When reading Natalie Zarreli’s “Dial-a-Ghost on Thomas Edison’s Least Successful Invention: The Spirit Phone” I was particularly intrigued by how “for Edison [speaking to the dead] was a matter of strict science” (Zarreli). She goes on to explain that Edison theorized that “like our bodies, our personalities have a physical form, made of tiny ‘entities’ similar to our current view of atoms. He thought these entities might exist after humans passed away—a personality-based residue of loose memories and thoughts, containing part of who a person was during life” (Zarreli). Our personalities are “indestructible” and in a way, this follows the law of conservation of mass. Our personalities—per Edison’s theorizing—cannot be created nor destroyed, only rearranged and transformed.
This scientific approach was surprisingly convincing to me. Through the advancements of science, we have so much understanding of energy and its transformations. For example, through solar panels we take energy from the sun, convert solar energy to electricity, this powers our outlets, which powers our lamps, these lamps give off heat that we absorb, so on and so on… The energy is never created or destroyed, just transferred. By no credentials am I a scientist, but with this logic, I feel oddly convinced by Edison in that our personalities should still exist after our time, but just in another form. After reading Zarreli’s article, I not only feel as though spirits after death exist, but that there must in fact be a way to contact these spirits through technology. I doubt this spirit communication device looks similar to Edison’s original spirit phone, but maybe through more time, funding, and energy to this field we will be able to find out in our lifetime.
