Edison vs.

Houdini
Nicola Setari (b. Brussels, 1978) is a philosopher and mediologist.

When we move into the domain of inventions we seem to find a common ground between art and
science, because we go beyond their interpretation as general categories towards their practical
applications. In the broad field of inventions there is the sub-category of incredible inventions
that points towards inventions that produce wonder and amazement and operate on the thin line
between reality and illusion. In this sub-category art performs as magic going beyond itself and
science experiments with science-fiction, surpassing its secure grounds.
In this perspective a particularly interesting type of invention is a device to deceive, such as the
magicians hat, the mediums spinning table or the trompe loeil in art.
A medium is a useful example because even though we are inclined to associate the word with
technological inventions, especially in its plural form media, one of its original meanings was a
person that supposedly is able to communicate with the dead, often thanks to special technical
apparatuses. In most etymological dictionaries the use of the term in the context of art in relation
to the kind of material surface that an artist employs is of 1854, while that of a person who
conveys a spiritual message is of 1853. The medium as a means of communication like the radio
came only after the turn of the century.
The cult of communicating with the dead has naturally existed since ancient times, but the
development of the telegraph in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century
unleashed a collective hysteria for paranormal phenomena, that went under the name of
spiritualism.

The historical figures I wish to summon without the intervention of any supernatural means are
Thomas Edison and Harry Houdini. The two men never dialogued in person, but they were
contemporaries and knew very well that, although they had different roles, there was a deep
connection between them. Houdini found it hard to accept that Edison went about calling himself
the Wizard of Manlo Park, which is where his laboratory was located, and was even more
disturbed by some of the experiments he was carrying out there. I will show how in a paradoxical
way their official roles as scientist and magician-performing artist got inverted, thus suggesting
that the tie between the rational notion of invention and its illusionary one is tighter than we are
normally willing to accept and opening a space for understanding where art and science often
meet.

Edison is considered the father of the modern research laboratory and is probably the most
famous inventor of all times. Born in Milan, Ohio in 1847 he never received a scholarly
education. His apprenticeship with modern technology was supposedly the result of a fortunate
circumstance: while working as a paper boy at the local train station he happened to save the life
of the son of the telegrapher who was on post there. To reward him the man decided to teach him
how the machine worked. While the truth of this anecdote is not so important, it is significant
nevertheless when considering the fact that Edisons later relationship to technology was deeply
intertwined with issues of mortality.
While experimenting on one of the many versions of the telegraph patented by him, he came to
the discovery of the phonograph, the first instrument to record and replay sound and in particular
the human voice. For the first time in the history of humanity it became possible for later
generations to listen to the voices of the dead, of course not in real time. One of the most famous
early recordings is Edison himself singing the song Mary had a little lamb.
1


Edison became member of the theosophical society in 1878, one year after inventing the
phonograph. He most probably did not embrace the full credo of the theosophists, but was
fascinated by the co-founder of the society Madame Blavatsky, an esoteric guru, who believed in
communication with the dead and wrote a number of books about spiritual elevation that
encountered the interest of many scientists and artists such as Mondrian and Kandinsky.
Edison also had a correspondence with the British scientists William Crookes, who invented the
vacuum and cathode tubes already a decade before Edisons phonograph. Crookes was a
convinced spiritualist that attempted to make photographs of ghosts and was trying to create a
machine that, thanks to his cathode tube, would project images of ghosts on a screen. It is quite
ironical that his tube was later used to construct televisions.
Edison was undoubtedly fascinated by paranormal phenomena. In the American culture he was
embedded in, spiritualism had become a dominant interest, even amongst intellectuals. He had a
particular passion for telepathy, performing extensive experiments on Bert Reese, a world famous
pseudo-scientist who fooled many, including Edison, into believing that he had telepathic powers.
How an inventor so involved in the mechanical aspects of telegraphs and telephones, felt the need
to believe that the human mind could without any mediation or medium communicate with other
minds is worth underlining.
One of the most fascinating machines of Edison that never became reality was an apparatus to
communicate with the departed, what can be called the necro-phone. In the 1920 October issue of
Scientific American, Edison made the following statements:

If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical and scientific to assume that it
retains memory, intellect, and other faculties and knowledge that we acquire on this
earth. Therefore, if personality exists after what we call death, it's reasonable to
conclude that those who leave this earth would like to communicate with those they
have left here.
if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved, or
manipulated . . . by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument,
when made available, ought to record something.

He later declared in an interview that appeared in New York Times on the 21
st
of April 1921 that
he was working on such a machine:

Where do you think the units of personality reside after so-called death?
These little entities of personality which I hope to detect with my apparatus are still
animal entities. But who created them, or where they go after they leave a given body,
I do not know. I surmise that they take up residence in another body. But I have no
information on the subject.
How long have you been engaged in your investigations and how soon do you think
they may be completed?
I have been reading and working for fifty years. I was more closely attracted to the
problem about three years ago. I was thinking of the war and the cruelty of nature.

The tragedy of World War I gave spiritualism many new followers and made human mediumship
again a profitable business. But their most radical critic was not Edison, it was the escape artist,
performer and inventor Harry Houdini (1874-1926).
In a letter to Arthur Conan Doyle Houdini explained how he had come to understand Bert
Reeses technique to read pellets, folded pieces of paper on which people would write thoughts
for Reese to telepathically see. When Doyle replied that even Edison believed in Reese, Houdini
answered That he fooled Edison does not surprise me. He would have surprised me if he did not
fool Edison.
2

The relationship of the inventor of Sherlock Holmes with the prestidigitator was first of
friendship and then of bitter conflict. The reason for this change in feelings was Houdinis
decision to give up spiritualism as a consequence of his discovery of the inability of any medium,
and in particular Doyles wife who claimed to be one, to retransmit a secret message that Houdini
had given to his dying mother for her to use when trying to contact him. I am inclined to believe
that this simple code game to unmask psychics should be considered an invention of Houdini.
Houdinis battle against human mediums was also a natural consequence of his artistic practice:
one of his favorite nicknames was the Handcuff King. It was given to him for his ability to escape
from any knot or handcuff that was devised to entrap him. He even spent a year in court in
Germany requesting that the police in Cologne would take back their accusations of trickery
against him following his escape from their famous handcuffs. The trial was successful.
The freeing from knots and handcuffs was the greatest proof, we could almost say scientific
proof, that those mediums that claimed to move objects and produce paranormal phenomena
while being tied up, had as well simply developed a technique to free themselves.
The singularity of Houdinis approach to magic was that he wanted to free his public from the
belief in supernatural powers. His escape philosophy was a way of performing a collective
catharsis from the invisible powers of the State, physically represented by the handcuffs. The
collective anxiety around the return of prisoners after World War I should not be forgotten.
Houdini was an idol basher that made a living by destroying the tricks with which psychics
profited enormously. He anticipated and even favored the new secularized form of spectacular
enchantment that modern communication technology was going to bring about.

The most difficult escape he ever attempted was from what he called his Water Torture Cell.
Thanks to Edisons phonograph it is possible to listen to a rare recording of Houdinis own
presentation of the performance.
3
In it Houdini speaks of his device as an original invention and
adds that it was devised by no supernatural means.
What is symptomatic is that his greatest success came exactly from these performances in which
he would place himself on the thin line between life and death, knowing that once he crossed it,
he would not be able to come back.
I would like to draw a parallelism with Salvador Dals performance for the opening of the
Surrealist exhibition that took place in London in 1936, during which the artist wore a deep sea
diving suit connected to an air pump and read out to an amazed public his lecture Fantomes
paranoiaques authentiques, which of course could not be heard by anyone. The act was
conceived to symbolically represent the dive into the subconscious. The public enjoyed in
particular the part of the performance in which they thought the artist was pretending to choke to
death for a lack of air coming into his suit. Dal later revealed that it was a true accident in which
he almost lost his life.
4
A public that was accustomed to mass-culture performers such as Houdini
and had by then learned the subversive tricks of the avant-garde was ready to belief that Dal was
performing his own death, while it was not actually happening.
Surrealist automatic painting can be considered a secularized form of the automatic painting of
mediums, which has a very long tradition still present today, producing images of celestial
beings. The surrealists instead directed their attention and automatic method to the beings that
haunted their subconscious, with far more interesting artistic results. When Dal turned away
from the group in the forties, he felt the need to receive an exorcism from a specialized Italian
monk, a quite ironic reversal.
Although it would be incorrect to speak of invention in the same terms in regards to Edisons
phonograph and to Houdinis water torture cell, as the former patented more than a thousand, the
latter had the courage to at least patent one in 1921. This is how he presented it to the office of
patents in New York:
The invention relates to deep-sea diving suits or armors, and its object is to provide a new and
improved diver's suite arranged to permit the diver, in case of danger for any cause whatever, to
quickly divest himself of the suit while being submerged and to safely escape and reach the
surface of the water.
5

A deep-sea diving suit from which it is easy to escape in case of danger, needless to say it would
have come handy to Dal for his performance.

The necro-phone was undoubtedly Edisons most ambitious project and would have been his
greatest achievement. But he never managed to realize it. On the other hand Houdini, a few years
before his premature death on the night of Halloween (of which the circumstances are on their
own an incredible story), attempted to make an invention in the techno-scientific sense of the
word. He wanted to create something that would allow people to escape from dying in their deep-
sea diving suit in case of an oxygen failure. He never found anyone willing to help him produce
it.

The ironic human trajectories that these two legendary figures followed reveal the inherent liason
of technology to death, the irrational background of dreams, desires and fears that fuels
inventions. They remind us to look at the many promises that technology and especially bio-
technologies deliver to us today, with the awareness that they are far away from making humans
more rational or at least reasonable.

1
In April of this year a group of American sound historians announced a very important discovery, Edisons
phonograph was actually not the first sound recording machine. An almost completely unknown French librarian and
printer douard-Lon Scott de Martinville had been experimenting years before Edison on a machine to make sound
visually sensible, he called it phonoautograph, and patented it in 1857. His machine was quite different from
Edisons as it graphed on paper the sound waves produced by for example a voice, it did not intend to reproduce the
sound. The researchers I mentioned went looking for these recordings in forgotten archives in Paris and found the
earliest one from 1860. With an elaborate software they managed to re-translate the recording into sound and what
they hear was the song: Au Claire de La Lune mon ami Pierrot.
2
Harry Houdini, Houdinis Magic, ed. of notebooks, 1932.
3
The only known recording of Houdini's voice reveals it to be heavily accented. Houdini made these recordings on
Edison wax cylinders on October 24, 1914, in Flatbush, New York. On them, Houdini practices several different
introductory speeches for his famous Chinese Water Torture Cell. He also invites his sister, Gladys, to recite a poem.
Houdini then recites the same poem in German. The six wax cylinders were discovered in the collection of magician
John Mulholland after his death in 1970. They are currently part of the David Copperfield collection. -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Houdini, the sound recording can be found online.
4
For an interesting reading of the episode see P. Sloterdijk, The Avant-garde and Analytical terror, in Iconoclash.
Beyond the image wars in Art, Religion and Science, MIT University Press, Boston, 2002 p.
5
http://www.colitz.com/site/1370316/1370316.htm