Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: the Spirit Phone.

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Building devices to talk with the dead was a popular diversion for inventors in the 1920s.

Thomas Edison seated in his laboratory, c. 1904.

▼ In the late 1920s, notlong before his death, Thomas Edison reportedly gathered with other scientists in a secret laboratory to record the voices and presence of the dead. They used “speakers, generators, and other experimental equipment,”Modern Mechanixmagazine alleged after the fact, in October of 1933.
The magazine article describes Edison’s machine, in which a “tiny pencil of light, coming from a powerful lamp, bored through the darkness and struck the active surface,” which could detect the smallest particle. These particles would be proof of the afterlife, physical bits of human personality left in the atmosphere, waiting to be discovered. Unfortunately, after “tense hours” spent watching the delicate instruments, nothing happened; which was, the magazine adds, why no one had heard of this experiment before.
Full disclosure: thatspecificaccount might have been a spooky fantasy for the magazine’s October issue. But, while it’s unclear if that exact scene occurred, there’s ample proof that Edison was interested in speaking to the dead using technology.In 1920, the inventor shocked the public when he toldAmerican Magazine: “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.”
Edison, who was known for having hundreds of patents of inventions and creating an efficient version of the light  bulb, added that this new invention would not function by “any occult, mystifying, mysterious, or weird means, employed by so–called “mediums”, but by scientific methods. 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.”
Edison’s idea became known as a “spirit phone”, and caused a media storm. For years many historians believed the invention to be a joke or a hoax; no blueprints or prototypes of a spirit phone could be found. But while he may not haveactuallycontacted the dead, there is evidence he experimented with the idea. In 2015 the French journalist Philippe Baudouin found a rare version of Edison’s diary in a thrift store in France.
This version includes a chapter that was not printed in the widely known 1948 English edition, called theDiary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. This missing chapter was dedicated to his theory of the spirit world, and how it might be possible to contact it. Baudouin re-published the French edition as Le Royaume de  l’au-delà.
A century ago, however, the wider world was somewhat less receptive to the revelation that the great inventor was working on a spirit phone. The resulting media circus was summed up in an editorial  noteinAmerican Medicine, which said “the press have failed to deal with proper dignity and respect an announcement from the great man who has produced so many modern miracles.”
As magazines regurgitated the  story, Edison’s somewhat pragmatic approach to the spirit world morphed into evidence that he was (or soon could be) regularly chatting with ghosts. A French cartoon from the time depicted a depressed husband being pestered by his mother-in-law beyond the grave via Edison’s spirit phone.
That a well-respected scientist who greatly influenced modern technology could try to contact spirits might seem unlikely to the public now. But when Edison spoke of his idea in 1920, spiritualists were still going strongin the United States—some even called themselves “ phone-voyants,” and claimed that they could harness the electric signals in conventional phones to interpret spirits.
For many, the spirit phone’s unbelievable promise invoked technologies like  the telegraph and  air flight, which were both seen as impossible until proven otherwise. The public was, for example, aghast at Edison’s phonograph when it was new in 1877, an invention many felt “could turn the ancient dream of immortality into reality, in an attempt to cheat death,” Baudouin notes in the documentaryThomas Edison & the Realms Beyond.
At the time, communicating with spirits didn’t seem much more impossible than harnessing electricity. Other similarly eerie ideas appeared during this time too. Thomas Watson, the well-regarded assistant of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, also dabbled in the idea of a spirit  phone; while an invention by Bell and ear specialist Clarence J. Blake, the “ ear  phonautograph,” recorded sounds using a stylus attached to a human ear and skull.
During Edison’s lifetime, science  and technology  advanced at a rapid clip, giving us the gas-powered car and the theory of relativity. These unexpected advancements seemed endless, and the possibility of a physical spirit seemed plausible. Edison mused toAmerican Magazinethat scientists studying electricity would probably be the first people to review his device. “It would cause a tremendous sensation if successful,” he said. Yet if his device failed, he added, our belief in the spirit world would wane significantly. (▪ ▪ ▪)

► Please, read the full note here: Source

bsk

hmm .. interesting