Edison and the Ghost Machine

"I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us."

THOSE ARE THE words of the great inventor Thomas Edison in an interview in the October, 1920 issue of The American Magazine. And in those days, when Edison spoke, people listened. By any measurement, Thomas Edison was a superstar in his time, a brilliant inventor during the height of the Industrial Revolution when man was mastering machine. Called "The Wizard of Menlo Park" (which has since been renamed Edison, New Jersey), he was one of history's most prolific inventors, holding 1,093 U.S. patents. He and his workshop were responsible for the creation or development of many devices that changed the way people lived, including the electric light bulb, the motion picture camera and projector, and the phonograph.

GHOST OF A MACHINE

But did Edison invent a ghost box – a machine to talk to the dead?

It has long been speculated in paranormal circles that Edison did indeed create such a device, though it must have been somehow lost. No prototypes or schematics have ever been found. So did he build it or not?

Another interview with Edison, published in the same month and year, this time by Scientific American, quotes him as saying, "I have been thinking for some time of a machine or apparatus which could be operated by personalities which have passed on to another existence or sphere." (Emphasis mine.) So in two interviews conducted around the same time we have two very similar quotes, one in which he says that he has been at work "building" the device, and in the other that he has merely been "thinking" about it. Somewhat contradictorily, the Scientific American article says, despite Edison's quote, that "the apparatus which he is reported to be building is still in the experimental stage…" as if there is a prototype.

However, since we have no evidence of such a device having been constructed or even designed by Edison, we have to conclude that it was an idea that never materialized.

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