dispossessed. The desire to record the voices of the dead seems specifically to ask the same question by adding a metaphysical dimension, and if one day the communication machines are able to capture our souls, what they would be able to hear?
