Interest in telepathy during the nineteenth-century developed in the context of ideas of magnetic, nervous and psychic forces said to project from the physical body to cause various phenomena, as seen in the literatures of mesmerism, Spiritualism, and psychical research. An article about cerebral radiations authored by American electrical engineer Edwin J. Houston in 1892 is reprinted and commented. Houston speculated that cerebral waves were projected to other brains via the ether, a process involving resonance with a similarly disposed brain. (...) These ideas were affected by concepts from physics dealing with such forces as magnetism and constructs like the ether. In fact, the phenomena of thought-transference stimulated many speculations involving ideas of brain waves and radiations that were part of a tendency to reduce unexplained phenomena to physical and physiological principles, or in this case, biophysical ones. Houston's paper is one of the most detailed ideas of this sort published in the nineteenth-century. Nonetheless, Houston showed no familiarity with the literature about telepathy of his times. While his article did not originate ideas of this sort, it is a good representative of speculations of the period about what today we refer as physical transmission models of ESP. Keywords: Edwin J. Houston; Telepathy; thought-transference; history of telepathy; brain waves; cerebral radiations. (shrink)

The purpose of this note is to rescue from oblivion the nineteenth-century researches of physician John E. Purdon with measures of pulse rate synchrony between two persons. This was done using a sphygmograph, an instrument that measured pulse and provided graphic tracings on paper. According to Purdon he found some persons reproduced the tracings of others in conditions he considered to imply a telepathic transfer. Purdon speculated that one person produced emissions of nervous force that were propagated to others via (...) the ether. While this research may be criticized from the point of view of modern research standards, it is presented here as an interesting and generally unknown early instrumental study of the concept of the detection of ESP via a physiological response. (shrink)