Science has long been used to investigate seemingly supernatural phenomena. Read about some of the most famous examples—and what they tell us about the historical relationship between science and the occult.
From Harry Price and his ‘National Laboratory of Psychical Research’ to the infamous case of the Cottingley Fairies, this story looks at the scientific instruments, methods and technologies used to test (or debunk) spiritualist mediums, fairy apparitions and ghostly visions.
HARRY PRICE AND THE NATIONAL LABORATORY OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH
In the years after 1900, several ‘psychical’ laboratories were purpose-built in Britain, Europe and the US by serious practitioners aiming to establish rigorous, controlled conditions for scientifically investigating the supernatural.
Photograph of Harry Price at the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, c. 1930, fixing machinery
Courtesy of Senate House Library, University of London © NLPR/Tourist Photo Library
Psychical investigator Harry Price established the London National Laboratory of Psychical Research (NLPR) in 1926. Price defined psychical research as the attempt to ‘ascertain, by exact experimental methods, how far the alleged phenomena of the séance room can be brought into line with normality’. Could science explain the strange phenomena spiritualists and occultists claimed were stemming from an unseen world?
To conduct these ‘exact experiments’, Price’s Laboratory was equipped with a range of technologies, from cameras to Dictaphones (voice recorders) and barographs (instruments for registering changes in atmospheric pressure). These were used to measure conditions in the séance room, document what was occurring, and study the medium’s body and associated phenomena.
This c.1924 Type A Dictaphone is illustrative of those used by investigators at the NLPR to record notes and observations, as well as to record psychical phenomena like spirit voices or noises. Science Museum Group Collection
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