PSYCHOPHONE
AIRED: Season 7, Episode 1
THE DETECTIVE: Gwen Wright
THE PLACE: New Jersey
THE CASE:
A couple in Cincinnati acquired a peculiar phonograph at an antique auction. The machine was labeled “PsychoPhone” and included four, grooved wax cylinders.
Their research makes our contributors think Thomas Edison invented the PsychoPhone to record messages from the afterlife.
As early as the 1870s, Edison and other scientific minds explored psychic phenomena like mediums. They believed every living being was made of atoms that could “remember” past lives.
Did Edison make a machine to unlock the secrets of the dead? The wax cylinders could hold the answer. History Detectives travels to the Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park in New Jersey to find out.
Video: Interview with Paul Israel
Gwen speaks to historian Paul Israel, of the Thomas A. Edison papers project at Rutgers University.
Think you have a case for the History Detectives? Send us your mystery here. 