I was looking into the history of infrared photography and came across the following article, which seems pertinent to this thread.
Science of the supernatural
By Rebecca Northfield
Published Monday, September 12, 2016
Scottish engineer, inventor and innovator John Logie Baird died in June 1946, 70 years ago. Intriguingly, like some other notable figures of his time, he was drawn to the idea that the dead can communicate with the living. So how did these men of science attempt to uncover the truth behind the paranormal?
This year marks the 90th anniversary of the demonstration of television by pioneer John Logie Baird. It’s also been 70 years since his death. Baird achieved what others thought impossible: transmitting what he called ‘the living image’. He was also one of many reputable scientists and inventors in the early 20th century who were intrigued by the paranormal.Baird’s grandson Iain Logie Baird, former curator of television at the National Media Museum in Bradford, says that “in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a much more blurred line between science and spiritualism than there is today.
“Part of this was driven by the massive sense of loss resulting from World War One. A large part of a generation of men was missing and everyone was affected by it.”
Many prominent and reputable men thought it their duty to investigate this spirit phenomenon, using their expertise to try and decipher so-called ‘supernatural’ events.
Baird’s brief foray into the world of the paranormal began shortly after his television achievement. According to his musings in ‘Sermons, Soap and Television: Autobiographical Notes by John Logie Baird’, he thought it would be possible to use infrared or ultraviolet (UV) rays in place of light in order to send an image in complete darkness.
With the help of his assistant, Wally, he tried UV first, but it affected the boy’s eyes, so he switched to infrared. Baird used electric fires to produce the radiation, writing that they were “practically heat rays. I added more fires until Wally was nearly roasted alive, then I put in a dummy’s head and added more fires and the... head went up in flames.”
After this disaster, Baird decided to try shorter infrared waves. He did this by using ordinary electric bulbs covered with a thin layer of ebonite, which cut off all light, but let the infrared rays pass. Wally managed to sit under this apparatus without much pain and Baird “saw him on the screen although he was in total darkness. That was something new and strange, I was actually seeing a person without light,” he wrote. Newspapers called it ‘seeing in the dark.’
Baird continued to exhibit his achievements to scientists and other interested parties and, while staying at a hotel after one such demonstration, he befriended an elderly professor. He had been called in to investigate a medium called Marjorie, “a respectable married lady who in early life had lost her only son”.
The boy, called Jack, had supposedly slit his throat with a razor in a ‘fit’ of depression, leaving bloodstained thumb marks on the handle. The razor had been locked away, untouched after the incident. Marjorie, heartbroken, joined a spiritualistic circle to try to speak to Jack again. “Here she was discovered to have astounding mediumistic powers,” Baird wrote.
Touching the spirits
During a séance led by Marjorie in a dark, quiet room, she became entranced and Baird wrote that “her body exuded from its orifices a strange vapour called ectoplasm”. It “floated about her like a cloud and was of such a fine and mysterious nature that it could be used by the spirits to build ectoplasmic bodies”. The spirit of Jack appeared, answering questions and using the ‘ectoplasm’ to materialise his hand, moving objects and touching the audience.
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https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2016/09/science-of-the-supernatural/
