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Thomas Edison, paranormalist

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1996 by Martin Gardner

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In his book Paper Magic (page 91) Houdini refers to Reese in a footnote as "in my estimation, the greatest pellet reader that ever lived. (A pellet is a billet rolled into a ball.) I had a seance with Dr. Reese, and if it had not been for my many years of experience as an expert, I might have been mystified by his adroit manipulations and uncanny deductions."

Edison was the most famous person to be totally bamboozled by Reese. Like so many scientists who tumble for psychic charlatans, Edison considered himself far too intelligent to be fooled, and of course it never occurred to him to seek explanation from a magician. When an article in the New York Graphic unveiled some of Reese's techniques, Edison was furious. He sent the newspaper a letter in which he said:

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I am certain that Reese was neither a medium nor a fake. I saw him several times and on each occasion I wrote something on a piece of paper when Reese was not near or when he was in another room. In no single case was one of these papers handled by Reese, and some of them he never saw, yet he recited correctly the contents of each paper.

Several people in my laboratory had the same kind of experience, and there are hundreds of prominent people in New York who can testify to the same thing.

Houdini wrote to Doyle on August 8, 1920:

You may have heard a lot of stories about Dr. Bert Reese, but I spoke to Judge Rosalsky and he personally informed me that, although he did not detect Reese, he certainly did not think it was telepathy. I am positive that Reese resorts to legerdemain, makes use of a wonderful memory, and is a great character reader. He is incidentally a wonderful judge of human beings.

That he fooled Edison does not surprise me. He would have surprised me if he did not fool Edison. Edison is certainly not a criterion, when it comes to judging a shrewd adept in the art of pellet-reading.

The greatest thing Reese did, and which he openly acknowledged to me, was his test-case in Germany when he admitted they could not solve him.

I have no hesitancy in telling you that I set a snare at the seance I had with Reese, and caught him cold-blooded. He was startled when it was over, as he knew that I had bowled him over. So much so that he claimed I was the only one that had ever detected him, and in our conversation after that we spoke about other workers of what we call the pellet test - Foster, Worthington, Baldwin et al. After my seance with him, I went home and wrote down all the details.

The letters are quoted from Houdini and Conan Doyle: The Story of a Strange Friendship (1932), by Bernard Ernst and Hereward Carrington. Joseph Rinn, in Sixty Years of Psychical Research (1950), has a good description of one of Reese's billet reading performances, with an explanation of how he did it.

The best account of Reese's methods is "Bert Reese Secrets," by magician Ted Annemann, in the 1936 Summer Extra issue of his periodical, The Jinx. It includes a photograph of Reese, his hand holding a cigar that he habitually smoked during his performances because it made it easier to palm a folded billet. Annemann writes that Harvard's distinguished German-born philosopher and psychologist Hugo Munsterberg (1863-1916) "became such a believer in Reese's powers that he was preparing a book on him when death prevented its finish." I was unable to verify this. Like his friend William James, Munsterberg believed in both God and immortality, but unlike James he was a well-known skeptic of the paranormal who had a great record of exposing mediums and other psychic charlatans by carefully contrived traps. Can any reader shed light on Annemann's startling claim?

Thomas Edison, paranormalist

Skeptical Inquirer, July-August, 1996 by Martin Gardner

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