Title: Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison's Least Successful Invention: the Spirit Phone - Atlas Obscura
Headings: Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: the Spirit Phone
Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: the Spirit Phone
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Content: A century ago, however, the wider world was somewhat less receptive to the revelation that the great inventor was working on a spirit phone. The resulting media circus was summed up in an editorial note in American Medicine, which said “the press have failed to deal with proper dignity and respect an announcement from the great man who has produced so many modern miracles.” As magazines regurgitated the story, Edison’s somewhat pragmatic approach to the spirit world morphed into evidence that he was (or soon could be) regularly chatting with ghosts. A French cartoon from the time depicted a depressed husband being pestered by his mother-in-law beyond the grave via Edison’s spirit phone. An illustration of Alexander Graham Bell and Clarence J Blake’s ear phonautograph. ( Photo: Internet Archive/Public Domain)
That a well-respected scientist who greatly influenced modern technology could try to contact spirits might seem unlikely to the public now. But when Edison spoke of his idea in 1920, spiritualists were still going strong in the United States—some even called themselves “ phone-voyants ,” and claimed that they could harness the electric signals in conventional phones to interpret spirits. For many, the spirit phone’s unbelievable promise invoked technologies like the telegraph and air flight, which were both seen as impossible until proven otherwise. The public was, for example, aghast at Edison’s phonograph when it was new in 1877, an invention many felt “could turn the ancient dream of immortality into reality, in an attempt to cheat death,” Baudouin notes in the documentary Thomas Edison & the Realms Beyond.