A look at Thomas Edison’s Spirit Telegraph, an apparatus to contact the spirit world that he claimed to be working on, but which never surfaced.

In 1920, famed inventor Thomas Edison gave a series of interviews bragging about a device he was testing, a spirit telegraph, which spiritualists could use to give their seances a more scientific bent. Though he despised Ouija boards, table tipping, and other trappings of spiritualism, Edison believed that his new invention could determine whether the human personality persisted after death, once and for all. The only problem? The invention never materialized.

Highlights include:
• Creepy uses for the phonograph
• The “little people” or “life units” that make up our bodies
• Electrocuting an elephant in Coney Island
• The chapter of Edison’s diary that his family had removed
• Edison’s ghost

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Sources consulted RE: Thomas Edison’s Spirit Telegraph

Websites  RE: Thomas Edison’s Spirit Telegraph

  • Article in American Medicine

  • Scientific American article

  • Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious … By James A. Herrick

  • https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/dial-a-ghost-on-thomas-edisons-least-successful-invention-the-spirit-phone

  • https://www.ozy.com/true-and-stories/the-greatest-turn-of-the-century-inventors-really-wanted-to-talk-to-ghosts/221925/

  • https://hauntedpalaceblog.wordpress.com/tag/edisons-diary/

  • https://hauntedpalaceblog.wordpress.com/tag/edisons-diary/

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edisonhttps://archive.is/7cmBb

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edison%27s_Black_Maria

  • https://science.howstuffworks.com/10-inventions-thomas-edison10.htm

  • https://www.reliableplant.com/Read/27212/Edison-invention-calls-dead

  • https://lisaandherworld-lisah.blogspot.com/2019/02/edisons-forgotten-invention-phone-that.html

  • https://www.nps.gov/edis/learn/historyculture/mina-miller-edison.htm

  • https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/how-thomas-edison-used-a-fake-electric-chair-execution-1829652181

  • http://itcvoices.org/thomas-edison-the-lost-chapter/

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