Thomas Edison's Contributions To The Spirit World

Can You Hear Me Now

The paranormal contributions of Thomas Edison

By: Sam Little

Thomas Edison was a man of many talents. He was an inventor of many things including the light bulb, the phonograph, and 2 different movie projectors. Edison prided himself on his scientific approach to nearly everything. He was revered as an intellectual mastermind and a man of much respect and dignity. Edison was a person whom others looked up to and admired. His scientific feats were unmatched by anyone who came before him and according to some scholars it would be ages before anyone came along afterwards with the scientific get up and go he had displayed. Born in 1847 and passed away on 1931 Edison lived his life through a period of time famous for the advent of the spiritualist movement. It is no shock that a man living in this age with the curiosity and drive that Edison had would take notice of this movement. Edison however was not like the majority who looked at the movement as a true way to make contact with spirits. He, like with most things, felt science could approach the task much better than the means of a medium sitting at a table surrounded by onlookers in hope of seeing a spirit make contact.

Edison looked at life much different than most people did. He saw life as a system of smaller life. Edison did not believe in the traditional soul, the soul that ascends to heaven or descends to hell upon death. He believed the soul was made of tiny units he called life units. These units were capable of forming shapes as simple as a circle and as complex as a hexagon, and in the realm of life they could create forms as small as a germ or as large as an elephant and everything in between. The units need only work together and they could form any foundation of living being. They also had a memory. This was what Edison explained caused skin to regenerate. The life units would use the memory they stored to rebuild missing fragments of their form. (this however seems to not be the case of a missing limb, which really throws a ghost in the machine as far as Edison's theory goes). This memory possessed an ability to outlast the form itself, Edison believed.

Edison believed a strong enough memory would cause the life units to stay around after the physical body parted. The units would retain the personality of the form they once held together. This personality could still evolve while away from the body. This would explain ghosts fairly well in most aspects of the word. Edison also believed some of these units had such strong memories they could return to each other and create an entire new form. It is a bit of a twist on the theory of re-incarnation. The units could go from being a human being to becoming a horse if they felt the need to be a horse was important enough. Some say Edison did not believe the units would be the same form twice, wanting to experience everything as opposed to the same thing over and over again, but in my reading I could not find that anywhere so that is speculation.

Edison was very big into the works of fellow scientific genius Albert Einstein. Einstein’s statement that energy is neither created or destroyed influenced Edison in many ways. Edison used the theory to figure that his life units were in a sense the same as energy in that there would always be a fixed number of units, that number could neither increase or decrease. The units would be indestructible. (once again another kink in the armor of Edison's theory as living things are far from indestructible). Edison also believed these units could be detected if the right means were taken to do so. He set about working toward that goal.

At the same time Edison was experimenting with his phonograph designs and a spark of interest hit him. He thought that he could use phonograph to record the departed voices onto records. He would work on this device for some time but never finish the creation. Some speculate that device to detect his life units was in fact the first scientific device for paranormal research.

Since Edison's machine the world of paranormal research as grown and progressed. EVP now stands as the third leading form of accepted evidence in regard to paranormal research, the first being video and the second the photogragh. EVP has become one of the most widely attempted forms of research in the paranormal field and ghosthunters often use it to back up claims of paranormal activity.

While the use of Edison's design has not really been all that inspired there can be no doubt that it has sparked some imaginative means of obtaining the evidence needed.

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