Thomas Edison Once Tried To Tinker With The Afterlife And Made Plans For A Ghost Machine
Thomas Edison was the king of invention. He developed many innovations in the fields of electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures, all of which had a profound influence on modern life.
But did you know that Edison once tried to tinker with the afterlife, too? He wanted to create a device that could hear the voices of the dead.
However, the documentation of his occult invention was nearly lost, as it was omitted from English-language editions of his book “Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison,” which was published in 1948.
Some people believed that the idea was just a hoax since no design for a “spirit phone” had ever been uncovered.
But in France, the 1949 French translation contained the missing chapter of Edison’s quest to talk to departed souls.
A French journalist named Philippe Baudouin came across a rare version of Edison’s diary in a thrift store in 2015.
The discovery took the media by storm, and soon enough, people began to joke that he was regularly chatting with ghosts.
It might seem strange that a well-respected man of science would dabble in the world of ghosts, but at that time, spiritualists were still prevalent in the United States. They claimed they could harness electricity in conventional phones to communicate with spirits.
In 1920, Edison announced to the public that he had been working on building a device to see if it was possible to communicate with those who were no longer living.
bonciutoma – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only, not the actual person – pictured above a ghostly woman stands in a forest
Edison believed that life was indestructible, so ghosts/spirits must exist. He theorized that human personalities could take a physical form. They were made up of tiny particles that continue to float in the atmosphere after people pass away.
He thought his device could amplify the particles, similar to how a human voice can be amplified and recorded by a phonograph.
Edison wrote plans and theories for this ghost machine, but it is unclear whether he actually constructed and tested one. He also never named the machine.
Later, sketches of the spirit phone by magazines depicted parts that looked like they were from phonographs. There was a fluted horn with an electrode believed to have been dipped in potassium permanganate.
The horn was attached to a wooden box containing a microphone, which would pick up the vibrations of otherworldly entities due to its high level of sensitivity.
Edison even made a pact with an engineer and colleague, William Walter Dinwiddie, that the first who died “would try to send a message to the survivor from beyond,” according to Baudouin.
Edison died in 1931, and although he never finished his spirit phone or knew for sure whether his theory was correct, he laid the foundation for using technology to detect and communicate with phenomena outside of our known world.
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