Thomas Edison, paranormalist

This also is not the place to discuss Edison's foibles: his temper tantrums, his lust for money, his efforts to purloin ideas, his boasts about war weapons that never existed, or his disastrous relations with his two wives and his children. These are aspects of Edison's character I did not know about when forty years ago I wrote an adulatory article about him for Children's Digest (November 1954).

My intent here is to focus on Edison's changing religious opinions, his lifelong interest in psychic phenomena, and his gullibility. My main sources are two biographies - Robert Conot's Thomas A. Edison: A Streak of Luck (1979) and Wyn Wachorst's Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth (1981) - and the chapter on Edison in Martin Ebon's They Knew the Unknown (1981).

In his youth Edison was an outspoken freethinker. He greatly admired Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, but unlike deist Paine, Edison did not believe in God, the soul, or an afterlife. At that time Edison was a pantheist who liked to call nature the "Supreme Intelligence," indifferent and merciless toward humanity. His friend Edward Marshall interviewed him for the New York Times (October 2, 1910). "There is no more reason to believe that any human brain will be immortal," Edison declared, "than there is to think that one of my phonograph cylinders will be immortal. . . . No, the brain is a piece of meat mechanism - nothing more than a wonderful meat mechanism."

Edison's words, occasioned by the death of William James, generated an uproar of opposition from Christians of all stripes. He was soundly trounced by Cardinal Gibbons. Columbian Magazine, a Catholic periodical, devoted an entire issue to attacking what it called "Edison's materialism."

Then something happened to Edison on the way to his laboratory. In an interview titled "Edison Working on How to Communicate with the Next World," in American Magazine (October 1920), B. C. Forbes - he later founded Forbes magazine - revealed that Edison not only had come to believe in an afterlife, but was actually working on an electrical device for communicating with the dead! (See also Austin Lescarboura's "Edison's Views on Life after Death," in Scientific American, October 30, 1920.)

Nothing is known about the kind of machine Edison had in mind, although it is known that he conducted experiments with it. It was probably some sort of telephone using greatly amplified electromagnetic waves.

Martin Ebon quotes the following remarks made by Edison to the Scientific American interviewer:

If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical and scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect, and other faculties and knowledge that we acquire on this earth. Therefore, if personality exists after what we call death, it's reasonable to conclude that those who leave this earth would like to communicate with those they have left here.

. . . I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then, if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved, or manipulated . . . by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something.

Certain of the methods now in use are so crude, so childish, so unscientific, that it is amazing how so many rational human beings can take any stock in them. If we ever do succeed in establishing communication with personalities which have left this present life, it certainly won't be through any of the childish contraptions which seem so silly to the scientist.

Christian leaders here and abroad welcomed Edison into their ranks as a theist who now believed in immortality. Scientific American, in the article cited earlier, ran a photograph of Edison pouring liquid from a flask into a beaker. The caption read: "Thomas A. Edison - the world's foremost inventor who is now at work on an apparatus designed to place psychical research on a scientific basis."

Although Edison never became a Christian, Mina Miller, his young and pretty second wife (she was eighteen years his junior), never wavered from her devout Methodist upbringing. Conot (page 427) calls her "an unreconstructed fundamentalist who . . . thought evolution a plot of Satan." I had the pleasure of meeting her when I was a small boy. My parents had taken me to Chautauqua, New York, where the Edisons maintained a summer cottage. I rang their doorbell to ask for the great man's autograph. He was not at home, but Mrs. Edison graciously promised to have him send it to me, which he did.

"Has Man an Immortal Soul?," another interview by Marshall, appeared in the Forum's November 1926 issue. Edison now speaks of the "soul," and refers to God as both a "Great Power" and a "Creator." "Today the preponderance of probability greatly favors belief in the immortality of the intelligence, or soul, of man," Edison said. He praises Christianity as the wisest and most beautiful of world religions, seeing it as evolving toward a faith with less emphasis on doctrines and more on the moral code of Jesus. Theologians should stop debating creeds, Edison emphasized, and devote more time to "pile up the evidence . . . which no fool skeptic can demolish."