Hello!

We spent the last two weeks digging into pneumatic tubes current use in hospitals (including how so many things are “accidentally” put into them). Today, we’re going back in time! We’ll be heading to the late-19th century, when women who professed they could summon spirits caught the attention of Spiritualists who tried to use scientific methods to prove the women were legit.

Several professed mediums had their powers “scientifically” verified. This post will focus on one case in London from February 1875.

One evening that month, 24-year-old Annie Eva Fay found herself in the house of Sir William Crookes, her hands clasping a galvanometer, a device that would ostensibly prove she was, in fact, a real medium. If she took her hands off its two handles, the electric circuit running through the apparatus would break, and the observers huddled around the apparatus in the adjoining room would see.

Fay fooled them that night, calling forth a ghostly hand that wound up a music box, rung a bell, and carried a violin across the room while the circuit remained intact. Crookes announced he had scientifically proven Fay had supernatural abilities, and she carried his claim as a badge of legitimacy for the remaining 40 years of her career.

Fay achieved this in part by taking advantage of how society dismissed and underestimated women. Almost every man who described Fay, for example, emphasized how they found her physically attractive, and (perhaps because of this) viewed her as a passive participant in her séances rather than the true driving force behind them.

Crookes’s hubris around his study’s scientific soundness also played a major role, which we’ll get into below.

Crookes was a well-regarded scientist who had discovered the element thallium, an achievement so renowned even Americans had heard of him. Because of this, one could say he was high on his own supply in terms of his skills in scientifically proving something that no one else could.

Crookes’s interest in Spiritualism, combined with his scientific drive, led him to test several mediums, including Fay, using the galvanometer.

Engineers didn’t create the galvanometer to test a woman’s ability to commune with the dead. (And yes, it was always women who séance scientists like Crookes examined.) Crookes’s acquaintance and fellow believer, Cromwell Varley, knew about the device from his work at the International Telegraph Company, where a decade or so before, he had used the apparatus to confirm a transatlantic cable line was intact.

While the galvanometer was first invented in 1820, electricity was still a curiosity rather than a part of everyday life in 1875. That novelty gave the device a faux veneer of authority when testing séances; what better way for men of good standing to prove mediums are real than to use fancy technology?

Crookes’s confessed as much in the March 12, 1875, edition of The Spiritualist:

“Mrs. Fay is usually tied with tapes or string; I proposed to tie her with a current of electricity. This method has the advantage of absolute certainty, since, if the medium has her hands or body removed from the wires, in a state of trance or otherwise, the galvanometer outside lets the spectators know the moment that the circuit is broken.”

Spoiler: Crookes was wrong.

As the diagram above shows, Fay sat in Crookes’s library holding two handles — one in each hand. Those handles had wires at the end that went through the wall to the galvanometer that measured the flow of current going through the system. If Fay dropped a handle, the circuit would break and the galvanometer reading would go to zero. If she tried to use something else besides her hands to keep the circuit, the observers would know, unless that object had the same “electrical resistance” (aka the same reading) as Fay’s body. There was, according to Crookes, an “infinite against” chance of that happening.

Fay sat alone in the darkened library while the men huddled in an adjoining room. A curtain over an open half-folding door was the only barrier between them.

The men didn’t have to wait long for supernatural stuff to happen.

“Sounds were heard, the lid of the musical-box was slapped, it was heard being wound up, and it commenced playing, but was stopped by the spirits to show their power over the mechanism,” recounted The Medium and Daybreak editor James Burns, who attended one of Fay’s galvanometer tests. “The violin which had been left on the table was seen to protrude from the side of the curtains […] A bell was heard ringing behind the curtain, and immediately a delicate little hand, was seen by the edge of the curtain, holding the bell, which was dropped before the eyes of the spectators. The fingers moved for a short time as if to attract attention.”

During all this, the readings on the galvanometer barely fluctuated. Other rumblings were heard in the library, a 650-page book was thrown at the men through the curtain, and then, after seven or eight minutes, Fay fainted — “she was in a very delicate state from want of rest” — and the galvanometer went to zero. When the men of science went in, they found more supernatural shenanigans: someone (something?) had unlocked the desk, opened it, and placed a picture frame from the wall as well as a mirror and porcelain bottle from the mantel on top of it.

Burns, an ardent Spiritualist, believed Crookes had established that Fay was a real medium.

Fay had three other galvanometer tests at Crookes’s house. She “passed” them all, and Crookes publicly stated he had proved her powers.

Fay knew the value of Crookes’s seal of approval. The magician J.N. Maskelyne, for example, had been exposing versions of the methods she used in her regular séance act at his own show in London, and now she had the label of passing a “scientific séance” to go against his claims.

Maskelyne’s exposures didn’t stick to her, and neither did numerous other exposures she faced over the following decades. Her skills, ambition, and charisma were no match for the skeptics, and she gained many admirers, including Houdini, who said that with “her personality she could have mystified the great mental giants of the ages — not our age, but of the ages.”

How did she create such a long, successful career? And how did she beat Crookes’s galvanometer test? Those questions will be answered in a future post…

Thanks for reading! Please share this article with a friend and subscribe, if you haven’t already!

I put a lot of time and effort into Tube Talk, not to mention the costs associated with it (this website isn’t free to maintain)! If you’d like to support my work, please consider a monthly subscription. It’s only $4.99 and also lets you comment on articles, read exclusive posts, and more! Plus you’d make my day 😃

If you’re a decision maker at your company, you need to be on the bleeding edge of, well, everything. But before you go signing up for seminars, conferences, lunch ‘n learns, and all that jazz, just know there’s a far better (and simpler) way: Subscribing to The Deep View.

This daily newsletter condenses everything you need to know about the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. Squeeze it into your morning coffee break and before you know it, you’ll be an expert too.

Subscribe right here. It’s totally free, wildly informative, and trusted by 600,000+ readers at Google, Meta, Microsoft, and beyond.