Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestations

In the feverish atmosphere of mid-nineteenth-century America, when table-rapping seances captivated parlors from Boston to Chicago, one of the nation's most respected chemists set out to do what no scientist had attempted before: prove the existence of spirits through rigorous experimentation. Robert Hare, professor of chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania and inventor of the oxyhydrogen blowtorch, turned his instruments toward the spirit world. Using dynamometers, galvanic apparatus, and carefully calibrated measurements, Hare attempted to isolate and quantify the supposed manifestations of the dead. His work represents a remarkable historical document: a serious scientific mind grappling with questions that would eventually pass beyond the boundaries of empirical inquiry, written in an era when the veil between this world and the next seemed, to many intelligent people, genuinely permeable.