Ghost in the Machine

An Archaeology of the Desire to Communicate with the Dead

April 15, 2011

Eric Alberts (3485595) New Media Archaeology MA New Media & Digital Culture Imar de Vries

2010-2011

The so-called occult is calling. It has never stopped ringing Avital Ronell Introduction Mankinds inexhaustible fascination with the afterlife seems almost transcendental in its own way. The idea of a world beyond, a place where our ancestors live on for eternity, can be found even in the remnants of the earliest, most primitive of civilizations. Whether this world beyond is called Hades, Walhalla, Nirvana or Heaven, the idea of the afterlife does not seem to be confined by time, law, religion or race. This ancient and blind belief in the afterlife has clearly faltered profoundly during the last centuries within industrialized, mainly Western, nations. The age of reason and its coinciding shift toward an increased reliance on science were important instigators of secularism and a clash between science and culture. Despite the onslaught of reason and science (Oppenheim 1) during the last centuries, the idea of the afterlife remains equivalently intriguing. Searching for afterlife on Google, for instance, will give roughly 26 million results. Looking at these search results, however, it becomes clear that the age of reason has left an imprint on the fascination for the afterlife. The religious and mystical aura that exclusively surrounded the idea of the afterlife has given way to scientific associations as well. Present-day involvement in the afterlife seems to have taken on the image of scientific research, given the existence of the Afterlife Research Centre (ARC) and the Paranormal Afterlife Research Alliance (PARA) for example. One of the core tasks of these institutions is to give scientific evidence for the existence of the afterlife by getting in contact with the world beyond. These institutions could therefor be considered as culminations of the mergence of ancient mysticism and scientific reasoning. In an attempt to get away from Shamanism, with its herbs, potions and spells, this distinct scientific approach to the afterlife depends on communication technology as a means to contact the dead. People who draw upon this form of instrumental contact with the dead are known as Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) or Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) researchers. Media, such as the television and personal computer, are put to use in an effort to catch the voices from beyond. I am driven by the question where this present-day confidence invested in communication technology, as a way to bridge the mortal and the spirit world, comes from. William Boddy further instigated this drive when I read his article Archaeologies of Electronic Vision and the Gendered Spectator, in which he

mentions the speculative applications of radio in communicating with the dead (108). In order to find answers I would like to place the desire to communicate with the dead in its cultural and discursive contexts. By doing this I believe that it will become clear that the utopian and dystopian fantasies surrounding early modern communication technologies still shape the contemporary desire for communicating with the dead. To be more specific, I believe that the underlying motive for mediated contact with the afterlife can be traced back in history to the turn of the nineteenth century. I draw upon the hypothesis that the ideas, hopes and fears in Victorian every day life at le fin de sicle, still shape the contemporary endeavour to prove that electronic communication with the afterlife is possible. In the field of media studies, researching media technologies by placing them in their cultural and discursive contexts has not always been the methodological norm. Previous attempts to grasp the origination of certain media technologies, such as the telegraph, telephone and radio, are characterized by their sole concern for the technological artefact. As a consequence of mainly focussing on the artefact and the causal relationships leading to the emergence of the artefact, crucial factors, such as social habits and traditions, were bound to be neglected. This type of research, especially within media studies during the nineteen nineties, was considered too narrow because of its factual focus and disregard of important events surrounding those facts. This methodological dissatisfaction led present-day historians, such as Tom Gunning, Carolyn Marvin, Susan Douglas and others, to look at media history in the tradition of Walter Benjamin and Wolfgang Schivelbusch. Their attitude towards history differs from the narrow, fact-centred and chronological concept of history because they treated history as a multi-layered concept, a dynamic system of relationships (Huhtamo 1). I consider this paper to be a pre-eminent example of a nonartefactual approach to media history. Searching for the underlying motives for contacting the afterlife through electronic media is impossible by solely looking at technological artefacts without the consideration of a wider and more multifaceted social and cultural frame of reference (Huhtamo 4). I would, therefor, like to place this research in the field of media archaeology as described by Erkki Huhtamo. Focussing on the desire to communicate with the afterlife as a recurring cyclical phenomenon, or topic, calls for an approach that tries to transcend specific historical contexts. I believe that the present-day confidence invested in communication technology to

achieve contact with the afterlife pops up again and again when looking back at communication technologies in previous periods. Underlying this claim is Tom Gunnings well-known quote that technology can reveal the dream world of society as much as its pragmatic rationalization (185). As stated above, I believe that a significant part of the motivation to get in contact with the dead through the use of electronic media lies at the turn of the nineteenth century and continued as a scientific inquiry all the way through the twentieth century. The powerful dreams and anxieties that accompanied the shift towards modernity at the turn of the century still shape the contemporary belief that the dead can be contacted by using communication technologies. In order to substantiate this claim I am, of course, obligated to elaborate on these hopes and fears to explain how science and technology became intertwined with the ancient belief in the afterlife. From thereon out I will try to link these historical contexts with contemporary EVP and ITC research in order to eventually transcend these contexts and delve into the recurring element of the desire to communicate with the dead. This is, in short, the roadmap to finding an explanation for the contemporary desire for mediated communicating with the dead. I am certainly aware that the attempt to establish instrumental contact with those in the world beyond is not new and even precedes Victorian times. As Konstantne Raudive, a pioneer in EVP, states: From time immemorial man's mind has been preoccupied with the idea of a hereafter and has tried to gain visual or acoustic impressions of it [] Similar attempted realisations have also been experienced through Spiritualism, Occultism and Anthroposophy (Raudive). I believe, though, that some of the more lucid sentiments constructing the desire for electronic communication with the dead are to be found at the end of the Victorian period and in the shift towards modernity at the dawn of the twentieth century when psychical research emerged. I am, moreover, aware that at the same time psychical research emerged in Victorian Britain, in Russia a similar scientific movement was very active in trying to cheat death. As in the Victorian period science and the occult in Russia were not separate, but mingled in a current of thought that aimed to create a substitute for religion (Gray 3). The significant difference between the two psychical movements was that in Russia emphasis on the quest for immortal life overshadowed the desire to communicate with those who died. In search for clues to underpin my claim I, therefor, mainly focus on events in Victorian Britain.

Victorian spiritualism and psychical research In order to find the underlying motive for mediated communication with the afterlife I will first try to unravel the complex times at the turn of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century. By looking at extensive historical accounts of that time it will become clear that this period was full of contradictions driven by a shift towards modernity. In his book The Invention of Telepathy Roger Luckhurst stipulates that within the transformation to modernity one central aspect became prominent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The practice of scientific study escaped its confining exclusiveness and dispersed rapidly from a small group of influential gentlemenamateurs to all layers of society. In this period, surely, scientific authority was extended across diverse terrains leading to a scientizing mania (Luckhurst 10) with powerful spokesmen asserting the primacy of scientific authority over traditional, theological orientations of experience (9). Richard Noakes notes that in these times the construction of empirically grounded laws was regarded as monuments of ordering physical phenomena. Victorian scientists regarded these natural laws as authoritative accounts of the natural world and saw empirical evidence as the supreme authorities on the natural world (Noakes 23-24). According to Noakes it has, therefor, long puzzled historians why there was such a resurgence of supernatural beliefs in this Victorian age of science (23). Roger Luckhurst, in an attempt to solve this puzzle, states that many experienced the modernity of science in traumatic ways [] having a disintegrative effect on traditional social and knowledge hierarchies (10). Through the practice of science, for instance, Charles Darwin disclosed a world in which humans were pulled down to the same level as animals. For most people, including Darwin himself, the thought that man would fall into oblivion after death was an intolerable one (Gray 1). According to Janet Oppenheim, moreover, Victorians were fully aware that the place of religion in the cultural fabric of their times was scarcely secure (1). In an effort to achieve stability in these times of shaken personal faith, thousands of British men and women [] turned to spiritualism and psychical research (ibid.). The concept of telepathy from the new science of psychical research can be seen as one of the culminations of these roaring times in which the emergence of a scientific culture produced a variety of unforeseen effects (Luckhurst 10).

With the process of secularism well underway, most people, paradoxically, turned to science in an effort to escape the world that science had uncovered (Gray 1). In Cambridge in 1874 a group of powerful and well-connected people came together and began investigations in finding scientific evidence for occult phenomena. These investigations, which led to the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882, included the search for evidence that human personality survived bodily death (ibid.). It is important to understand that the investigations conducted a century ago were seen as a very serious business attracting eminent people, such as the Fellow of the Royal Society, university professors, and Nobel prize-winning scientists (Oppenheim 3). Together with other intellectuals, this prominent group of people considered psychic phenomena as a legitimate way to uncover the secrets of mans place in the universe (Oppenheim 4). According to John Gray, the sances that we so popular at the time were more than plain superstition: They were part of an anxious, at times desperate, search for meaning in life (2). Many historians, such as Pamela Thurschwell, Janet Oppenheim and John Gray, argue that the scientific endeavour of the Society for Psychical Research into the occult and their search for evidence that the human mind could survive death was an attempt to counter the pessimism of a materialist and scientifically determined world view (Thurschwell 15). Moreover, it was an attempt to marry the claims of nineteenth-century positivist science with older claims of religious faith. The typical psychical researcher tended towards this combination of religious hopefulness and materialist scepticism (ibid.). Psychical research, therefor, can be seen as a product of the interaction between science and the occult. These two flows came together in two revolts against death (Gray 6) with the similar claim that science could give humanity what religion and magic had promised immortal life (ibid.). As I have tried to show, the late-Victorian period was a time of great confusion, as the rules by which people organised the world they inhabited were shaken to the core. People turned to spiritualism and psychical research as a refuge from emptiness and despair. It was a widespread effort in this period to believe in something (Oppenheim 4). This boom of the occult became a popular theme in literature as well. Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle and many others delighted in telling ghost stories. According to Nicola Bown et al. [e]ven avowedly realist novels were full of dreams, premonitions and second sight (1).

The more interesting point in relation to this research Bown et al. make, though, is that the material world the Victorian inhabited seemed somehow supernatural as well. Modern technologies were transforming daily life rapidly and were often felt to be uncanny. There were [d]isembodied voices over the telephone [and] near instantaneous communication through telegraph wires [] and apparently real communications from the dead elicited by [s]piritualist mediums made the world seem as if it were full of invisible, occult forces (ibid.). Electronic mediation with the world beyond In order to further substantiate my claim that a significant part of the desire to get in contact with the dead through the use of electronic media lies in the conflicting Victorian period, I would like to argue that realised and unrealised inventions in the field of communication technology were drawn into this scientific enquiry into the afterlife. To give a full comprehension of this process I would like to start by looking at the beginning of spiritualism in 1848, roughly four decades before the formation of the Society for Psychical Research. Spiritualist practise and psychical research, though, are not intended to be synonymous. Janet Oppenheim explains why: The spiritualists, on the one hand, were likely to attend sances in an accepting frame of mind. [] Psychical researchers, on the other hand, trod with greater circumspection and even, in some cases, scepticism (3). Steven Connor, who in his essay The Victorian Ear explores the interface between technological innovations and sances, states that spiritualist practice is much more thought of as a phantasmal commentary upon the work of science or even as embodied reflections upon the reconfigurations of the body induced and potentiated by new communicational technologies (23). Connor points to the spiritualist convincement that communication with the dead was a system of alphabetic knocks, which had to be decoded and states that [n]o more literal parallel to the digital system of the electric telegraph could be imagined (ibid.). Connor, furthermore, notes that Charles Partridge already in 1858 wrote an essay on spiritual communication in Morse code, which was published by the Spiritual Telegraph Office (24). Emma Hardinge Britten also lively describes this spiritual telegraph in her book Modern American Spiritualism, stating that the apparatus could bridge the mortal and immortal worlds, whereby legions of enfranchised spirits can transmit their messages of undying affection (547). The spiritual telegraph in this early context, though, was primarily used metaphorically, but

gives a good indication of how the medium became a synonym for afterlife communication. An example of how the telegraph was physically put to use in spiritualist practices can be found in Hardinge Brittens work Nineteenth Century Miracles:
At a private circle held in New South Wales by a party of ladies and gentlemen, some of whom were operators in the Magnetic Telegraph Office, the controlling Spirits had been frequently asked if they could not give communications through electrical signals. (254)

Hardinge Britten continues by giving several results of this session, which are testimonies of a number of respectable witnesses (ibid.). One of the testimonies included states:
Within one minute after taking our seats at the table, raps and loud knocks were given; the armature at the instrument commenced to work strongly, rapidly and well, spelling the alphabet down to the letter K quite correctly. [] Question asked Would they be able to work the instrument perfectly? Answer, Yes. (255)

The invention of the telephone and in lesser extent the phonograph around 1876 quickly entered the spiritualist sances. The primary reason for this was because these media did not require attendees to decode the messages coming from the spirits. According to Steven Connor the effect of adopting these technologies was that the ghostliness of the new technological power became highlighted (24). These technologies were able to separate the voice from its source, either in space, as with the telephone, or in time, as with the gramophone (ibid.). Spiritualist sances became more about hearing rather than seeing, leading to the phenomenon of the direct voice. Voices from beyond became facilitated rather than produced by the medium. The most interesting point Connor makes, which is relevant to my argument, is his statement that the flourishing of the direct voice during the twentieth century was undoubtedly encouraged by the development of acoustic technologies (26) including the telephone, phonograph and gramophone, but also the megaphone, radio and tape recorder. With this claim, Steven Connor underlines the hypothesis that the desire for mediated communication with the afterlife can be traced back to the Victorian period, in

which a basic principle was formed for mediated communication with the world beyond. There is, however, an underexposed element in Steven Connors historiography concerning the occult and its growing interest in communication media. As I have pointed out there was a significant shift towards modernity and an ever-growing belief in science at the end of the nineteenth century. Where Connor omits this shift, Jeffrey Sconce lively describes this process in his book Haunted Media. At the end of the nineteenth century the credibility of the spiritualists and their sances diminished profoundly under the diffusion of scientific reason. According to Sconce even spiritualists began to doubt the idea that deceased scientists were working in a laboratory beyond on electronic technologies to uplift the mortal world (59), an idea not uncommon at the time. The reason why interest in occult media, nevertheless, intensified in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was due to psychical research and their search for empirical evidence for the afterlife. Sconce describes this shift from superstition to science as follows: Spiritualisms fanciful portraits of a benevolent spirit world gave way in the age of modernity to a program of pragmatic experimentation focused squarely on the verifying the act of communication itself (ibid.). The growing confidence in science led many people, including the most celebrated scientists of that time, to believe that one day someone here on earth, instead of a deceased genius up in heaven, would develop a device to contact the spirit world. There was a firm belief that an apparatus for contacting the dead was something just around the corner. Erkki Huhtamo notes that unrealised dream machines, or discursive inventions (inventions that exist only as discourses), can be just as revealing as realised artefacts (3). His example of the telectroscope, a never-realised device making man capable of seeing over great distances, shows how an apparatus can become a utopian projection of the hopes raised by realised technologies, such as electricity and the telephone (ibid.). For many inventors and scientists at the beginning of the twentieth century it was very much plausible, even inevitable, that devices capable of contacting the dead would be realised (Sconce 61). Where the telectroscope was thought of through the hopes raised by the telephone, so were supernatural devices imagined through the telegraph, telephone and modernitys most startling supernatural invention wireless communication (ibid.).

The invention of Marconis wireless technology invigorated the belief to contact the dead even more. Prior to the invention of wireless, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), a member of the Society for Psychical Research, published an article about mental telepathy in 1891 stating that [we] have found that mind can act upon mind in quite detailed and elaborate way over vast stretches of land and water (Twain 71). Twains desire for immediacy, the collapse of distance, promised to become reality with Marconis wireless system. The ether was thought of as a mysterious substance, an invisible medium through which light, electricity and magnetism moved (Sconce 61). Communication through this mysterious medium evoked the thought that reaching the afterlife had become ever more plausible. It was commonplace to assume a logical continuity between the communication technologies Marconi worked on and deploying a crossing over into the world beyond (Thurschwell 23). Marconi even allegedly worked on a device that would receive voices from all human history, hoping even to someday hear the last words of Jesus on the cross (Sconce 61). Edisons dream machine Marconi certainly was not the only prominent scientist working on a kind of supernatural communication device. The name of Thomas Edison popped up more than once during my search for transcendental communication technologies. In his memoir The Dairy and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison the famous scientist devotes an entire chapter to life after death. In this chapter, named The Realms Beyond, Edison states:
But that we receive communications from another realm of life, or that we have as yet any means, or method, through which we could establish this communication is quite another thing. [] [A]n apparatus [] should make communication very easy. I am engaged in the construction of such an apparatus now. (233-234)

In an article in The New York Times, published on January 23 1921, Edison discusses his engagement for the construction of such a machine. The device may register the hundred trillion life units that get scattered once a human dies. On the motivation for his engagement in the construction for such an apparatus the article states:
Thomas Edison has announced his entrance into a new sphere, that of psychic research. [] [H]e feels that his investigations are worth while

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whether success attends them is not the sole criterion. [] [T]en million men and women who have lost dear ones in the war are hungering for word or knowledge as to the existence of life after the life we know. [] It is Mr. Edison, the scientist, that is applying all his powers and all his knowledge to the questions life and death and life thereafter.

From the article, furthermore, it becomes clear that Edison does not wish to describe the mysterious device in detail: What the public is interested in, Mr. Edison pointed out, is results only, and that is what he was striving for. When asked if Edison earnestly feels that communication with the dead can be established, Edison answers as follows:
There is a doubt. I am not sure. Thats the reason why I am experimentting. But if I didnt believe, I wouldnt try.

An article in Modern Mechanix and Inventions published in October 1933 reported on the secret apparatus Edison was allegedly working on. The beginning of the article leaves little to be desired:
One black, howling wintry night in 1920 just such a night when superstitious people would bar their doors and windows against marauding ghosts Thomas Edison, the famous inventive wizard, gathered a small group of scientists in his laboratory to witness his secret attempts to lure spirits from beyond the grave and trap them with instruments of incredible sensitivity.

Machines that could actually communicate with the dead, of course, never met the high expectations or were most likely never even realised. The importance of these discursive inventions, however, should not be discarded so easily. These dream machines represent the hopes and expectations evoked by astonishing scientific breakthroughs. When the hopes and expectations belonging to specific realised and unrealised communication technologies are compared it becomes clear that similarities can be pointed out. Susan Douglas notices these similarities, these recurring hopes, when comparing discourses at the dawn of American broadcasting: The early quixotic hopes for the telegraph and telephone had deflated as the inventions came to be managed by large-scale organizations [] But lines and wires were easy to control. [] It seemed that wireless might be the truly democratic, decentralized communication technology

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people had yearned for (25). According to Vincent Mosco, author of the book The Digital Sublime, there is indeed a remarkable, almost wilful, historical amnesia about technology, particularly when the talk turns to communication and information technology (117). The turn of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century was a period of astonishing and overwhelming inventions. With each new invention certain hopes and desires seemed to reappear. Whether it is was the hope for democracy, as stated by Susan Douglas, or the hope for contact with the afterlife, as show in the preceding paragraphs, there are certain elements that reappear and coincide with each new invention. Placing emphasis on these recurring elements, or topoi according to Huhtamo, will show that people tend to forget that others looked at earlier technologies in much the same way (Mosco 118). In other words, hereby again citing Vincent Mosco, we want to believe that our era is unique in transforming the world as we have known it (ibid.). I believe Avital Ronell expresses this wilful amnesia about technology and the occult quite aptly in The Telephone Book: The so-called occult is calling. It has never stopped ringing on the exchanges between science and technology, urging a lineage of verification, empiricity, invention, and proofs (364). The discourses that surrounded Edisons mysterious apparatus, that would bridge the physical and spirit world, is probably the most characteristic for the reception of communication technologies to this day. As Jeffery Sconce puts it:
Born in the wake of radios discarnate voices and in the full hubris of modernity, Edisons project survives in each new generation of electronic telecommunications technology that sounds and echo of this original voice from the void [] encouraging speculation that the technologys power to transmute and transmit might be more than a metaphor. Each new communications technology seems to evoke as well the nervous ambivalence of wireless, a simultaneous desire and dread of actually making such extraordinary forms of contact. (83)

On this quote, together with Moscos wilful amnesia of communication technology and Huhtamos recurring elements that seem to transcend historical contexts, I would like to shift the focal point of this research from the Victorian era and beginning of the twentieth century to the nineteen sixties when the term electronic voice phenomena (EVP) was coined.

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EVP and ITC Dr. Konstantns Raudive was a Latvian philosopher and professor who published his book, with the applicable title, Breakthrough in 1971. Raudives book, which described a series of experiments he conducted in the late nineteen sixties, inspired many psychical researchers across the globe, both amateur and professional (Sconce 85). The investigation into the recording of voices later became known as EVP. At the end of his introduction Raudive states: It is my opinion that the voice-phenomenon produces facts by means of which we can break through the habitual confines of our existence and make contact with the "opposite world" that can be regarded as the center of our life after death (Raudive). His search for facts through scientific experiments with electronic media, such as the tape recorder, falls in line with the scientific approach to the occult by the Society of Psychical Research. According to Jeffrey Sconce, moreover, Raudive even reverts to the Victorian spiritualists by claiming to have evidence that spirits in the world beyond had their own technologies for contacting our world (86). In search for the underlying motive for conducting these recordings, Jeffrey Sconce states that the spiritual hope Raudives voices raised, can be seen as one of many responses to modernitys increasingly unsettling model of the subject (90). Darwin, Freud, Sartre and others shrivelled the transcendental dimension of the human psyche (ibid.). Radio and tape-recording technologies at least offered some form of tangible evidence that there might be an immortal essence that would live on after death. Sconce, thus, gives a similar explanation for why Raudive conducted his scientific inquiry as Oppenheim, Thurschwell, Gray and Luckhurst give for why Victorian scientists turned to the occult. On the one hand science was responsible for marvellous accomplishments. But on the other hand science demystified life itself and unveiled the unbearable image of a puny earthly existence. The irony of EVP, as observed by Sconce, is that it, however, remystified the soul through the validating authority of an electronic technology (ibid.). The question if Raudives experiments are true or false, in this case, is not important. What is interesting, though, is that Raudive was driven by the same motives as psychical researchers at the turn of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century were. Instrumental Transcommunication (ITC) can be considered a broader term than and a more recent version of EVP. Mark Macy, author of the book Miracles in the

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Storm and seen as an ITC pioneer, states that ITC began in the nineteen seventies when George Meek began researching EVP with the aim to achieve prolonged, two-way communication. ITC in its current state, however, reminds more of spiritualist sances than of the strict scientific research proclaimed by the Society of Psychical Research and Raudive. According to Macy, the spirit side does not transmit text or images in the form of human alphabets or illustrations per se, but as thought impulses which, in conjunction with the thoughts of the human receivers, interact to arrive as words and pictures (Macy). ITC seems, therefor, to have assimilated the scientific psychical approach with spiritualist tradition. Besides tape recordings, ITC depends on video, computer-text and computerscanned images as new media for transferring information from the spiritual to the physical plane. Conclusion As I have tried to show, the connection between communication technology and the afterlife and the desire to communicate with the dead became explicitly visible during the Victorian era and has popped up on multiple occasions during the course of the twentieth century every time a new technology became within arms reach. I believe Pamela Thurschwell describes this phenomenon quite aptly: [T]here is always already a ghost in the machine, a telepath on the telephone wire (23). This ghost in the machine has shown its elusive presence time and time again, from the invention of the Morse alphabet, to the telephone, radio, and all the way through the first personal computers. I have, furthermore, attempted to unravel how and why the ghost manifested itself in the machine by explaining how different processes in the Victorian era and beginning of the twentieth century were of importance in constructing the mystification of communication technology. That what is considered pseudo-science today was seen as a most serious matter at the turn of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century: the search for evidence of the afterlife. James Katz and Mark Aakhus state at the end of their article Making Meaning of Mobiles that it seems that certain conceptual perspectives arise in peoples minds as a result of their interaction with technologies (316). I believe that the desire to communicate with the dead, to bridge the mortal and eternal world, is indeed one of these conceptual perspectives that seem to reappear every time a new revolutionary communication technology is introduced. Research by Vincent Mosco, moreover, has shown that, in retrospect, people seem to forget

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these conceptual perspectives with every new invention. These reoccurring, cyclical elements are what Erkki Huhtamo calls topoi. I am almost certain that future communication technologies will be viewed as, again, bringing mankind one step closer to contact with the world beyond. Hard scientific evidence of spirits floating around in the afterlife, I believe, will not change this perpetual desire. No matter how many telegraph transcripts, gramophone records, photographs, tape-recordings, videos or computer-texts of lost souls scientists will collect, the desire to communicate with the voices from beyond is something that will remain for eternity. Just like our souls. References
Boddy, W. Archaeologies of Electronic Vision and the Gendered Spectator. Screen 35:2 (1994): 105-122. Bown, N., et al. Introduction. The Victorian Supernatural. Eds. N. Bown, C. Burdett and P. Thurschwell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 1-19. Connor, S. Voice, Technology and the Victorian Ear. Transactions and Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Eds. R. Luckhurst and J. McDonagh. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. 16-29. Douglas, S. J. Inventing American Broadcasting, 1899-1922. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. Edisons Own Secret Spirit Experiments Modern Mechanix and Inventions (october 1933): 34-36. Edison, T. A. The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison. Ed. D. D. Runes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. Gray, J. The Immortalization Commission. London: Penguin Group, 2011. Hardinge Britten, E. Modern American Spiritualism: A Twenty Years Record of the Communion Between Earth and the World of Spirits. New York: Published by the author, 1870. Hardinge Britten, E. Nineteenth Century Miracles: Or, Spirits and Their Work in Every Country of the Earth. New York: W. Britten, 1884. Huhtamo, E. From From Kaleidoscomaniac to Cybernerd: Towards an Archeology of the Media." Electronic Culture. Technology and visual representation. Ed. T. Druckrey. New York: Aperture, 1996. 297-303. Katz, J. E. and M. A. Aakhus. Conclusion: Making Meaning of Mobiles A Theory of Apparatgeist.Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance. Eds. J. E. Katz and M. A. Aakhus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 301-318.

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Luckhurst, R. The Invention of Telepathy. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002. Macy, M. H. "Instrumental Contact with the Dead?" Perforations 5 Mar. 1994. 14 Apr. 2011. <http://www.pd.org/Perforations/perf5/commun-with-dead.html> Mosco, V. The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power and Cyberspace. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005. Noakes, R. Spirtualism, Science and the Supernatural in Mid-Victorian Britain. The Victorian Supernatural. Eds. N. Bown, C. Burdett and P. Thurschwell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. 23-43. Oppenheim, J. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 18501914. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. Raudive, K. Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead. New York: Lancer Books, 1971. Ronell, A. The Telephone Book: Technology Schizophrenia Electric Speech. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Rothman, A.D. Mr. Edisons Life Units. The New York Times (January 23, 1921): 1. Sconce, J. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000. Turschwell, P. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880 1920. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001. Twain, M. Mental Telegraphy. The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. Ed. C. Neider. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1963.

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