How did séance tables move when nobody admitted to pushing?
In 1853 table-turning was a fashionable diversion all over England, with sitters waiting for spirits to move the table. Michael Faraday built a little device to ask the sitters' own fingers.
▶ Start the storyIn the winter of 1852 to 1853, spiritualism reached Europe from America, and the most popular way to consult the spirits was table-turning: several people sit round a table, rest their hands on it and wait. In England it became a fashionable diversion, practised all over the country in 1853. The alphabet would be slowly spoken aloud and the table would tilt at the appropriate letter, spelling out words and sentences. The sitters were convinced they were not pushing. So what was?
The public had plenty of explanations, among them spirits, animal magnetism, Odic force, electricity, or even the rotation of the earth. Two Geneva investigators claimed a physical force emanating from the sitters' bodies, which they called ectenic force. Others had a plainer idea. James Braid and W. B. Carpenter pointed out that the phenomena could depend on the sitters' expectation and could be stopped altogether by appropriate suggestion. Michel Eugène Chevreul explained the movement as involuntary and unconscious muscular reactions.
Michael Faraday put that to the test. He devised a simple apparatus, two small boards with glass rollers between them, fastened together by india-rubber bands so that the upper board could slide a little over the lower, with an upright haystalk to show any sideways movement. It conclusively demonstrated that the movements were due to unconscious muscular action. When it was made clear to the experimenters that their fingers moved the table, the phenomena generally ceased.
That is the ideomotor phenomenon, a term Carpenter coined in 1852: a person makes motions unconsciously. Today scientists and skeptics consider table-turning the result of the ideomotor effect, or of conscious trickery.
Step 1: Two boards
Glass rollers between them, held by india-rubber bands
Step 2: Hands on top
Sitters press as they would on the table
Step 3: Haystalk
Shows any sideways slide at once
Step 4: They see it
The phenomena generally ceased
1849
First paying public demonstration of spiritualist rapping, in Rochester
1851
University at Buffalo investigators say the raps come from cracking joints
1852
Carpenter first uses the term ideomotor
1853
Table-turning is a fashionable diversion across England
1888
Margaretta Fox recants, though she later retracts
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Recap
Expectation can make your muscles move a little without your knowing, so sincerity is not proof that you did not push.
💡 A trick to remember it · If your hands are on it and you expect it to move, assume your hands are part of the 'spirit'.
Surprising fact · Faraday's boards-and-haystalk device made the sitters see their own fingers moving the table, and the phenomena generally ceased.
Connects to
Sources (3)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (25 claims) cites at least one of these.