The First Psychic

We live in an age of relatively slight entertainments from spiritualists. Modern spiritualists claim to get messages from "the other side," and clearly impress audiences with their accuracy; skeptics, however, point out that such performances show merely skills in "cold reading" and bilking an audience that is already eager to believe. The Victorians did it better. Daniel Home got messages from the departed, to be sure, but by the help of spirits, he also levitated furniture, made hovering musical instruments play in the air, and floated himself in and out of three-story windows. Or at least that is what he claimed, and more importantly, that is what people (including scientists) who saw the performances claimed for him. Charlatan or ambassador to the Spirit World, Home created a sensation that was the international talk of all levels of society. Peter Lamont, who has worked as a magician, thinks that Daniel Home was the most interesting person who ever lived. You probably have some other candidate for such a title, but Lamont in the entertaining biography _The First Psychic: The Peculiar Mystery of a Notorious Victorian Wizard_ (Little, Brown) makes his own choice clear. The book is also an examination of how we know what we know, and how we have to deal with incredible anomalies. Home had a mission, to convince a skeptical world that these were not tricks and that the supernatural world was affecting the natural one through himself as intermediary. It was to be a tough sell, but while skeptics were numerous, believers were enthusiastic. Home had serious detractors who were conjurors, but many of the effects which Home was able to achieve, or which were remembered as being achieved by him, were unique and remain unexplained. It is a shame that the conjurors did not join in the scientific investigation of Home's powers. One of the lessons that James Randi has taught contemporary investigators of psychic phenomena is that scientists are really no better at avoiding being deceived by tricksters than anyone else, and that a magician needs to be on the investigative team to spot deception. No such spotter was called upon when Sir William Crookes, the discoverer of the element thallium, undertook an investigation of Home's powers by different tests. In the Victorian heyday of science, it was held that a scientist was the man to make objective and keen observations, and would not be liable to deceit. Crookes, as eminent a scientist as there was in Britain at the time, had never been deceived by his chemicals and expected no deception from Home. Indeed, his findings were that Home's effects were genuine, and although Crookes did not go so far as saying that they were the product of spirit manifestation, he proposed that there was a Psychic Force that would need to be a new target of investigation by physicists. He invented the application of the word "psychic" to those who could manifest such a force, with Home being the first person