New York, New York
Sunday, July 17, 1870
IN RESPONSE TO your letter of last week from the esteemed Mr. Hinckley of the American Institute, Photographic Section, denouncing the scientific impossibility of spirit photography based on the assumption that what the eye cannot see cannot be photographed, we would like to draw attention to the following:
A few months since an article was printed in Scientific American quoting Prof. C. F. Varley, of London, the celebrated electrician, who recounted how he had made experiments by passing a current of electricity through a vacuum tube, the results of which were indicated by strong or faint touches of light about the poles: “In one instance, although the experiment was carried out in a very dark room, the light was so feeble that it could not be seen, and the operators doubted if the current were passing. But at the same time photography was at work, and in thirty minutes a very good picture was produced of what had taken place. This is a remarkable fact—indeed, it borders on the wonderful, that a phenomenon INVISIBLE to the human eye should have been, so to speak, seen by the photographic lens, and a record thereof kept by chemical agency.”
What is electricity? We know it is a force; it passes silently and invisibly over the wire and performs its work; therefore we know it exists. But can this same electricity be made visible? Mr. Varley says yes, by employing a MEDIUM, in the shape of a vacuum tube, when by connecting it with the battery, a stream of invisible electricity is made visible to the human eye. Mediums stand in the same relation to spirits as vacuum tubes do to electricity: they supply the necessary elements by which spirits are enabled to be seen; whether those elements be aura, magnetism, or anything else, they are, in our belief, essential to all spiritual manifestations.
Luther Colby
Editor, Banner of Light
Boston, Massachusetts