1/9/23, 7:35 PM This Is How Thomas Edison Tried To Speak With The Dead

THIS IS HOW THOMAS EDISON TRIED TO SPEAK WITH THE

DEAD

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BY CODY COPELAND / FEB. 6, 2021 2:32 PM EST

Thomas Edison was arguably the most prolific inventor of the Industrial Revolution. According to
Britannica, he held the world record at the time for patents, with 1,093. And among those were
some truly life-changing inventions, such as the telegraph, the phonograph, alkaline batteries,
movie cameras, and more (the light bulb? Not really). With such a long list of new ideas to his
name, however, not all of them were going to be zingers. For example, Edison had a rather
peculiar idea for how we'd use steel in the future. But solid steel houses were far from his
wackiest whim. That title definitely goes to his idea for a "spirit phone," a contraption he hoped
would enable people to speak with the dead.

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1/9/23, 7:35 PM This Is How Thomas Edison Tried To Speak With The Dead

"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 told The American Magazine in 1920,
according to LiveAbout. Despite this and another statement he made to Scientific American, that
for the longest time he had been "thinking for some time of a machine or apparatus which could
be operated by personalities which have passed on to another existence or sphere," the scientific
community was unsure of his actual dedication to such a project. The speculation was put to rest
in 2015 when a French translation of Edison's diary revealed a shocking discovery.

EDISON REVEALED IN HIS DIARY THAT HE HAD BEEN WORKING ON A 'SPIRIT

PHONE' TO TALK WITH THE DEAD

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1/9/23, 7:35 PM This Is How Thomas Edison Tried To Speak With The Dead

Edison died in 1931, and his posthumous memoir The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas
Alva Edison was published in 1948. According to Tech Times, the final chapter of that book
included the inventor's designs for a "spirit phone." That chapter, however, was never published in
English. It had been removed from the original text before publication, and in its absence
scholars and scientists believed Edison's statements about making tech to talk to ghosts were
simply his odd way of making a joke or trying to pull a fast one on the public.

But that chapter wasn't removed from the book entirely. It was never edited out of the French
translation, and in 2015, Edison's true beliefs about the next plane of existence were brought to
the attention of French readers via a book titled Le Royaume de l'Au-dela (The Kingdom of the
Afterlife). Radio personality and philosopher Philippe Baudouin, who wrote the preface to the
book, said that Edison made a deal with an audio engineer named William Walter Dinwiddie in
which the first of the two to die "would try to send a message to the survivor from beyond."
Baudouin said that the chapter reveals that Edison "imagined being able to record the voice of
another being, to be able to make audible that which isn't — the voice of the dead."

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HOW THOMAS EDISON CAME TO BELIEVE IN GHOSTS

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Although he was a genius, Edison was one of several ostensibly intelligent people who got
caught up in the turn-of-the-century religious fad known as spiritualism. The movement attracted
tons of people we consider to be pretty smart, from scientists and Nobel Prize Winners like Pierre
Curie (husband of Marie Curie) to famous authors like Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle. According to HuffPost, the religion saw a boost in popularity after World War I. Lots of
people had lost loved ones and they were desperate to be able to speak with them one last
time. In the face of such widespread grief, a wave of quacks posing as mediums swept through
the United States and elsewhere, claiming they could conduct séances to put people in contact
with the ghosts of their loved ones.

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But Edison was smarter than all those others getting duped by charlatans, of course. He told
American Magazine in 1920 that the "methods and apparatus commonly used and discussed [by
practitioners and believers of spiritualism] are just a lot of unscientific nonsense." So he decided
to find a scientific way to talk to ghosts. He had a theory that "our personality hereafter will be
able to affect matter" and that he could find a way to make that happen. But he died before he
could realize that dream, and people like Harry Houdini eventually proved the religion to be full of
phonies.
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