The Spiritoscope

I.The Professor and the Question

Let the record be exact about who this was, because the story depends on it. Robert Hare was born in Philadelphia in 1781. In 1801, not yet twenty-one, he described the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe, the first instrument to burn hydrogen in oxygen under control, and with it produced a flame that fused platinum and lime and every refractory substance the chemists of the day could put in front of it. It was the torch of the age, and the ancestor of every welding flame since. He went on to build the calorimotor and the deflagrator, galvanic batteries of a size and violence no laboratory had seen, and to hold the chair of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania from 1818 to 1847, teaching from a lecture table crowded with apparatus of his own making. By his own count he published more than a hundred papers, most of them on chemistry and electricity. He was a member of the American Philosophical Society, and in 1848 he gave the whole of his laboratory apparatus to the new Smithsonian Institution. When the spirit-rappings reached Philadelphia he was, by any reckoning, among the most senior experimental chemists in the country.

His position on the rappings was not neutral. In a letter published in 1853 he wrote that he felt called upon, as a duty to his fellow creatures, to bring whatever influence he possessed to the attempt to stem the tide of popular madness which, in defiance of reason and science, was fast setting in favour of the gross delusion called Spiritualism. In the book itself he is plainer still about the state of his mind: “so great was my disbelief of any such agency, that it would have made no impression on my memory,” and, of his whole education, “in common with almost all educated persons of the nineteenth century, I had been brought up deaf to any testimony which claimed assistance from supernatural causes, such as ghosts, magic, or witchcraft.” He had, in fact, just published a paper corroborating Faraday’s explanation of table-turning as unconscious muscular pressure. He was, in the exact sense, the prosecution.

“So great was my disbelief of any such agency, that it would have made no impression on my memory.”Robert Hare, Experimental Investigation, ¶134

What he did next is the reason this page exists. He did not argue. He built. If a medium could be seated so that she could neither see the letters nor move the table, and the letters were nevertheless chosen and the table nevertheless moved, the cause lay elsewhere; if not, the matter was closed. The machines on this page are that proposition made in iron, brass, pasteboard, and glass. And the outcome, which he records with the stiff embarrassment of a man who knows exactly how it will be received, is that the machines answered. The disk spelled Y when he asked for Y. It gave the initials R H, his father’s. It spelled Washington on request. At later sittings it produced the name of his father’s Revolutionary-era business partner, Warren, and the maiden name of an English relation, Clargess, neither of which the medium or anyone present could have known, and one of which his own younger brother had forgotten.

He did not go quietly. The book records the sitters accusing him of “extreme incredulity,” a medium declaring she would not sit for him again, a gentleman retiring to the fireside and giving him up as “insusceptible of conviction.” He kept building tighter tests, and the tests kept passing. “My conversion,” he writes, “was effected before I attended any public medium”; it happened in private houses, on his own apparatus, with his own hands on the fittings. By the time he wrote the book he was not a cautious convert. He called on his contemporaries, “solemnly,” to accept what he had received from the spirits about the destiny of the soul, and he closed the volume with a theology. He presented his findings to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was received, in his words, rather as “the King of Ava gave to the Dutch ambassador, who alleged water to be at times solidified in his country, by cold, so as to be walked upon.” He died in 1858, three years after publication, a spiritualist to the end and a chemist to the end, and he never saw the contradiction.

One may hold any view one likes of his conclusion. The instruments are what concern me here, because whatever they proved, they were the first serious attempt to bring the séance under the discipline of the laboratory, and nothing like them was ever built again.

II.The Trial by Machine

Hare’s method was to remove, one by one, every avenue by which a sitter might influence the result, and to make the apparatus announce its own answer. The lettered disk of his first apparatus was mounted upon an iron axle with a fixed index, and turned only when the table tilted, by means of a cord round a central pulley tied to two unequal weights. A screen stood between the sitter and the disk, so that she could not see which letter the pointer had reached. The alphabet, in short, was read out by the furniture.

The second instrument he named. He took a dial made by a mechanic called Pease, set it in a small box shaped like a house with a sloping roof, and joined it to a vibrating lever of his own contrivance. The dial carried not only the alphabet but the digits, five staves for the writing of music, and a ring of short phrases arranged on radial lines: Yes, Doubtful, No, Don’t know, I think so, A mistake, I’ll spell it over, A message, Done, I’ll come again, Good-bye, I must leave. Inside the box a coiled brass spring, a catgut cord, and a pulley of a quarter inch returned the index when the pull upon it ceased. “The whole, thus modified,” he wrote, “has been named the Spiritoscope.” The word is his. It is the word this house is named for.

Then came the test table, six feet by sixteen inches, on castors at one end and an axle at the other, with a grooved wheel driving the disk by a band, so that pushing the table along the floor spelled out words. The sitter’s hands rested upon a brass plate balanced upon two balls; any horizontal force she applied would roll the plate off the balls long before it could shift a six-foot table. Then the hydraulic balance: a board upon a fulcrum, a spring balance at its far end, and a glass vase of water into which the sitter’s hands were lowered inside a wire cage that touched nothing. The balance, Hare reported, repeatedly registered an increase of three pounds at the vase, which by the leverage of the board was eighteen pounds at the point of application. Then the serrated iron strips in their wooden frame, and the modified dials of the fourth plate.

What strikes the modern eye is not the conclusions but the craftsmanship. These are not props. They are laboratory instruments, engraved from photographs, described to the sixteenth of an inch, with their springs and pulleys and cords itemised as carefully as the parts of a balance. They were made, almost certainly, by the same Philadelphia mechanics who supplied his lecture room. And when he died they went wherever such things go.

III.As It Was Done: Five Recollections

What follows is not invention. Each recollection is reconstructed from Hare’s own account of the sittings, his measurements, and his descriptions of where the hands were placed and what the room saw. The voice is that of a visitor to one of those Philadelphia parlours in 1854, remembering.

The Disk on the Table Plate I, Fig. 1

I remember the sound of it first, the two weights knocking softly on the floorboards under the table. One was a lump of eight pounds and the other of two, tied to the ends of a cord that ran once round a little pulley on the axle, and the axle passed through the legs of the table about six inches below the top. The disk stood up on its edge like a wheel, more than a foot across, pasteboard, with the letters cut from an alphabet card and tacked around the rim in no order at all; he had deranged them on purpose. The lady sat down behind a sheet of zinc that was fastened to the table so that it stood between her and the disk, and she laid her hands on the table before her. The Professor sat on my side, facing the letters, with the fixed wire of the index pointing up at the rim. When the table tilted, the heavy weight held and the light one lifted, the cord slid round the pulley, and the disk turned; when the table settled back, the small weight drew it the other way. That was all the machinery there was. What I cannot forget is that she could not see a letter of it, and the wire came to rest on Y when he asked for Y, and then on R, and then on H, and he said, quite quietly, “My honoured father?” and the wire went back to Y. Later, when I pressed him, the disk went round and spelled out, letter by letter, Oh, my son, listen to reason. He looked at it for a long while and said only that the matter was too important to be settled in one evening.

The Spiritoscope Plate I, Fig. 2

The small instrument was the one he came to prefer, and the one the spirits were said to prefer too. It was a little box like a house with a single sloping roof and no floor, and on the roof was painted the dial that Mr. Pease of Connecticut had devised: the alphabet round the margin, the digits between, five ruled circles for musical notes, and on radial lines the words Yes, Doubtful, No, Don’t know, I think so, A mistake, I’ll spell it over, A message, Done, I’ll come again, Good-bye, I must leave. Inside, a coil of brass wire and a length of catgut wound about a pivot, so that when the string was drawn the index swept one way round the dial and when it was let go the spring carried it back. The Professor had fitted it with a lever, a narrow board on a wire fulcrum, and a stand, and the medium sat with her hands on the board. In the ordinary way her hands lay half on either side of the fulcrum wire and the index wandered readily from letter to letter. But when he wanted a test he made her draw her fingertips back until they reached the fulcrum line and no further, and then, as he explained to me more than once, she could press the board neither up, for the rod was already against the disk, nor down, for that could only lift her own hand off. And still the index moved. It went to Yes. It went to I’ll come again. I have heard the click of that spring in my sleep.

The Test Table Plate II

He had the long table carried in in three pieces and bolted together on the carpet, six feet of it and sixteen inches wide, on castors at one end and at the other on an iron axle with two wheels, one of them grooved for a band. The band ran up to the pulley behind the lettered disk, so that when the table was shoved along the floor the wheel turned and the disk turned with it, faster, and the letters passed under the index. Any of me could have stood at the end and pushed it a foot and spelled what I pleased. That was the point. The medium was not permitted to touch the table. On its top he set a brass plate, made quite true, and under the plate two brass balls like billiard balls, and she laid her hands on the plate. Push as she might, the plate would only roll off the balls; there was no way to get purchase on six feet of oak through two spheres. Sometimes he put the tray on castors under the plate instead, and I saw the tray skate a foot to and fro under her hands, brisk as a shuttle, with the table not stirring. And then, when he asked for the table, the tray went still, and the whole six feet rolled on its wheels, and the disk went round, and the letters came. A brother of hers spelled his name. A grandfather. For the Professor, the name of a man his father had been in business with before the Revolution.

The Hydraulic Balance Plate III

This was the one that silenced the room. A board lay across a rod like a see-saw, but the rod was a foot from one end and three feet from the other, and the long end hung from a spring balance on a frame, the kind with a round face and a hand that reads pounds and ounces. Near the short end there was a hole, and into it was set the knob of a glass vase, inverted, nine inches across, with its open mouth upward; he filled it with water to within an inch of the brim. From a board on the floor two iron rods came up on either side of the vase and held, down inside it, a cage of wire gauze, the sort you put over a dish to keep the flies off, five inches across, standing clear of the glass by an inch all round and an inch and a half from the bottom. The gentleman who was to sit put his hands down into the cage, into the water, up to the wrists. He touched the vase nowhere. He touched the board nowhere. Whatever he did with his hands, he could only stir the water, and water will not carry a push. I remember the Professor saying that he had counterpoised the whole so that the hand of the balance stood still, and then he asked whether the spirits would show their power. The hand crept round. Three pounds, he read, and did the sum for me aloud: the vase six inches from the fulcrum, the balance thirty-six, so eighteen pounds of downward force upon a board that no one in the room was touching except through a bowl of water. The sitter said he felt nothing at all. When the Professor told this to the men of science at their meeting, they laughed at him, and he wrote down that they laughed.

The Lever Dials and the Serrated Frame Plate IV

By the time I saw him last the apparatus had grown small enough to sit on a side-table, which he said suited feeble mediums and beginners. There were two dials on the cloth, cast iron, each with its disk and its index. The first was worked by a lever board with the fulcrum line marked on it, and when he wanted a test he had the medium keep her fingertips to the line, as with the little house. The second, which he told me the spirits liked best, was a short board with the disk at one end and a wheel and band beneath, so that a slight motion of the board to and fro turned the index, much as the long table had done, and for a test he simply turned it round so that the dial faced away from her and she could see neither the letters nor the pointer. And there was the strange thing, the frame: strips of iron with their edges cut like saws, set in a wooden frame that slid along the lever board so that the teeth hung just above the back of the medium’s hand without touching it. He could not tell me why it helped, only that under test conditions it did, and he said he would give the rationale, so far as it could be suggested, in the chapter on mediumship. I have never seen another like it, and I do not suppose one has been made since.

V.A Century and a Half of Silence

Here is the curious fact. The spirit dial, in cheap and cheerful forms, went on being sold for decades; the talking board that succeeded it is sold still. But Hare’s instruments, the serious ones, the ones with iron axles and spring balances and brass plates on balls, were never taken up by any maker. There was no market for a six-foot test table that came apart in three pieces. There was no one, after 1858, who cared to prove anything with a vase of water. The plates went into libraries, the apparatus into attics, and the attics into the fire. So far as I have been able to discover, no complete Hare instrument survives in any collection, and none has been made from his descriptions in the hundred and seventy years since he wrote them.

That silence is the reason these reproductions exist, and it is also the reason they are difficult. There is no surviving example to measure. There is only the text, the engravings, and the habits of Philadelphia workshops of the 1850s, which must be reconstructed from the trade catalogues and the instruments that do survive from Hare’s lecture room. The dial must be lettered by hand, because it was. The spring must be wound from brass wire and its recoil balanced against a catgut cord, because that is how the index was made to return. The table must separate into three parts along joints that will not loosen, because a table that will not travel is not Hare’s table. Each of these problems was solved once, in 1854, by a man who did not write down how, and each must be solved again.

I make them, therefore, in very small numbers, one at a time, and I price them accordingly. They cost more than a visitor might expect for what appears at first to be a box with a dial. They are not a box with a dial. They are the only working examples of a lost class of Victorian scientific instrument, built to the letter of the only account of it that exists, and there will never be many of them.