Doctor Wood. Modern Wizard of the Laboratory: The Story of an American Small Boy Who Became the Most Daring and Original Experimental Physicist of Our Day-but Never Grew Up

Chapter Seventeen. Debunker of Frauds

Dr. Wood has had a long career, dating back beyond the days of Blondlot’s “N rays” and the American visit of Eusapia Palladino, in the exposure of frauds and delusions, whether emanating from supposedly scientific laboratories or from mediumistic cabinets.

In the investigation of doubtful phenomena, he is neither academic nor tame nor conventional. In the case of the famous “N ray”, he made a trip to the University of Nancy, and dramatically exposed the most extraordinary scientific delusion of modern times. When Grindell Matthews came over from England with his “death ray” and was trying to induce our government to buy it for the navy, the Associated Press asked Wood to look into it. Wood “looked into it” and gave the press a scathing broadside in which he compared Matthews, “whether self-deluded or not”, to “promotors who try to sell Brooklyn bridges to innocent bystanders”.

In the Palladino investigation, in which he was a member of the committee appointed under the auspices of the Scientific American, he employed X rays and also an ingenious “Venetian-blind” arrangement by which the floor of the medium’s cabinet was illuminated without her knowledge. In the later case of Margery, the Harvard-investigated medium, he seized hold of and pinched — her ectoplasm!

In Wood’s opinion, these scientific leaders up false alleys divide sharply into two categories — self-deluded cranks and downright frauds. The former honestly imagine they have an idea and can make a fortune for themselves and others if they get the backing. The impostors usually set up a tiny but elaborate apparatus worked by trickery, with the hope of impressing some gullible capitalist who might advance them a lot of money to carry out the “idea” on a grander scale. Both categories are old as the hills and perennial as the daisies. Last summer Wood was being urged to investigate a man who claimed he could run a farm tractor by wireless power, with waves from a station a hundred miles distant. He also, of course, had a “death ray”. They always have “death rays”. He had a promotor who’d been pestering the great physicist, and who insisted he had seen a duck brought down from an elevation of eight hundred feet.

“Investigating such people”, said Wood, “is often amusing, but generally a waste of time. The bigger, more serious cases are different”,

Here is Wood’s own account of what was probably the greatest scientific delusion of our time.

In the late autumn of 1903, Professor R. Blondlot, head of the Department of Physics at the University of Nancy, member of the French Academy, and widely known as an investigator, announced the discovery of a new ray, which he called N ray, with properties far transcending those of the X rays. Reading of his remarkable experiments with these rays in the Comptes rendus of the Academy, the leading scientific journal of France, I attempted to repeat his observations, but failed to confirm them after wasting a whole morning. According to Blondlot, the rays were given off spontaneously by many metals. A piece of paper, very feebly illuminated, could be used as a detector, for, wonder of wonders, when the N rays fell upon the eye they increased its ability to see objects in a nearly dark room.

The flame of discovery kindled by Blondlot was now burning brightly, and fuel was added by a score of other investigators. Twelve papers had appeared in the Comptes rendus before the year was out. A. Charpentier, famous for his fantastic experiments on hypnotism, claimed that N rays were given off by muscle, nerves, and the brain, and his incredible claims were published in the Comptes, sponsored by the great Arsonval, France’s foremost authority on electricity and magnetism.

Blondlot next announced that he had constructed a spectroscope with aluminum lenses and a prism of the same metal, and found a spectrum of lines separated by dark intervals, showing that there were N rays of different refrangibility and wave length. He measured the wave lengths. The flame of N-ray research was now a conflagration. Jean Becquerel, son of Henri Becquerel, whose discovery of the rays from uranium had laid the foundation for the discovery of radium by the Curies, claimed that N rays could be transmitted over a wire, just as light can be transmitted along the inside of a bent glass rod by internal reflection. One end of a wire near the faintly luminous detector caused variation of its intensity as the other end, some meters away, was passed over the skull of a living person. If the subject was anesthetized with ether, the N rays from the brain first increased and then decreased as the sleep deepened. He claimed that metals could be anesthetized with ether, chloroform, or alcohol, in which condition they ceased to emit or transmit the rays. Biologists, physiologists, psychologists, chemists, botanists, and geologists climbed on the band wagon. The nerve centers of the spinal cord in their relation to disease and previous surgical operations were studied by the N rays which they emitted. The rays were given off by growing plants, vegetables, and even by a human corpse. Charpentier found the senses of hearing and smell were increased by N rays as well as the sense of sight. A tuning fork in vibration gave a powerful N ray. By early summer Blondlot had published twenty papers, Charpentier twenty, and J. Becquerel ten, all describing new properties and sources of the rays.

Nearly one hundred papers on N rays were published in the Comptes rendus in the first half of the year 1904. The N ray was polarized, magnetized, hypnotized, and tortured in all of the ways that had forced confessions from light rays — but only Frenchmen could observe the phenomena. Scientists in all other countries were frankly skeptical, in fact ridiculed these fantastic impossibilities. But the French Academy stamped Blondlot’s work with its approval by awarding him the Lalande prize of 20,000 francs and its gold medal “for the discovery of the N rays”.

During that summer we were at Beg-Meil, in Brittany, and I was out of touch with the scientific high jinks in Nancy, but in September I went over to Cambridge for the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. After the meeting some of us got together for a discussion of what was to be done about the N rays. Of our group, Professor Rubens of Berlin, with whom I had come in close contact while a student, was most outspoken in his denunciation. He felt particularly aggrieved because the Kaiser had commanded him to come to Potsdam and demonstrate the rays. After wasting two weeks in vain efforts to duplicate the Frenchman’s experiments, he was greatly embarrassed by having to confess to the Kaiser his failure. Turning to me he said, “Professor Wood, will you not go to Nancy immediately and test the experiments that are going on there?” “Yes, yes”, said all of the Englishmen, “that’s the idea, go ahead”. I suggested that Rubens go, as he was the chief victim, but he said that Blondlot had been most polite in answering his many letters asking for more detailed information, and it would not look well if he undertook to expose him. “Besides”, he added, “you are an American, and you Americans can do anything…”.

So I visited Nancy before rejoining my family in Paris, meeting Blondlot by appointment at his laboratory in the early evening. He spoke no English, and I elected German as our means of communication, as I wanted him to feel free to speak confidentially to his assistant, who was apparently a sort of high-class laboratory janitor.

He first showed me a card on which some circles had been painted in luminous paint. He turned down the gas light and called my attention to their increased luminosity when the N ray was turned on. I said that I saw no change. He said that was because my eyes were not sensitive enough, so that proved nothing. I asked him if I could move an opaque lead screen in and out of the path of the rays while he called out the fluctuations of the screen. He was almost 100 per cent wrong and called out fluctuations when I made no movement at all, and that proved a lot, but I held my tongue. He then showed me the dimly lighted clock, and tried to convince me that he could see the hands when he held a large flat file just above his eyes. I asked if I could hold the file, for I had noticed a flat wooden ruler on his desk, and remembered that wood was one of the few substances that never emitted N rays. He agreed to this, and I felt around in the dark for the ruler and held it in front of his face. Oh, yes, he could see the hands perfectly. This also proved something.

But the crucial and most exciting test was now to come. Accompanied by the assistant, who by this time was casting rather hostile glances at me, we went into the room where the spectroscope with the aluminum lenses and prism was installed. In place of an eyepiece, this instrument had a vertical thread, painted with luminous paint, which could be moved along in the region where the N-ray spectrum was supposed to be by turning a wheel having graduations and numerals on its rim. This wheel turned a horizontal screw with a movable nut on which the thread was mounted. Blondlot took a seat in front of the instrument and slowly turned the wheel. The thread was supposed to brighten as it crossed the invisible lines of the N-ray spectrum. He read off the numbers on the graduated scale for a number of the lines, by the light of a small, darkroom, red lantern. This experiment had convinced a number of skeptical visitors, as he could repeat his measurements in their presence, always getting the same numbers. He claimed that a movement of the thread of 0.1 mm. was sufficient to change the luminosity, and when I said that seemed impossible, as the slit of the spectroscope was 2 mm. wide, he said that was one of the inexplicable properties of the N rays. I asked him to repeat his measurements, and reached over in the dark and lifted the aluminum prism from the spectroscope. He turned the wheel again, reading off the same numbers as before. I put the prism back before the lights were turned up, and Blondlot told his assistant that his eyes were tired. The assistant had evidently become suspicious, and asked Blondlot to let him repeat the reading for me. Before he turned down the light I had noticed that he placed the prism very exactly on its little round support, with two of its corners exactly on the rim of the metal disk. As soon as the light was lowered, I moved over towards the prism, with audible footsteps, but I did not touch the prism. The assistant commenced to turn the wheel, and suddenly said hurriedly to Blondlot in French, “I see nothing; there is no spectrum. I think the American has made some derangement”. Whereupon he immediately turned up the gas and went over and examined the prism carefully. He glared at me, but I gave no indication of my reactions. This ended the séance, and I caught the night train for Paris.

Next morning I sent off a letter to Nature, London’s scientific weekly, giving a full account of my findings, not, however, mentioning the double-crossing incident at the end of the evening and merely locating the laboratory as “one in which most of the N-ray experiments had been carried on”. La Revue scientifique”, France’s weekly semipopular scientific journal, published a translation of my letter and started an Enquête, or inquiry, asking French scientists to express their opinions as to the reality of the N rays. About forty letters were published in the succeeding numbers, only a half dozen backing Blondlot. The most scathing was one by Le Bel, who said, “What a spectacle for French science when one of its distinguished savants measures the position of the spectrum lines, while the prism reposes in the pocket of his American colleague!”

Only two papers on N rays appeared in the Comptes rendus after this. They may have been delayed in the mail. The Academy at its annual meeting in December, when the prize and medal were presented, announced the award as given to Blondlot “for his life work, taken as a whole”.

The tragic exposure eventually led to Blondlot’s madness and death. He was a great man, utterly sincere, who had “gone off the deep end”, perhaps through some form of self-hypnotism or overstimulated retinal imagination due to years of staring in the dark. What Wood had done, reluctantly but with scientific ruthlessness, had been the coup de grace.

This climax was summarized by A. A. Campbell Swinton, F.R.S., in the Westminster Gazette:

… the highest scientific tribunal in France had made its award and all apparently went well till an American Professor of Physics — R. W. Wood, of Baltimore, now a foreign member of the Royal Society of London — exploded completely and forever the whole discovery by showing to Blondlot that he continued to see the spectrum, when no spectrum could possibly exist there, if indeed there ever had been one!

Toward outright scientific frauds and fakers, Wood is scornful and merciless, never feeling any sadness or depression over their exposure, but rather a savage and amused elation. One night in Baltimore, after a dinner, he told me and a couple of friends a number of his adventures in this field.

Some years ago, I was asked by Mr. Bernard Baker, president of the Atlantic Transport Line and trustee of the university, to come down to his office and look into the apparatus of a man whose experiments he was financing. It was a scheme for transmitting speech and signals under water. The man claimed he’d discovered a new chemical which was sensitive to sound. Mr. Baker had given him a large room in his office building to use as a laboratory, and I was taken there. He had a large table covered with a hodgepodge of pseudoscientific instruments. There was a dome-shaped bell with eight small pendulums hanging around it, touching its rim. Several parts of a typewriter were included in the setup! The whole thing, on the face of it, was perfectly preposterous, a collection of junk connected by wires. The inventor said his chemical was so sensitive to sound that it was decomposed by noises which the human ear could not possibly hear. I asked him how he could make it, if it was so sensitive, and he said he had to prepare it undersea, in a diving bell! I advised Mr. Baker to kick the man out of his office — which he did a day or two later.

On another occasion I was taken to the roof of a downtown office building to see a demonstration by an inventor who claimed he’d found a method of getting power out of the atmosphere. His table was covered with electric motors, a small toy railroad with an electric locomotive, and other little gadgets run by electricity. At one end of the table a pole ran up in the air, with fifteen or twenty brass points radiating from it. These, he said, gathered the power from the atmosphere, which came down the wire and operated the toys and gadgets on the table. There was a crowd of newspaper reporters and one or two men from whom he was trying to get money. There were several boxes under the table, partly covered by burlap, and one box which was completely covered. Nobody had paid any attention to this part of the “exhibit”, and I pulled the burlap from the box that was completely covered, disclosing a big storage battery with two wires leading up to the top of the table, along the inside of one of the legs! He cleared out of the hotel without paying his bill, carrying all of his apparatus with him.

“They used to tar and feather ’em when they came like that out West”, interpolated Leslie Hohman, the psychiatrist. “There’s a difference between the deluded crank and the deliberate faker. In which class, by the way, was that Paris inventor who did monkey tricks with electric light bulbs, and got into the semiscientific journals for a while? He was going to revolutionize all our lighting systems, as I recall”.

Well, I never quite knew (replied Wood). As a matter of fact I don’t know yet whether he was trying to bribe — or befuddle — me with champagne. But whether crook or crackpot, he was an amusing fellow. He claimed he could reduce the amount of current required for illumination to a fifth of what the bulbs use now. I happened to cross over that summer with the New York capitalist who was planning to sink $20,000 in the experiments, and promised to investigate the phenomenon. I warned him not to disclose my identity but to say merely that I was a Mr. Wood, a friend of his, who was also interested in the invention. About a week after I’d arrived in Paris, there came a phone call inviting me to the inventor’s house and laboratories. His idea was to feed short intermittent pulses of current into the lamps in succession. He used double the voltage for which the lamps were rated, shooting the flashes of current from one lamp to another. He was innocent as a babe of any suspicion I was a physicist. He supposed I was just another American business man who knew all about dollars but nothing about dynamos. He assured me solemnly that light produced from lamps by his method had very peculiar properties resembling those of X rays, as they could penetrate flesh so that you could see the bones! He held one in his clenched fist and tried to make me think I was “seeing the bones”!

Presently he illuminated three lamps arranged on a rotating wheel at the center of the ceiling. Up to then I had listened openmouthed to his fantastic claims, as if bewildered and entranced, but now I asked for a hand mirror which was presently found for me by his assistant. I studied the reflection of the whirling lamps in the mirror and waggled the mirror rapidly to and fro, muttering some gibberish to myself about a “luminous sine-wave curve of variable intensity”.

“Ah” and “ah” again exclaimed the inventor, “Monsieur then comprehends something of the physik?” I was tired of the nonsense, though it had been amusing, so I said, “Yes, I am R. W. Wood of Johns Hopkins University”.

He hesitated for a perceptible second, then leaped on me in ecstasy, shaking my hand in seeming delight. “Oh, but this is for me a very great honor! Wait and you shall see”. Whereupon he darted out of the room, returning in a moment with a copy of my Physical Optics. Then, believe it or not as Ripley says, he turned page after page (of my own book, Lord help us!) with marked paragraphs, and exclaimed, “Here you see the proof! Here and here and here! And now we shall drink to your health… He pushed a bell, gave his instructions, and presently the butler appeared with a bottle of champagne. The circus had been well worth an entire morning lost — but not worth my friend’s $20,000.

Allen W. Harris of the Baltimore Sun, who was pouring us all another drop of whisky, said, “Maybe he thought if you’d go in cahoots with him, you could raise it to a million”.

SCIENTIFIC DETECTIVE: Wood examines a bomb fragment while Lieutenant Itzel looks on, during the investigation of the Brandy bomb mystery.

CELEBRITIES: Wood, Max Planck and Albert Einstein in the front row of a scientific lecture in Berlin in 1931. It was after this meeting that Wood tested the party guests with the bitter-tasteless powder.

The most fantastic piece of electro-medical hokum ever brought to his attention, says Wood, was the recent “discovery” of a method of sending the curative properties of sulfanilamide over a copper wire to an aluminum plate on which bottles of distilled water were standing. At the end of a half hour the water in each bottle was supposed to become highly charged with the germicidal properties of the drug. This charged water, the inventor claimed, could then be used internally or by intravenous injections… “with results equal to those produced by solution of the sulfanilamide itself in water”. And he claimed that it had made “a favorable impression” on the director of the Chemical Foundation in New York!

The inventor of the discovery was asked to demonstrate it before a committee at Johns Hopkins Medical School. Dr. Perrin Long, who has been largely responsible for putting sulfanilamide on the map, persuaded Wood to help debunk the demonstration.

The inventor in this case was a true “screw ball” who believed he would be a benefactor of mankind. He was not seeking the Foundation’s money. He had plenty of his own.

“It was funny and crazy”, says Wood, “but pathetic”.

When Eusapia Palladino visited America thirty years ago, many celebrated scientists, in addition to the psychologists and psychic-research crowd, had begun to take an active and inquisitive interest in mediums. The Scientific American sponsored and financed a committee to investigate the famous Italian medium, while the newspapers reported that Mr. Edison was working on a sensitized electrical apparatus which might supersede ouija boards and planchettes in the séance room. Wood took his pen in hand and gave birth to the following ode, which he entitled “The Edison Specter-Scope”!

Wood was never much interested in the purely psychic pretensions of the mediums, but he had an inordinate curiosity concerning the floating trumpets, tambourines, ectoplasmic excrescences which at that time were, and frequently still are, a part of the mise en scène which heralds the approach of the dear departed.

When Palladino was brought to New York, Dr. Wood was asked to serve on the American committee. She was primarily a physical medium — and physics was his meat. The physical medium doesn’t produce messages from the dead, but gives séances in which objects at a distance are moved, breezes blow, phosphorescent lights appear, tables rise in the air, impressions of hands are produced in wet clay, while musical instruments are played at a distance from the medium, who is supposed to be either securely tied or held firmly in the grasp of spectators — or both.

The Palladino sittings (says Wood) were held in the physical laboratory of Columbia University. The cabinet had been built into the doorway in Professor Hallock’s office in such a way that it jutted back into the apparatus room adjoining. They had cut a hole through the brick wall which separated the two rooms, close to the floor so that an observer could lie in the apparatus room and watch what was going on under the table, or as much as could be seen in the dim light. The cabinet contained a table on which the usual pieces of apparatus reposed, a tambourine, a bunch of flowers, and one or two other things that I have forgotten. Eusapia sat in a chair with her back to the curtain, her hands resting on a small wooden table, around which the other observers were gathered. Palladino was known to cheat whenever she was given an opportunity, and was frequently caught doing so. I convinced myself very early in the series of sittings that all the phenomena were fraud. I was puzzled by the blowing out of the curtains, with all the windows closed and the doors locked. Münsterberg, who succeeded Professor James at Harvard, attended some sittings later on, and explained that the curtain had been blown out by a jet of air from a rubber bulb that she had in her hand. Objects were “brought” out from the cabinet and appeared on the table in front of Palladino when her hands and feet were supposed to be held, and I was anxious to see what the instrument was that had reached back through the curtain. I decided it could be seen if the floor of the cabinet were feebly illuminated. An observer lying on the top of an apparatus case in the next room, looking down through a hole in the top of the cabinet could see whether an arm or hand reached back for the tambourine, or whether the trick was done with some mechanical appliance. It was necessary, however, to arrange this so that Palladino would not see the light on the floor, as she had a way of pushing back the curtain and looking in occasionally. I accomplished this by making a wooden grill of thin, vertical slats, like a Venetian blind, painted black, which covered the floor under the cabinet. By propping one corner of the cabinet up for a quarter of an inch with a little wedge and placing an electric light to one side of the cabinet, the rays entered through the crack and spread over the floor, producing a feeble illumination. I could see this from above, looking down through the hole in the top, and between the slats, which, however, obscured the luminosity entirely from the eyes of Palladino, who was sitting at one side…

And, sure enough, at the very next sitting, peering down from my recumbent hiding-place above the cabinet, I could see a distinct black outline like a shadow silhouetted against the luminous floor. It was a long pointed triangle, and it poked around among the flowers and the tambourine but failed to bring anything out through the curtain. Palladino had an uncanny intuition whenever anything had been planned to trap her. She may have got a glimpse of the wooden grill on the floor that evening, which made her suspicious, even if she did not know the purpose for which it had been placed there. I finally decided to use X rays, placing a powerful tube on one side of the cabinet, and a fluorescent screen about four feet square on the opposite side. We tried this out before the sitting and it worked beautifully. Anyone reaching back through the curtain to the table could be at once detected and the observer in the dark room behind would see the bones of the hand and arm, or the projecting rod if she used one, as a sharp, black shadow on the fluorescent screen. We all had high hopes of this equipment, but when Palladino arrived she said she was “not feeling well” that evening and would not hold a sitting.

If Wood was a ruthless expert in setting scientific bear traps, Palladino was a “bear” at smelling them out and evading them.

She’d had her toes pinched occasionally, and was wary. She was “feeling no better” the next day, or the next, or on any day thereafter, so far as the American committee was concerned, if Wood was on it. The record shows she refused ever to hold another sitting for them.

Wood was, and still is, an admirer of hers. Convinced that so far as any supernatural or even supernormal power was concerned, it was all a fraud, he considers her to have been the greatest performer of her time, and the greatest, perhaps, in the history of the world. He had profound respect for her ability — and apparently she also had for his.

He has, on the contrary, an impatient, biting scorn for all “psychic” and spiritualist mediums, whether amateur or professional, who claim communion with the dead — and has taken a fiendish delight in skinning a lot of them. He got out of patience some years ago with a doctor acquaintance who had suddenly discovered wonderful psychic gifts in his wife while fiddling with the ouija board. This doctor usually had a finger or two of his own on the board while it was scrambling to and fro along the alphabet, and later when they graduated to the planchette, he still kept his own fingers on the little table. Presently a furor was created by the announcement that the doctor’s wife had pulled a poem out of the infinite — in an ancient, unknown language. Taken to an authority on obscure ancient dialects, it proved to be in Old Icelandic. It was the copy of an actual poem which had been written centuries ago, the original being in the British Museum. Later Wood learned, however, that reproductions had appeared in a printed journal as late as the eighteenth century — and he smelt a very smelly rat. There was no way, however, to smoke the rat out of its hole. You couldn’t prove that sort of thing. You couldn’t prove that the doting doctor husband had copied the poem and simply reproduced it via his wife and her planchette. But later they made the mistake of inviting Wood to one of their spirit hunts, and offered to raise a spook for him. The host said:

“Is there anyone whom you knew well and who has died quite recently — preferably one who has ‘gone over’ no longer than a year or two ago?”

“Yes”, said Wood, “I’d very much like something from Lord Rayleigh”. Lord Rayleigh, the great British physicist, had died just a little while before. Wood wanted no wishy- washy wraiths. He asked for a tough one.

They put their hands on the board, and the host said repeatedly, “Lord Rayleigh, are you with us?” Presently the planchette wrote “Yes”, and the host said to Wood, “Have you any question to ask by which he can establish his identity?”

“Yes, I should like any remembrance he has of Terling”. Terling was the name of Lord Rayleigh’s country place. Presently the planchette began to tremble, and soon neatly wrote, “The ring of the stones on the swept ice”.

The rat was in the bag! The literarily gifted spook-summoner had tangled the word with “curling”, the Scotch game in which heavy flat stones are skidded over ice which has been swept clean with a broom. Wood was a guest, so he contained his contempt, and bade the doctor and his wife good night.

Sometimes these sources of seemingly spirit-inspired knowledge are not easy to trace. After Wood had begun to learn most of the tricks and their answers, he couldn’t refrain, of course, from occasionally using them, and hoisting his credulous friends by their own petards. The victims of his most celebrated hoax were Professor Hyslop of Columbia and Sir Oliver Lodge. Pure chance, in that case, had supplied him with the mysterious necessary knowledge. While crossing to England he’d been introduced on the boat to an attractive young widow who wanted his advice. Her husband had gone down on the Titanic. Subsequently she had met Professor Hyslop, who took her to a medium. She had an elaborately bound, typewritten report of all the sittings, and no human being save herself, the medium, and Hyslop had ever laid eyes on it. Now she wanted Wood to read it, and he did. Most of the messages were the usual clichés such as “waiting for you”, “happy in this new life”, etc., etc. But there was one phrase which had an element of novelty, on the page which recorded the dead husband’s thoughts immediately before the boat went down:

“I am standing on the bridge near the captain… we are going down… the water is rising… it’s up to my knees… to my waist… to my shoulders… this is the end. The engines are coming up!”

Now what could that have been intended to mean? Wood wondered. The widow too had puzzled over it. Perhaps a rush of steam as the water reached the furnaces? Not likely. It stuck in Wood’s memory like a cocklebur, because it was peculiar. The lady was on her way to London, where she was to meet Professor Hyslop again. He was going to take her to a celebrated English medium from whom they hoped to get what the psychical researchers call “cross references”. Wood, arriving in England, was the house guest for a few days of Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge.

After dinner on the second day (Wood tells me) Sir Oliver said, “Oh, by the way, we have another guest arriving tomorrow who is your countryman”. “Who is it?” I asked. “Professor Hyslop of Columbia”, replied Sir Oliver.

Hyslop arrived in due course, and after dinner I got them going on psychic phenomena. Presently I invented an imaginary instance in which a man’s wife had drowned in her cabin when a yacht was sunk in a collision. Her husband had received “messages” from her describing her last thoughts as the water rushed in through the rent in the hull. Hyslop sat up and said, “That’s very remarkable. I have a similar case now”. “Tell it”, we said. “Unfortunately I cannot, I’ve been sworn to secrecy. Nobody but the medium and a lady and I know the story”. “Oh, but you can tell it impersonally, mentioning no names, can’t you?” I asked. “Yes, why not?” said Sir Oliver. “There’s no breach of trust in that”.

Well, he finally consented and spun a rather long story, to which I pretended to be listening dreamily. Finally he got to the point, “And then very remarkably he told us his last thoughts, ‘I’m on the bridge, the water is rising, it’s up to my neck, the — ’ The — let’s see — what was it? Oh, yes, ‘The machinery is rising!’ Now what could he have meant by that? I’ve asked naval architects and sea captains, and they can’t imagine”.

I sat with bowed head, my eyes covered with one hand. “No”, I said, “not the machinery is rising — the engines are coming up!”

Hyslop jumped like a jack-in-the-box. “What made you say that?” he asked. “Say what?” I asked, waking up. He repeated it. “Did I say that?” I asked. “You certainly did, didn’t he, Sir Oliver?” “Yes, he certainly did”. “Well”, I said, “if I said that I suppose it was because it came into my mind”.

“The most extraordinary thing I’ve ever heard!” said Hyslop. “Telepathy with the subconscious mind! That was the communication, but I’d forgotten it”.

I never confessed to either of them. Several years later, I again met the charming widow. She had ceased to be interested in mediums, and I told her the story.

Perhaps the most amusing comment on Sir Oliver was made by the Woods’ maid, when Sir Oliver and Lady Lodge were house guests of the Woods in Baltimore. Sir Oliver was to deliver a series of lectures in The Lyric, which is Baltimore’s “opera house”. On the first night the hall was jammed. The public expected him to talk of spooks, ghosts, and the dear departed. His talk was pure science — abstruse and dry. On the next night his audience had dwindled to a tiny group of fellow-scientists. It seems, however, he’d talked earnestly enough of life beyond the grave at the Woods’ table, for when he’d gone the colored maid, long familiar with Wood’s Luciferian raillery, ventured to say:

“Miss Gertrude, it sure made a difference, having dat nice Evangelist in de house”.

I asked Dr. Wood to venture a guess as to why such able scientific men as Flammarion, Crookes, Hyslop, Lodge, and others had been credulous and at times so easily duped — as they had been — by fraudulent spiritualists and mediums. He made a reply which I think throws a lot of light on it.

“The pure scientist”, said he, “is trained to investigate nature’s immutable laws, subtle and complex though they may be. He can perform controlled, quantitative investigations. When it comes to outwitting the guile of the human mind, where the laws are no longer immutable and the scene can be shifted to suit the circumstances, the scientist, despite his skepticism, who has not been indoctrinated in the art of tracking down the fraud, will in his ingenuousness be an easy dupe. The old adage, ‘It takes a thief to catch a thief,’ is only too well demonstrated”.

I suspect that most of the scientific gentlemen, both among the public committees and the privately credulous, who have investigated or held traffic with the spiritualists and mediums, have been on the whole too soft and polite to apply in a literal and ruthless way Wood’s quoted adage. This is partially understandable, particularly in the light of the fact that so many mediums are of the so-called tender sex.

I doubt, for instance, whether there is one among them save this ruthless devil himself, who would have dared to do what he did in the case of the Harvard-investigated Margery…

The Harvard committee, after elaborate investigation, had pronounced the celebrated Boston medium fraudulent, but Dr. William McDougall of Oxford and Duke universities had hedged on it, and the Society for Psychical Research was wanting a further investigation. They induced Professors Knight Dunlap, H. C. McComas, and Wood to form a new committee of three and go up to Boston. Here is the account which Wood has given me of his own sardonic “meddlesomeness” — from the repercussion of which Margery was carried out screeching and fainting. It begins scientifically enough, but soon goes into clinches.

At one of the sittings (Wood says) I brought in an ultraviolet lamp of the type I developed during the war for secret signaling. It emitted a flood of invisible light, though to the eye it appeared only as a very dark red photographer’s darkroom lantern. I asked permission to use this, representing that it was an especially dark light, which was true, and might be favorable to the manifestations. I had with me secretly a small camera with a lens of large aperture with which I felt sure photographs could be made. I showed the lamp to Dr. Crandon, Margery’s husband, while the room was lighted, turned on the lamp, and asked him if it would be all right to use it. He said he would have to consult with the control, “Walter”, a brother of Margery who’d died many years ago. “Walter” said it was O.K. As soon as Margery had gone into a trance, as signified by heavy breathing, the lights were turned down and the “phenomena” commenced. I turned on the ultraviolet light and got out my camera. But looking up I saw that all the bouquets of artificial flowers on the mantelpiece and various other objects in the room had been painted with phosphorescent paint and were glowing in vivid colors, in fact the whole place was lit up like a cathedral. I turned off the light immediately and made no further effort to use it, for the cat was out of the bag. After the sitting was over, Margery came up to me and said in a low voice, “Say, Professor, what kind of light was that you turned on there?”

I said, “Why? What’s the matter with it?”

“Why, everything in the room, all the flowers and everything, was lit up”, she replied.

I said, “How did you know that? I thought you were in a trance”. She laughed and walked away.

At another séance we were permitted to see the ectoplasm. I was sitting in front of a checkerboard which had been placed on the center of the table opposite Margery, the squares of which had been painted along the edges with luminous paint. Several objects were placed on this which were supposed to be moved by the ectoplasm. Margery had a luminous star attached to her forehead, so that we could keep track of her face in the dark. After a few minutes a narrow dark rod appeared, silhouetted over the luminous checkerboard. It moved from side to side and picked up one of the objects. Later on, as it passed in front of me, I reached out very carefully and touched it with the tip of my finger, following it back until I came to a point very near Margery’s mouth. It seemed probable that she was holding it in her teeth. A moment or two afterwards I took hold of the tip of it very quietly and pinched it. It felt like a steel knitting needle covered with one or two layers of soft leather. Neither Margery nor the control gave any evidence of having realized what I had done — though we had been warned beforehand on no account to touch the ectoplasm, as it would be sure to result in the illness or possible death of the medium.

At the end of the sitting, Margery was alive and in good spirits. Beer and cheese were brought, and we talked over things that had happened. At these sittings everything was taken down by a stenographer and subsequently typed for the benefit of the committee. I said, “Oh, there’s one thing I forgot to mention, and I should like to have it taken down now”.

Dr. Crandon objected, insisting that only things said during the séance should be transcribed. I finally persuaded him, however, by representing it as a matter of slight importance, and he said, “All right, go ahead”.

The stenographer got out her pencil, and I began dictating slowly and solemnly a complete description of my “experiment” with the ectoplasm. Margery gave a shriek and fell back in her chair, pretending to faint. She was carried out of the room, and the committee was asked to depart. Later they pretended she was dangerously ill for weeks as the result of my “brutality”.