DeMeo’s (2014) article about the idea of the ether in the JSE brings to mind the historical relationship of this concept to psychic phenomena. Much more than a simple physical theory of force, the ether was one of those powerful and overreaching concepts that captured the imagination of both scientists and the general public during parts of the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Centuries (on the concept see Cantor & Hodge 1981). As argued by Asprem (2014:222): Ether metaphysics provided a worldview (...) that emphasized the immanence of the divine, through the all-encompassing, interprenetating, but invisible ether. This medium functioned as a kind of “world-soul”; it was the seat of animation in general, the source of life, and also the plane on which much mental functioning was thought to take place. The metaphysical dimensions of the ether connected the topic to philosophical and religious views, as well as to ideas of the unity of nature, the transcendence of the spirit, and of human faculties. Such issues were discussed by Balfour Stewart and Peter G. Tait (1875) and Oliver Lodge (1925) (on the various dimensions of the ether see Asprem 2014, Noakes 2005, and Wynne 1979), among others. (shrink)

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)

Largely unacknowledged by historians of the human sciences, late-19th-century psychical researchers were actively involved in the making of fledgling academic psychology. Moreover, with few exceptions historians have failed to discuss the wider implications of the fact that the founder of academic psychology in America, William James, considered himself a psychical researcher and sought to integrate the scientific study of mediumship, telepathy and other controversial topics into the nascent discipline. Analysing the celebrated exposure of the medium Eusapia Palladino by German-born Harvard (...) psychologist Hugo Münsterberg as a representative example, this article discusses strategies employed by psychologists in the United States to expel psychical research from the agenda of scientific psychology. It is argued that the traditional historiography of psychical research, dominated by accounts deeply averse to its very subject matter, has been part of an ongoing form of ‘boundary-work’ to bolster the scientific status of psychology. (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)

In 1927, George Paget Thomson, professor at the University of Aberdeen, obtained photographs that he interpreted as evidence for electron diffraction. These photographs were in total agreement with de Broglie's principle of wave–particle duality, a basic tenet of the new quantum wave mechanics. His experiments were an initially unforeseen spin-off from a project he had started in Cambridge with his father, Joseph John Thomson, on the study of positive rays. This paper addresses the scientific relationship between the Thomsons, father and (...) son, as well as the influence that the institutional milieu of Cambridge had on the early work of the latter. Both Thomsons were trained in the pedagogical tradition of classical physics in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos, and this certainly influenced their understanding of quantum physics and early quantum mechanics. In this paper, I analyse the responses of both father and son to the photographs of electron diffraction: a confirmation of the existence of the ether in the former, and a partial embrace of some ideas of the new quantum mechanics in the latter. (shrink)