Articles by Margaret Wendt

Thomas Alva Edison was one of the greatest practical scientists of the 19th century. He was also a wild and crazy guy! As a child, he was always exploding basements and causing unwanted excitement wherever he went.  Some of the people in his home town thought he was a little touched. He was touched alright, touched with the genius that led him to some of the greatest achievements of this century.

 

His achievements included the perfection of the 'duplex' telegraph, the invention of the phonograph, and the first electric light. In 1882, his generating station brought electric street lighting to New York, and 12 years later his moving picture show, which he called his 'kinetoscope parlour', was opened in the city.

 

Despite these great successes, an interview he gave to the Scientific American magazine in 1920 caused great concern among his contemporaries. He spoke of a device that could and would someday communicate with the dead.  Surely he was going mad, or had the great Thomas Edison fallen into the dark chambers of a once bright and innovative mind? Some of his fellow scientists thought that the 73-year old inventor had lapsed into senility.  How could the great Thomas Edison suggest that LIFE AFTER DEATH may well exist. How could he treat the topic with such a serious tone and how could he talk about it to the most respected reporters of the scientific world. Such a scandal; the likes we could not imagine. Thomas was used to this kind of criticism. He had grown up with it, and it had only made him more determined to create his next scientific miracle. His mother had always believed in him and maybe it was for her that he wanted this machine.  

 

Thomas Edison simply proposed, that an instrument for communicating with the dead was most likely going to be his next great invention. In was in 1919 that Thomas Edison worked on the development of a device that would, he believed, make possible a form of telepathic contact with the dead:

 

 

"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 is reasonable to conclude that those who leave this earth would like to communicate with those they have left here...I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then, 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."

 

Edison worked on developing his device and told of how such an instrument could work. Unfortunately death came to the inventor in (1931) before the device was completed. It seemed that the late Thomas Edison was not successful. However in the opinion of many modern scientific researchers, Thomas Edison's  views were vindicated by the eminent German psychologist professor Hans Bender, director of the Government-funded parapsychological research unit at the University of Freiburg.

 

Dr. Bender and a distinguished team of scientist repeated the experiments and analyzed the results found in the Edison Papers and the amassed evidence documented in the book Voices from the Universe, published in 1964, and written by the celebrated Swedish painter, musician, and film producer Friedrich Jurgenson. 

 

Their finding can be summarized as follows, the implications of these 'voices from nowhere' are enormous.

Dr. Bender is reported to consider them of more importance to humanity than nuclear physics.