The historiography of psychical research: lessons from histories of the sciences

This paper surveys the different uses to which history has been put, and the different historiographical perspectives adopted, in psychical research and related enterprises since the mid-nineteenth century. It contrasts recent historiographies of the science with those employed from late eighteenth century to the 1960s, and shows how these and other developments in the practice of history have dramatically changed our understanding of the places occupied by psychical research and the ‘occult’ in ‘orthodox’ sciences and wider culture. The second half of this paper outlines some of the key ways in which we can proceed still further in the shift towards better situating psychical research in its contemporary scientific contexts and abandoning rigid and ultimately unhelpful distinctions between ‘science’ and ‘pseudo-science’. I suggest that by deepening our understanding of nineteenth and early twentieth century scientific cultures — their troubles as well as successes — we can better appreciate why psychic phenomena were considered fit topics of scientific research. In conclusion I consider the suggestion that eclecticism is a virtue and necessity in history and suggest that it’s precisely because my discipline, the history of science, is more eclectic than many that it is and will continue to be a fruitful resource for developing our histories of psychical research.British Academy; Royal Societ

Foreword

In: Nerve Centre of Empire : Connecting Cornwall, Expanding Frontiers, 1870 - 191

Industrial Research at the Eastern Telegraph Company, 1872-1929

Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2013By the late nineteenth century the submarine telegraph cable industry, which had blossomed in the 1850s, had reached what historians regard as technological maturity. For a host of commercial, cultural and technical reasons, the industry seems to have become conservative in its attitude towards technological development, which is reflected in the small scale of its staff and facilities for research and development. This paper argues that the attitude of the cable industry towards research and development was less conservative and altogether more complex than historians have suggested. Focusing on the crucial case of the Eastern Telegraph Company, the largest single operator of submarine cables, it shows how the company encouraged inventive activity among outside and in-house electricians and, in 1903, established a small research laboratory where staff and outside scientific advisors pursued new methods of cable signalling and cable designs. The scale of research and development at the Eastern Telegraph Company, however, was small by comparison to that of its nearest competitor, Western Union, and dwarfed by that of large electrical manufacturers. This paper explores the reasons for this comparatively weak provision but also suggests that this was not inappropriate for a service-sector firm

Punch and comic journalism in Mid-Victorian Britain

© Cambridge University Press 2004. Published version reproduced with the permission of the publisher.The Leverhulme Trus

Science in the nineteenth-century periodical: an electronic index

publication-status: Publishedtypes: ArticleThis is a post-print version of an article published in Notes and Records of the Royal Society. The definitive version is available at http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/59/3/317.full.pdf+htmlIn 1858 James Clerk Maxwell explained to his friend Lewis Campbell that ‘there are good books … with which people may be as delighted as Mary Anne was with Faraday's lecture, of which she gave an account to Punch’.1 Maxwell was referring to a recent article in the leading British comic weekly in which the fictional ‘Mary Ann’ had described her visit to the Royal Institution.2 Possessing a notorious penchant for witticisms, Maxwell was an obvious reader of Britain's leading comic weekly paper. However, the eminent Scottish physicist was one of many Victorian scientists whose regular diet of reading included Punch and many other non-scientific periodical titles such as The Times, the Pall Mall Gazette, and the Contemporary Review. His reference to Punch also illustrates the more significant point that general periodicals frequently contained references to scientific, technological and medical topics. Typically classified as ‘non-scientific’ publications and overlooked by many historians of science, general periodicals are increasingly being recognized by historians as crucial agents in shaping the scientific understanding of nineteenth-century reading publics. These publications often enjoyed circulations far exceeding those commanded by even the most successful scientific or technical journals of the century: compare, for example, Nature, with 5000 readers in 1870, with the 25 000 readers of the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine in the 1820s, the 60 000 of Punch in the early 1860s, and the 300 000 of the Review of Reviews in 1890.3 The hacks, vicars, jobbing artists and penurious scientific practitioners who discussed science in these periodicals may well, as Bernard Lightman has pointed out, have been more important than such professionalizers as T. H. Huxley and John Tyndall in shaping the public images of the sciences

Representing 'a Century of Inventions': nineteenth-century technology and Victorian Punch

© 'Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media', Louise Henson, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, Sally Shuttleworth, & Jonathan Topham (eds), 2004, Ashgate. Chapter is post-print version.Leverhulme Trus

The Spiritualist Press

Copyright © 2009 British Library"The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism" is a large-scale reference work covering the journalism industry in 19th century Britain. Its comprehensive representation of diverse facets of the industry provides a snapshot of the press, from journalist to reader. Its 1700 entries, by an international team of experts and researchers, reflect the range of the press, including art, children, illustration, literature, religion, sports, politics, local and regional titles, satire, and trade journals. "DNCJ" includes newspapers and periodicals in England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.Here you will find entries on journals, journalists, illustrators, editors, publishers, proprietors, printers, and topics such as advertising, frequency, magazine day, printing presses, readership, social science and the press, and war and journalism

Telegraphy is an occult art: Cromwell Fleetwood Varley and the diffusion of electricity to the other world

© Cambridge University Press 1999. Paper condensed from chapters of the author's doctoral dissertation. Illustrations 1,2,4 & 5 reproduced by permission of the British Library © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved (4367.150000 DSC; 4367.215500 DSC; Hendon; Hendon). Illustration 3 reproduced by permission of the College of Psychic Studies. All quotes from archival sources reproduced with the permission of the rightsholders. References for the BT archives have been recatalogued: POST 81/45 is now TGA/1/10/1; POST 81/20 is now TGA/1/7/1; POST 81/41 is now TGE/1/13; POST 81/19 is now TGA/2/1; POST 81/27 is now TGE/1/11.In May 1862 Desmond G. Fitzgerald, the editor of the Electrician, lamented that "telegraphy has been until lately an art occult even to many of the votaries of electrical science. Submarine telegraphy, initiated by a bold and tentative process – the laying of the Dover cable in the year 1850 – opened out a vast field of opportunity both to merit and competency, and to unscrupulous determination. For the purposes of the latter, the field was to be kept close [sic], and science, which can alone be secured by merit, more or less ignored". To Fitzgerald, the ‘occult’ status of the telegraph looked set to continue, with recent reports of scientific counterfeits, unscrupulous electricians and financially motivated saboteurs involved in the telegraphic art. Nevertheless, Fitzgerald reassured his readers that the confidence of ‘those who act for the public’ had been restored by earnest electricians, whose ‘moral cause’ would ultimately be felt and who ‘may be safely trusted even in matters where there is an option between a private interest and a public benefit’. As a prominent crusader for the telegraph, Fitzgerald voiced the concerns of many electricians seeking public confidence and investment in their trade in the wake of the failed submarine telegraphs of the 1850s. The spread of proper knowledge about the telegraph would hinge on securing an adequate supply of backers and the construction of telegraphy as a truly moral cause – an art cleansed of fraudsters, ignoramuses and dogmatists.British Academ

Haunted thoughts of the careful experimentalist: psychical research and the troubles of experimental physics

publication-status: AcceptedNOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science: Part C History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication.This paper analyses the relationship between the ‘elusive’ science of psychical research and experimental physics in the period approximately 1870-1930. Most studies of the relationship between psychical research and better established sciences have examined the ways in which psychical researchers used theories in the established sciences to give greater plausibility to their interpretations of such puzzling phenomena as telepathy, telekinesis and ectoplasm. A smaller literature has examined the use of laboratory instruments in attempts to produce scientific evidence for these effects. This paper argues that the cultures of scientific experiment could matter to psychical research in a different way: by focusing on the British physicists involved in psychical research, it suggests that experience of capricious effects, recalcitrant instruments and other problems of the physical laboratory made them sympathetic towards the difficulties of the spiritualistic séance and other sites of psychical enquiry. In the wake of widely-reported claims that the mediums they had investigated had been exposed as frauds, these physicists were persuaded by some of the merits of an older argument that human psychic subjects could not be treated like laboratory hardware; however, well into the twentieth century, they maintained that experimental physics had important lessons for the psychical researcher

Cromwell Varley FRS, electrical discharge and Victorian spiritualism

This is a preprint version of an article published in Notes and Records of the Royal Society. The definitive version is available at: http://publishing.royalsociety.org/index.cfm?page=1083Cromwell Fleetwood Varley is chiefly remembered as a leading Victorian electrical engineer who was closely involved in the testing and laying of the successful transatlantic telegraph cables of the 1860s. Historians of physics principally regard him as a key figure in the 'prehistory' of the electron because in 1871 the Proceedings of the Royal Society published a paper in which he seemed to anticipate the corpuscular nature of cathode rays. For many Victorians, however, Varley was as notable for his spiritualism as for his electrical researches. This paper argues that for Varley spiritualism was one of the most significant contexts of use for the 1871 paper. The latter work sought explicitly to unravel the mystery of the electrical discharge through rarefied gases but also showed the hazy boundary between the invisible and visible and material and immaterial domains. This suggested that one of the invisible powers associated with spiritualism—the 'od' force—might be photographed and rendered scientifically more credible, and also made it easier to understand how imponderable spirits could have apparently material attributes. Although the physical implications of Varley’s 1871 publication were not explored until the 1890s, Varley's 'spiritualistic' uses of it shaped the way in which some late-Victorian scientists investigated the puzzling phenomena of psychical research