Mary Roach - Six Feet Over

Equally untenable to Macdougall was the thought of one’s soul being separated from one’s earthly remains by millions of miles. “Between the time of man’s death and the time of the burial of the body, an average of three days, as a spiritual principle he would be separated from his body and the place he died by a distance of nine million miles, the distance the earth would travel in three days’ time.” To a man who spent his adult life five thousand miles away from his parents and siblings in Scotland, you can imagine it was a gloomy proposition.

Macdougall envisioned a giant “earth-accompanying globe of ether… above the storm zone,” a sort of floating reunion hall for “beings constituted entirely different from us, who are yet subject to gravitation.” Perhaps singed by his colleagues’ earlier scorn, the doctor published neither his refraction experiments nor his ether-heaven theory in American Medicine . The only description I have was part of a 1914 Boston Sunday Post article entitled, quite marvelously, “Heaven Is Perhaps Just Outside Earth.”

And that was the last to be heard from Dr. Duncan Macdougall. Six years later, he took to his bed with cancer, wrote one last awful poem (“I had a bout with Death / We strove through night and day”), and departed for the great globe of ether. His wife Mary, aforementioned battleaxe, lived on for another thirty-five years. Depending on whether Macdougall was right or wrong about gravity’s hold on souls, this could mean that when the missus’ soul finally shed its earthly shell, Duncan’s own soul would be thirty-eight billion miles away. To every cloud, a silver lining.

Around the time Macdougall went public with his disappointing light-ray project, a University of Pennsylvania physicist named Arthur W. Goodspeed trumped him by announcing plans to reveal the human soul by way of the amazing new roentgen ray (now called X-ray), named in 1895 for its discoverer, Wilhelm Roentgen. (Goodspeed had inadvertently discovered the rays some time before Roentgen had, but failed to recognize the import of what he’d done and watched his rival Roentgen become a household name, albeit a mispronounced one, while he faded to obscurity.)

X-rays are today a humble diagnostic tool but in their infancy were considered nothing short of miraculous. Nan Knight, director of the archives at the history center of the American College of Radiology, told me that Thomas Edison, who seems to have invented publicity along with everything else he invented, at one point announced a public demonstration in which he would take an X-ray photograph of the living brain, [17] In reality, an X-ray of the head could not show the brain, because the skull blocks the rays. What appeared to be an X-ray of the folds and convolutions of a human brain inside a skull—an image that circulated widely in 1896—was in fact an X-ray of artfully arranged cat intestines. showing actual thoughts as they darted here and there. Within a year after the ray’s discovery, Parisian hucksters were selling tickets to sideshows purporting to show ghosts captured as X-ray images. In 1896, a New York newspaper reported that over at Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, X-rays were being used to project anatomical diagrams directly into the brains of students, “making a much more enduring impression.” Somewhere along the way, a rumor surfaced to the effect that opera glasses could be outfitted with X-rays, considerably upping the appeal of a night at the opera for many a bored spouse. So thoroughly taken was the public by this story that on February 19, 1896, a New Jersey assembleyman introduced a bill specifically—and to the great derision of his peers—prohibiting the use of X-rays in opera glasses.

Temple University Urban Archives in Philadelphia has a file of news clippings on Arthur Goodspeed. His soul project made the New York Times on July 24, 1911, under the headline “As to Picturing the Soul.” The article quotes none other than Duncan Macdougall, denouncing the project’s worth. Though he tempered his skepticism at the end of the piece by admitting that “at the moment of death the soul substance might become so agitated as to reduce the obstruction that the bone of the skull offers ordinarily to the Roentgen ray and might therefore be shown on the plate as a lighter spot.” A separate article mentioned that Goodspeed was to be assisted by “his Roentgen ray expert Dr. Snook.” Though biographical material on Dr. Snook [18] To those who find humor in this poor man’s name, I have this to say: His full name was Homer Clyde Snook. makes no mention of soul X-rays, history has bestowed at least one honor upon the man. He is known to this day for the Snook tube, an obsolete glass-globed cathode tube that resembles a hummingbird feeder.

If Goodspeed wrote a paper on his soul X-ray project, the archives didn’t have a copy. Nan Knight wondered whether his mention of it might have been a joke. Possibly, but I don’t think so. Not only did Goodspeed’s bio list him as the vice president of the American Roentgen Ray Society, but it named philosophy as his chief interest (with “trotting horses” a close second). He was the secretary of the American Philosophical Society for thirty years. Since he ran the physics department’s Randall-Morgan Laboratory, he would have had both the equipment and the budget for such an undertaking. Plus, we have the requisite untimely loss of a loved one, which so often sparks an interest in the hereafter among otherwise orthodox scientists. Goodspeed’s twenty-eight-year-old son died in a parachuting accident.

For an even more creative approach to soul-viewing, we have Hereward Carrington, Ph.D., the founder, in 1920, of the Psychic Laboratory and the undisputed gizmo geek of the paranormal set. In his 1930 book The Story of Psychic Science , Carrington sets forth his idea for a machine to reveal the shape of the soul. The description takes two pages, beginning with “arrange a small box as to imprison some animal—a dog, cat or small monkey” and ending with “therefore, when condensation occurs, the resulting line will outline the form of the astral body .” Along the way, we make stops for hermetic seals, piped-in anesthetic, dust-free air, ionization rays, an air pump, and no doubt several Snook tubes. The book contains a half dozen photographs of the dashing Carrington, his Gregory Peckish hair swept back from his forehead and a scowl of concentration on his face, checking the readings on the dials of his latest gadget. The photograph invariably includes an attractive young woman, sometimes hooked up to the machine, other times merely gazing rapturously at Dr. Carrington. I had a crush on Dr. Carrington, too, until I saw some of his later titles, which include The Hygienic Life and Fasting for Health and Long Life.

Carrington never built his monkey box, so the honors for most elaborate soul-manifesting device go to a pair of Dutch physicists, J. L. W. P. Matla and G. J. Zaalberg van Zelst. Matla believed himself to be in contact with an entity who spelled out communications letter by letter on a Ouija board. (Hopefully the question “What is my full name and that of my partner?” was never posed.) The entity informed Matla that the human spirit survives death to become a gaseous body called homme-force (meaning “man-force”; this was the French edition, which was all I could find). Matla reasoned that if homme-force were truly a gas, it must obey the laws of physics, and thus its existence might be proved scientifically. The entity, which appeared to have an engineering background, not only agreed with this, but provided detailed instructions for the building of a device for the task. The transcript of séance #36 reads, in part: “Construct two cardboard cylinders that are impenetrable to air. Length 50 cm. Diameter, 25 cm….” The idea was that the gaseous entity would pass into the cylinders and make its presence known by expanding and contracting on demand. The displaced air would then trigger the rise and fall of a drop of grain alcohol in a glass tube. Which it did, at least to the satisfaction of Matla. The pair sallied forth with more and more elaborate calculations. Their book Le Mystère de la Mort is full of lines like “ Le volume de la masse de l ’ homme-force est de 36.70 m.M 3 ” and “ Le volume du gaz déplace 279.169 c.M 3d’air .” It’s hard to say where is the bigger hubris, in their convictions or in the arrogance of carrying them to a third decimal point.