revealed the tricks that she had used. Regarding Crookes and his experiments with mediums, the magician Harry Houdini suggested that Crookes had been deceived. The physicist Victor Stenger wrote that the experiments were poorly controlled and "his desire to believe blinded him to the chicanery of his psychic subjects." In 1897, John Grier Hibben wrote that Crookes' idea of ether waves explaining telepathy was not a scientific hypothesis "he presents no facts to indicate its probability or to save it from being relegated to the sphere of bare conjecture." In 1916, William Hope tricked Crookes with a fake spirit photograph of his wife. Oliver Lodge revealed there had been obvious signs of double exposure, the picture of Lady Crookes had been copied from a wedding anniversary photograph, but Crookes was a convinced spiritualist and claimed it was genuine evidence for spirit photography. The physiologist Gordon Stein suspected that Crookes was too ashamed to admit he had been duped by the medium Florence Cook or that he conspired with her for sexual favors. He also suggested that Crookes had conspired with Anna Eva Fay. He noted that contrary to popular belief, Hope had been exposed as a fraud on several occasions. Stein concluded that all feats of Hope were conjuring tricks. In a review, biographer William Brock wrote that Stein made his "case against Crookes and Home clearly and logically." Crookes joined the Society for Psychical Research, becoming its president in the 1890s: he also joined the Theosophical Society and The Ghost Club, of which he was president from 1907 to 1912. In 1890 he was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. References Further reading Edmund Edward Fournier d'Albe (2011, originally published in 1923). The Life of Sir William Crookes. Cambridge University Press. External links Crookes's (1874) A practical handbook of dyeing and calico-printing – digital facsimile from the Linda Hall Library 1832 births 1919 deaths 19th-century British chemists 19th-century British physicists 19th-century English people 20th-century British chemists 20th-century British physicists 20th-century English people Academics of the University of Chester Alumni of Imperial College London Burials at Brompton Cemetery Discoverers of chemical elements English physical chemists English physicists English spiritualists Fellows of the Royal Society Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences Knights Bachelor Members of the Order of Merit Parapsychologists People involved with the periodic table English plasma physicists Presidents of the Royal Society Recipients of