Thomas Edison and His Spirit Phone
Building devices to talk with the dead was a popular diversion for inventors in the 1920s.
As reported in Atlas Obscura - In the late 1920s, not long before his death, Thomas Edison reportedly gathered with other scientists in a secret laboratory to record the voices and presence of the dead. They used “speakers, generators, and other experimental equipment,” Modern Mechanix magazine alleged after the fact, in October of 1933.
The magazine article describes Edison’s machine, in which a “tiny pencil of light, coming from a powerful lamp, bored through the darkness and struck the active surface,” which could detect the smallest particle. These particles would be proof of the afterlife, physical bits of human personality left in the atmosphere, waiting to be discovered. Unfortunately, after “tense hours” spent watching the delicate instruments, nothing happened; which was, the magazine adds, why no one had heard of this experiment before.
Full disclosure: that specific account might have been a spooky fantasy for the magazine’s October issue. But, while it’s unclear if that exact scene occurred, there’s ample proof that Edison was interested in speaking to the dead using technology. In 1920, the inventor shocked the public when he told American Magazine: “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’s idea became known as a “spirit phone”, and caused a media storm. For years many historians believed the invention to be a joke or a hoax; no blueprints or prototypes of a spirit phone could be found. But while he may not have actually contacted the dead, there is evidence he experimented with the idea. In 2015 the French journalist Philippe Baudouin found a rare version of Edison’s diary in a thrift store in France.
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.
At the time, communicating with spirits didn’t seem much more impossible than harnessing electricity. Other similarly eerie ideas appeared during this time too. Thomas Watson, the well-regarded assistant of telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell, also dabbled in the idea of a spirit phone; while an invention by Bell and ear specialist Clarence J. Blake, the “ear phonautograph,” recorded sounds using a stylus attached to a human ear and skull.
During Edison’s lifetime, science and technology advanced at a rapid clip, giving us the gas-powered car and the theory of relativity. These unexpected advancements seemed endless, and the possibility of a physical spirit seemed plausible. Edison mused to American Magazine that scientists studying electricity would probably be the first people to review his device. “It would cause a tremendous sensation if successful,” he said. Yet if his device failed, he added, our belief in the spirit world would wane significantly.
Speaking to loved ones beyond the grave may have appealed to the public, but for Edison this was a matter of strict science. Edison believed that life was indestructible, and that the “quantity could never be increased or decreased.” He theorized that like our bodies, our personalities have a physical form, made of tiny “entities” similar to our current view of atoms. He thought these entities might exist after humans passed away—a personality-based residue of loose memories and thoughts, containing part of who a person was during life.
If these particles existed, he reasoned, they could collect together in the ether around us. Possibly they could be amplified by his device like a human voice could be amplified and recorded by a phonograph.
From an article in Modern Mechanix magazine, about Edison’s experiments to “lure spirits from beyond the grave”. (Photo: Public Domain)
Since Edison’s death in 1931, ghost-communicating hopefuls have been looking for blueprints to build and test the spirit phone; or at least to approximate it. In 1941, researchers tried to replicate the spirit phone and call the inventor up, after they believed they were instructed to do so by Edison’s spirit via a medium. “Alas, the contraption did not seem to successfully transmit any life units,” Stephan Palmié writes in the anthology Spirited Things.
People still want to use technology for detecting and communicating with ghosts, though the preferred gadgets have evolved into electronic voice phenomena (EVP) recorders and geophones. Some cost-minded ghost hunters use ghost-detecting apps, converting their smartphones into portable spirit phones. In 2002, the late Frank Sumption claimed ghosts could speak, just as spiritualists hoped for with Edison’s invention, using a special radio called Frank’s Box; spirits tune in, directing the frequencies to form words from the world beyond.
While we don’t know if Edison was correct in his theory that our personalities inhabit physical “entities”, nor if he could hear them on his spirit phone, at least the inventor’s idea of using technology to speak beyond the grave lives on.
