If Goodspeed wrote a paper on his soul X-ray project, the archives didn’t have a copy. Nan Knight wondered whether his mention of it might have been a joke. Possibly, but I don’t think so. Not only did Goodspeed’s bio list him as the vice president of the American Roentgen Ray Society, but it named philosophy as his chief interest (with “trotting horses” a close second). He was the secretary of the American Philosophical Society for thirty years. Since he ran the physics department’s Randall-Morgan Laboratory, he would have had both the equipment and the budget for such an undertaking. Plus, we have the requisite untimely loss of a loved one, which so often sparks an interest in the hereafter among otherwise orthodox scientists. Goodspeed’s twenty-eight-year-old son died in a parachuting accident.
For an even more creative approach to soul-viewing, we have Hereward Carrington, Ph.D., the founder, in 1920, of the Psychic Laboratory and the undisputed gizmo geek of the paranormal set. In his 1930 book The Story of Psychic Science, Carrington sets forth his idea for a machine to reveal the shape of the soul. The description takes two pages, beginning with “arrange a small box as to imprison some animal—a dog, cat or small monkey” and ending with “therefore, when condensation occurs, the resulting line will outline the form of the astral body.” Along the way, we make stops for hermetic seals, piped-in anesthetic, dust-free air, ionization rays, an air pump, and no doubt several Snook tubes. The book contains a half dozen photographs of the dashing Carrington, his Gregory Peckish hair swept back from his forehead and a scowl of concentration on his face, checking the readings on the dials of his latest gadget. The photograph invariably includes an attractive young woman, sometimes hooked up to the machine, other times merely gazing rapturously at Dr. Carrington. I had a crush on Dr. Carrington, too, until I saw some of his later titles, which include The Hygienic Life and Fasting for Health and Long Life.
Carrington never built his monkey box, so the honors for most elaborate soul-manifesting device go to a pair of Dutch physicists, J. L. W. P. Matla and G. J. Zaalberg van Zelst. Matla believed himself to be in contact with an entity who spelled out communications letter by letter on a Ouija board. (Hopefully the question “What is my full name and that of my partner?” was never posed.) The entity informed Matla that the human spirit survives death to become a gaseous body called homme-force (meaning “man-force”; this was the French edition, which was all I could find). Matla reasoned that if homme-force were truly a gas, it must obey the laws of physics, and thus its existence might be proved scientifically. The entity, which appeared to have an engineering background, not only agreed with this, but provided detailed instructions for the building of a device for the task. The transcript of séance #36 reads, in part: “Construct two cardboard cylinders that are impenetrable to air. Length 50 cm. Diameter, 25 cm….” The idea was that the gaseous entity would pass into the cylinders and make its presence known by expanding and contracting on demand. The displaced air would then trigger the rise and fall of a drop of grain alcohol in a glass tube. Which it did, at least to the satisfaction of Matla. The pair sallied forth with more and more elaborate calculations. Their book Le Mystère de la Mort is full of lines like “Le volume de la masse de l’homme-force est de 36.70 m.M3” and “Le volume du gaz déplace 279.169 c.M3 d’air.” It’s hard to say where is the bigger hubris, in their convictions or in the arrogance of carrying them to a third decimal point.
Hereward Carrington read the book and, being Hereward Carrington, couldn’t resist building a set of Matla cylinders of his own. His model was accessorized with a bell, rigged to ring whenever the alcohol drop moved. Carrington would assemble a group of observers in a room with the device, ask for quiet, and then announce loudly, as though man-force had hearing trouble: “If there be any force present capable of entering the cylinder and thus displacing air, will it please do so?” Sometimes the alcohol drop moved, but not necessarily in conjunction with a request to do so. Often repeated requests were made and nothing happened. Then Carrington would give up and leave the room, only to hear the bell ring. It was as though the entity were intentionally making Carrington look like a boob in front of whichever fetching young lab assistant was at his side. Carrington spent an entire year messing about with the cylinders. In the end, he concluded that temperature changes and coincidence accounted for Matla’s results.
The amazing thing about men like Matla and Carrington is that they weren’t perceived as fringe scientists. For a significant span of years, paranormal research was an accepted undertaking among respectable scientists. As proof, I offer an article that ran in the July 30, 1921, Lancet, then and now one of the most respected medical journals in the world. A Dr. Charles Russ writes that he has proved the existence of an unknown “force or ray” that “emerges from the human eye.” Russ built a tabletop device to demonstrate this force, which is illustrated in the article. Volunteers were asked to stare into a sealed box at a copper-wire solenoid suspended from a string and held steady by magnetic force. If they stared at the left side of it, he claimed, the solenoid would be pushed clockwise; right-side staring set it twisting the other way. He posited that the mystery force “disturbs the electrostatic state of the enclosed system” and claimed that five physicists with London’s Royal Society were unable to find any electrical or mechanical fallacy that could account for the effects. Meanwhile, it’s business as usual on the facing page, with dysentery expert W. S. Dawson holding forth on fecal sampling—whether it is preferable to “introduce the swab” into the rectum or to take a specimen directly from “the motion.”[19] As for Dr. Russ’s machine, I can’t explain what was going on; however, given that no one has since replicated the study, I suspect it was a load of motion.
Dr. Russ was but one of a long parade of scientists who were convinced that the soul was a sort of life force that—if not actually photographable or locatable as an entity—could be detected and proved indirectly, by way of its emanations. Often these emanations were captured as coronal glows or lightninglike rays around the perimeters of living objects placed in contact with a photosensitive surface. Bear in mind, photography was in its infancy; its processes were still poorly understood. While some of the manipulations were outright fraud, most were the result of sincere, if misguided, efforts.
For instance, the effluviograph. In 1897, a team of scientists from the Société de Biologie in Paris demonstrated a new technique in which a halo could be made to appear on a photographic plate where a subject had held his finger. The men assumed they had discovered a way to capture od rays. Od force had been making the rounds as the latest form of life force, having bumped aside Franz Mesmer’s animal magnetism. In reality, what the French biologists had discovered was the effects of heat on photographic developer. As proof, chemist and debunker Emil Jacobsen produced an effluviograph that looked identical to the Parisian fingertip effluviographs but was made by touching the plate with the rounded end of a heated glass test tube.
Jacobsen’s next undertaking was to unseat the electrograph. In Beyond Light and Shadow, Rolf Krauss’s admirable history of paranormal photography, you will find a reproduction of an 1898 photograph entitled: “Electrograph of the antipathy between two Vienna sausages.” The photo was part of Jacobsen’s paper debunking electrographs, which do no more than document the light from an electrical discharge given off by an object—living, dead, or inert—that has been hooked up to an induction machine and placed in contact with a photosensitive surface. Using this technique, a member of the Imperial Institute for Experimental Medicine in St. Petersburg had claimed to be able not only to photograph the life force, but to use these images to diagnose illnesses and emotional states. The scientist paraded a photograph of two adversaries holding their fingertips close together—the inspiration for Jacobsen’s satirical Vienna sausage series—such that their sparks of nerve force could be seen to keep their distance, whereas nerve force among friends could be seen to commingle.
19
I’m trying to work out how this makes sense as a noun meaning “the product of a bowel movement.” This is not Dawson’s personal euphemistic misstep; the usage persists in medical writing today. Should you have had the misfortune of visiting a web page called the Constipation Page, you will have seen the phrase, “the motion or stool is very dry or hard.” Perhaps this is why the term “motion pictures” was replaced by “movies.” Now that I see it on the page, “movie” would have been a far better BM euphemism than “motion.”