Spiritualism and Electromagnetism

The classical theory of electromagnetism, which formed the basis of wireless communication technology, was developed in the latter half of the 19th century, coinciding quite closely with the rise of spiritualism, i.e., the belief in the possibility of communicating with departed souls. Interestingly, there seems to have been some connection between these two fields of thought. Although aspects of what later came to be called spiritualism can be found throughout the 19th century (and indeed throughout history), the modern spiritualist movement is usually considered to have begun in 1848, when the young Fox sisters of upstate New York began to hold séances, during which they mediated messages from deceased persons. The idea spread rapidly, and by 1854 there were thousands of “mediums” throughout the United States and Europe – especially England – all claiming the ability to communicate with the dead. How seriously these claims were taken by the average person is debatable, but it’s remarkable that many well-educated and intelligent people became genuinely convinced by the basic tenet of spiritualism, which is that individual human souls survive death and continue in some mode of existence capable of interacting with the living. One notion was that the souls of the departed are imprinted in an “ethereal medium” that surrounds and permeates all ordinary matter.

The success of Isaac Newton’s inverse-square law of gravitation formulated in 1687 led to a concept of physical forces as some kind of direct “action at a distance”, and this conception was carried over to the study of magnetic and electric forces by scientists such as Ampere and Coulomb. However, beginning in the early 1850’s, James Clerk Maxwell began to conceive of electric and magnetic effects in a completely different way. Building on the earlier suggestions of Faraday, Maxwell conceived of an all-embracing ether as the mechanism and embodiment for the forces of electromagnetism. Moreover, he showed that this ethereal medium was capable of conveying energy in the form of electromagnetic waves propagating at the speed of light. Indeed he surmised that light itself is an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell’s final synthesis was published in 1873, and in the 1880s the reality of electromagnetic waves was shown by Hertz, who succeeded in producing and detecting them directly by means of oscillating electrical circuits.

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