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

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”!

“Of mediums I trust not one”,
Said Thomas Alva Edison.
“The planchette plays pernicious pranks,
The table tips and turns and twanks.
With mediums I cannot grope —
I shall invent a specter-scope!”

He called his helpers one by one,

Did Thomas Alva Edison.
They took some wheels, a spring, a cam,
Attached them to a diaphragm,
Arranged a lens within a coil,
A red-hot strip of platinum foil.
And when at last the thing was done
They put it in a vacuum.

“With your ideas I sure agree”,

Said Mr. Thomas Alva E.
“To show themselves through this, the Shades
Will all come trooping up from Hades.
For this old Noah will leave his Ark
And travel down to Menlo Park.
Put down the shades, shut out the sun”,
Said Thomas Alva Edison.
“And let the Pianola play
Turn on the ultraviolet ray
And watch old Thomas cramp the style
Of Oliver Lodge and Conan Doyle”.

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.