Thomas Edison’s Spirit Phone

No ghost has ever been reported in this story, but it is one of the most-cited encounters between a famous American scientist and the idea of life after death. In October 1920 the inventor Thomas Edison, then in his seventies and working from his laboratory complex in New Jersey, told B. C. Forbes in an interview published in The American Magazine that he had been working on an apparatus to test whether personalities that had left this earth could communicate with the living. The tone of the interview, as reported by the Thomas Edison Center and Mental Floss, was that this would be done by scientific means, not through the ‘mystifying’ methods of mediums.

Edison was no Spiritualist. Salon’s excerpt from a book on the history of the subject describes him as a critic who called mediumship charlatanism and mocked the Ouija board. His reasoning, as the Thomas Edison Center summarises it, was that a human being might be made of tiny units that carry mass, that a personality might persist after death as energy able to affect matter, and that a sufficiently sensitive device might detect it. The press quickly dubbed it the ‘spirit phone’ or ‘ghost machine’, and some retellings call it the ‘necrophone’.

A story then arose that Edison tested a device in the winter of 1920, in front of scientists and mediums, with a beam of light shining on a photoelectric cell wired to a meter that would register anything passing through the beam. The needle is said to have stayed still. The Thomas Edison Center is careful to note that no laboratory notes, prototypes or outside witnesses corroborate this account, unlike Edison’s many other experiments, and a 1933 magazine account is the version Salon cites. Locations given for the supposed test also vary between accounts.

On 12 October 1926 the New York Times reported that Edison had called the whole thing a joke, telling the paper he had invented it because he disliked disappointing Forbes, who had called on a very cold day. Others point to a diary he kept in which he continued to discuss such an instrument, and to the fact that a chapter of the Diary and Sundry Observations describing it was removed from many English-language editions. No working device or design has ever been found.

No apparition is reported. The story concerns a proposed instrument to detect or contact the dead, and a reported demonstration in which a meter did not move.

Edison’s laboratory in New Jersey (West Orange; one account places the test at Menlo Park), where he lived and worked in 1920.

The spirit phone is a staple of books on Spiritualism and science, was the basis of an episode of the television series Supernatural and recurs in popular articles. Historians treat it as a curiosity that shows how seriously even sceptical scientists took the question of survival after death.