Today, we’re talking about Thomas A. Edison. The lauded inventor was responsible for the phonograph, our electric utility system, and many other innovations; so many, in fact, that he has 1,093 patents filed in the U.S. alone. (His inventions, by the way, do not include the light bulb! Those were around before he set his sights on improving the technology; he did create a new-and-improved version that contained a filament in a vacuum, allowing it to last longer — hours, even! — than what was previously available.)

He’s still popular to this day, even having over 155,000 Facebook followers — a true feat given he died over 70 years before Mark Zuckerburg created a website to rate women’s looks at Harvard.

What’s less known is that Edison was interested in what happens to us after we die. So much so, that he revealed in an October 1920 interview with The American Magazine that he had been working on “an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.”

He was, in short, working on a “spirit phone” or “necrophone,” as some at the time called it.

Edison wasn’t a Spiritualist. In that same article he berates mediums’ methods as “unscientific nonsense.”

He had his own ideas on the matter, and his work rested on his hope — and he was very clear that this was not something he knew as fact — that “our personality exists after what we call life leaves our bodies.” He asked his interviewer, B.C. Forbes (who founded Forbes magazine), “If our personality dies, what’s the use of the hereafter? What would it amount to?”

What would it amount to, indeed. I have thoughts on that premise, but that’s fodder for elsewhere!

The 72-year-old Edison started with that hypothesis, and then extrapolated that if our personalities existed after death, science dictates that they must have at least some matter, no matter how slight, and be able to interact with our world. Their presence would, in short, be measurable.

That conclusion also aligned with Edison’s thoughts about life. He believed that all living things consist of “myriads and myriads of infinitesimally small individuals,” each of which is a “unit of life.” These units, Edison explained, live forever, and when we die, these “swarms of units” move on and “go on functioning in some other form or environment.”

He also concluded that these swarms came from outer space — “I cannot believe for a moment that life in the first instance originated on this insignificant little ball which we call earth” — and that these life-units were not equal. (In true tech-bro fashion, he believed that scientists had more “high class” swarms and thus were more likely to communicate from beyond the veil.)

Edison also told American Magazine that he was working on a device that would measure those units. And when the article went to print, the general public had questions… and opinions.

Some responses were positive. “Already science has undertaken tasks of incredible delicacy which are in some respects not unlike the problem Mr. Edison has before him,” said one article in the Richmond-Times Dispatch published on October 24, 1920. It goes on to explain how plausible such a device could be, and ends with the question, “How better could he crown his proud record of service to humanity than by perfecting a method by which the spirits of the dead can transmit whatever messages they may have for the living friends they have left behind?”

Others were less enthused by Edison’s proposal. The French paper L’Information asked Edison to give the effort up. “You seek to prove whether or not we are immortal,” it said. “But that's just what we do not want to know.”

Even Edison’s longtime friend, the naturalist John Burroughs, told The Commercial Appeal in February 1921 that Edison “sometimes seems to hold some very unusual ideas. His theory of communicating with the dead is one. Personally, I take no stock in talking with the dead.”

Edison himself remained relatively silent on the subject after that American Magazine interview. In a New York Times article published on October 15, 1926, an unnamed friend of Edison even claimed that the inventor told him that the whole idea was a hoax.

It’s clear though, that he seriously thought about connecting with the dead. In 1948’s posthumously published The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison, the last chapter is called “The Realms Beyond” and touches on his work on the spirit phone.

“This apparatus may perhaps most readily be described as a sort of valve,” he wrote. “In exactly the same way as a megaphone increases many times the volume and carrying power of the human voice, so with my ‘valve,’ whatever original force is used upon it is increased enormously […].”

Edison expands on the thoughts he outlined in the 1920 American Magazine interview (although that interview appears almost verbatim in this chapter as well), including making it clear that he wasn’t promising communication with the dead, but that he was giving “psychic investigators an apparatus which may help them in their work, just as optical experts have given the microscope to the medical world.”

He added, “And if this apparatus fails to reveal anything of exceptional interest, I am afraid that I shall have lost all faith in the survival of personality as we know it in this existence.”

He ends the book, however, again expressing hope that our personalities exist after our bodies die: “I am now at work on the most sensitive apparatus I have ever undertaken to build, and I await the results with keenest interest.”

No “valve” or apparatus has survived, nor have any designs, although it appears that the device would be extremely sensitive, based on Edison’s own words. Perhaps it’s the device that his friend, the mentalist Joseph Dunninger, described at a private party in 1955, where The New Yorker quoted him describing the following instrument:

“It was three feet long, two feet wide, and two and a half feet deep, and had discs, tubes, tapes, and all kinds of other equipment attached to it. On top lay a pie-shaped map or diagram, one-eighth of which was black. Edison said that seven-eighths of the affair were so sensitive they could pick up the sound of a grasshopper jumping in Egypt, but that the one-eighth that was indicated by the black on the diagram made noises that were not earthly. They were either astral-fibro forces or energies from another planet.”

Or perhaps not.

An article in the October 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix and Inventions also purported to reveal that Edison tested the device on wintry night in 1920, with “only a few favored spectators.” That device doesn’t sound like the “valve” Edison described; it involved a “photo-electric cell” and a strong lamp that beamed a pencil-thin ray of light onto the cell. Any disruption of that beam to the cell would be measureable. The group then called forth the dead to walk on the beam while the scientists watched an instrument measuring the “electric eye.”

Whether this story is accurate or not, the outcome appears to be the same as the truth, if Edison ever did test his spirit phone: Hours passed, nothing happened.

Edison died on October 18, 1931, at the age of 84. I can’t help but wonder if he continued to have hope that our personalities will continue on.

According to Dunninger, Edison kept on believing. The mentalist told the Milwaukee News in 1937 that his friend was working at the time of his death on a machine that the inventor  “thoroughly believed might be developed to such a sensitivity that it could record spiritual vibrations.”

Dunninger added, “The last time I saw Edison, he gave me a short statement, which he said he would try to communicate to me. He said that if he could get through the great void between here and the afterlife, he would. And I believe he would as a scientist. There is no superstitious nonsense about Edison.”

The mentalist sat with many mediums, and none of them repeated Edison’s phrase (nor secret phrases given to him by Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). Edison’s efforts had failed, but I also can’t help but recall what he said to Forbes back in 1920 about his need to learn more: “We don’t know one millionth of one percent about anything! […] We have a lot of hypotheses, but that’s all. We are just emerging from the chimpanzee state mentally.”