The Limits of Genius’ by Katie Spalding

 Who you gonna call ? 

 

Thomas Edison's Lesser-Known
Invention: Dial-a-Ghost

By the time Thomas Alva Edison died in 1931, he had patented more new inventions than anybody else in history. He achieved this in much the same way as the pharaohs of Egypt built the pyramids, which is to say, he got a bunch of other people to do it, and then slapped his own face on the finished product.

That's not totally a bad thing - Edison-heads these days often credit him with 'inventing' the concept of independent industrial research labs more than anything else, and that alone has given us ... well, pretty much every modern convenience you have at your disposal right now, probably. But the idea you likely have in your mind of a brilliant loner being hit by bolt after bolt of divine inspiration is pretty much a fabrication: as the man himself once said, 'I never had an idea in my life?
In fact, most of even his most iconic creations were the result of collaboration with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of the employees working at his Menlo Park laboratory - his 'invention factory', as he affectionally called it. I mean, the guy didn't even really invent the lightbulb, and that's the one thing he's best known for inventing.

Edison's claim to have 'invented' the lightbulb is shaky at best, is the point. His genius wasn't in the invention itself, but the process - he was the one who assembled the shop-floor teams and got them fine-tuning the established process, by testing material after material for years on end in search of the best filament. Then, after they got the general idea down, Edison patented the design and founded the Edison Electric Light Company well before they perfected it - his patent is remarkably vague on details outside of 'carbon filament in glass bulb - T. A. Edison'.

We think of him today as, if nothing else, a genius with a string of world-changing inventions to his name, but, really, Edison was just playing the averages - and nothing encapsulates that more than perhaps his weirdest contraption of all: the Spirit Phone.

‘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’, he told The American Magazine in a 1920 interview.
This coming invention would not use any occult, mystifying, mysterious, or weird means, employed by so-called "mediums", but by scientific methods,' he assured the public. 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.'

Before you could say 'how's the reception in Hades these days, magazines across the world were publishing articles and cartoons lampooning the inventor who could talk to the dead. But to Edison, it made perfect sense: with his usual self-belief, he told the magazine that he knew 'with absolute positiveness that some of our most generally accepted notions on the subject [of life after death] are utterly untenable and ridiculous. In fact, he said, all living things are made from 'myriads and myriads of infinitesimally small individuals, each in itself a unit of life. These individuals were immortal, lived in some kind of vague hierarchy - to account for the fact that certain men and women have greater intellectuality, greater abilities, greater powers than others, he explained - and worked together in what he called 'swarms' to generate intellect and personalities. Contacting the dead, then, wasn't a question of séance but science
- all you need to do is construct a way of isolating these swarms'.

If the units of life which compose an individual's memory hold together after that individual's "death", is it not within range of possibility to say the least, that these memory swarms could retain the powers they formerly possessed, and thus retain what we call the individual's personality after "dissolution of the body?" Edison asked the readers of The American Magazine.

'If so, then that individuals memory, or personality, ought to be able to function as before... I am hopeful that by providing the right kind of instrument, to be operated by this personality, we can receive intelligent messages from it in its changed habitation, or environ-ment,' he said.

It sounds absurd, I know - which is why, for about a century, biographers mostly thought it was a hoax. But, for the time, it wasn't such a crazy idea: despite the best efforts of scientists and debunkers like Houdini, spiritualism - the belief that the dead were able to communicate with the living and even effect events in the real world - had been steadily gaining popularity throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.

It kind of makes sense as well: the whole century, people had been bombarded with inventions that opened up brand new possi-bilities, and a bunch of them had come from Edison himself.

I mean, sure, it might seem obvious to us that you can't talk to the dead, but it probably seemed obvious to people two hundred years ago that you can't listen to the opera if you're at home - then Edison invented the phonograph.

And at the time Edison was out there talking about his spirit phone, spiritualism was all the rage. By 1920, two things had happened that had left the world reeling: the First World War, and the 1918 pandemic. Parents had lost their sons to foreign trenches - quite often they never even saw their child's body again - and then, when the dust settled, along came a deadly flu to take out the survivors. In total, the second half of the 1910s saw the loss of around 70 million people - around one in twenty of everybody alive - and most of them were young and healthy, with whole lives ahead of them.

In the wake of so much death, people scrambled for any sense of control - and with spiritualism, they were promised their sons and daughters were still with them, and happy. Books on spiritualism sold out over and over; in America, Ouija boards started selling out, and in the UK, spiritualism became so popular that it briefly gave the Anglican Church a run for its money.

So despite his biographers' attempts to cover it all over with a 'ha ha, that was probably a joke, he didn't really think you could phone up ghosts', Thomas 'Will Invent For Money' Edison almost certainly was serious about this suggestion. And in 2015, any lingering doubts about whether he really meant it or not were put to bed when a French radio presenter named Philippe Baudouin happened to find an old copy of Edison's memoirs in a second-hand bookstore.

The 'Diary and Sundry Observations' of Edison was essentially just a bunch of his writings and speeches that had been collected up and sold seventeen years after he died, which, to be fair, sounds like what he would have wanted. Whoever organised the book certainly had a lot to choose from, since Edison left approximately five million pages of notes, letters, diaries and the like after he died, but for some reason - and let's face it, it was probably embarrassment - they neglected to include any mention of the spirit phone.

At least, in the English version. In French, the book had one extra chapter: Edison's designs for the spirit phone. Sketches showed that he was basing the idea off his phonograph designs - this was a standard way of working for him, a technique that modern biographers have called his 'invention by analogy'. His idea seems to have been to ramp up the sensitivity of the phonograph enough that it would be able to pick up the vibrations of the swarm. He even made a pact with one of his engineers, William Walter Dinwiddie, that whichever of them died first would send the other a message from beyond.

Even if his chronicler was ashamed of these occult beliefs, Edison himself had no such qualms. Ever his own biggest hype man, he told The American Magazine that 'the apparatus ... should provide a channel for the inflow of knowledge from the unknown world - a form of existence different from that of this life - we may be brought an important step nearer the fountainhead of all knowledge, nearer the intelligence which directs it all?

To be fair, if it had worked, it probably would have beaten even the lightbulb in terms of world-changing inventions. Luckily, though, ghosts can't use phones, so the plans came to nothing. Nobody ever found a prototype, and it was generally assumed that, like so many other ideas he had at some point been obsessed with, Edison had simply dropped it and moved on to the next distraction.

Well, kind of. Two years after he died, in 1933, the magazine Modern Mechanix published an article claiming that Edison had convened a group of eminent - though unnamed - scientists several years previously to test a prototype spirit phone.
'Edison set up a photo-electric cell, the story explained. 'A tiny pencil of light, coming from a powerful lamp, bored through the darkness and struck the active surface of this cell, where it was transformed instantly into a feeble electric current. Any object, no matter how thin, transparent, or small, would cause a registration on the cell if it cut through the beam.

The group spent hours watching the machine for any sign of communication, the article said, but to no avail. If the phone was ringing, nobody was picking up on the other side. And that, perhaps, is the strongest evidence of all that the spirit phone was a flop. After all, Edison was infamous in his day for being excessively litigious - if the device had worked, there's no doubt his spirit would have got on the phone to Modern Mechanix and threatened legal action.

Source ~ ‘ The Limits of Genius’ by Katie Spalding