EPISODE · May 12, 2026 · 36 MIN
The Spirit Telegraph: How Victorian Engineers Plugged the Dead Into the Cable
from Crazy Alchemist · host Crazy Alchemist
On 31 March 1848, two girls in a Hydesville cottage worked out a code with a rapping presence. Four years earlier, Samuel Morse had sent the first electric message from Washington to Baltimore. The Victorian and post-Victorian Spiritualist movement organised itself in the vocabulary of the telegraph, and a generation later the engineers who had laid the Atlantic cable were running séances with the same instruments. This article reads the period from the Hydesville rappings to the Houdini-Doyle feud as a single technological story, with the documented case file of mediums and exposures, the Society for Psychical Research, and the migration of the metaphor from wire to wireless.
What this episode covers
On 31 March 1848, two girls in a Hydesville cottage worked out a code with a rapping presence. Four years earlier, Samuel Morse had sent the first electric message from Washington to Baltimore. The Victorian and post-Victorian Spiritualist movement organised itself in the vocabulary of the telegraph, and a generation later the engineers who had laid the Atlantic cable were running séances with the same instruments. This article reads the period from the Hydesville rappings to the Houdini-Doyle feud as a single technological story, with the documented case file of mediums and exposures, the Society for Psychical Research, and the migration of the metaphor from wire to wireless.
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The Spirit Telegraph: How Victorian Engineers Plugged the Dead Into the Cable
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