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January 14, 2007
Science and the Seance
Dated: August 30, 2005
SOURCE: BBC News
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But some of science's biggest names have not only dabbled in, but been entirely convinced by the world of the seance.
Guglielmo Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell and John Logie Baird are familiar to most for the household indispensables they invented. But the attraction to spiritualism they all shared is definitely not part of the GCSE science syllabus.
All three men, and many other Victorian scientific pioneers, became involved with the religion, which depended on strange forces being demonstrated through bizarre phenomena.
Legitimacy
But how did the world of certainty and precision collide and, in some cases, fuse with that of levitating spiritualists and voices from the "other side"?
To some, it was simply down to chronology. When the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York State - widely considered to be the founders of modern spiritualism - first claimed to have communicated with the dead, the world was awash with scientific endeavour.
Just four years earlier a communication of a very different sort - the first electric telegraph - was sent across the Atlantic.
Science was challenging the old certainties about life - making the impossible, possible.
According to the biographer of the Fox sisters, Barbara Weisberg: "There was so much that was exciting and so much that wouldn't have been thought possible two decades before.
"If people could communicate over the telegraph, why couldn't this world and the next world communicate?"
This gave the sisters' claims greater legitimacy, she says.
As the spiritualist craze grew people from every level of Victorian society crammed into dingy parlours, where knocks and raps indicated the presence of spirits.
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Posted by andrewanissi at January 14, 2007 06:11 PM