William Crookes

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William Crookes (1832–1919) was a British chemist and physicist whose scientific reputation was already secure when, in the early 1870s, he turned the methods of the laboratory on the séance room and announced that something there resisted ordinary explanation. The collision of those two careers — discoverer of the element thallium and fellow of the Royal Society on one side, examiner of mediums on the other — made him one of the most discussed figures in the Victorian quarrel over whether the spiritualist phenomena were real. He was no marginal enthusiast lending a credulous name to a fringe cause; he was an establishment scientist of the first rank, and that is exactly what unsettled his contemporaries.

His standing as a scientist was not in doubt, and was not later revised. He discovered thallium in 1861, identifying it by its bright green spectral line and determining its atomic weight in the years that followed. He founded the Chemical News in 1859 and edited the Quarterly Journal of Science; he built the radiometer that still turns in shop windows — though he misread its mechanism, ascribing the spin to the pressure of light rather than to the thermal motion of rarefied gas — and devised the high-vacuum tube that carries his name, which let him establish that cathode rays travel in straight lines and prepared the ground for the physics that followed. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1863, won its Royal, Davy, and Copley medals, was knighted in 1897, received the Order of Merit in 1910, and served as president of the Royal Society from 1913 to 1915. It was from inside that authority, not outside it, that he took up the mediums.

The institutional point was sharp. The same Royal Society that had elected him for thallium refused his first report on the new force: a paper submitted in June 1871 was declined, and Crookes published it instead in his own Quarterly Journal of Science. The body that crowned the chemist would not print the psychical investigator, and he was driven to his own pages to be heard at all. His sittings with the medium Daniel Dunglas Home, begun in 1871, supplied the experiments behind the coinage. He rigged a board to a spring balance to register force applied without contact, suspended an accordion inside an electrified cage and reported it playing “without hands,” and recorded apparent alterations in the weight of bodies under conditions he held no known cause would produce. From these he proposed a “psychic force” answerable to investigation. In 1874 he turned to the young Florence Cook, who claimed to materialize a spirit called Katie King; he described touching, photographing, and at times apparently seeing the medium and the apparition at once, and gathered the results, with the Home papers, in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism (1874).

The reception was severe, and the suspicion has shadowed him since. Critics held that he had been deceived, that the controls were loose, and — in the Cook case especially — that the domestic, low-light arrangement invited collusion. Modern readers note that he did not adequately document the precautions he took against fraud. The gravest later charge came in Trevor Hall’s The Spiritualists (1962), which alleged outright fraud and a romantic entanglement between Crookes and Cook; the historian Sherrie Lyons distilled the irony into a man who discovered a new element yet could not detect a live maiden masquerading as a ghost. Against this runs a rehabilitative reading: the SPR investigators Medhurst and Goldney judged Hall’s affair thesis far from conclusive, and Stephen Braude has reassessed the Home work more favorably. The position taken here falls between the two: what can be established is the record of the experiments and the resistance they met, not a verdict on the phenomena themselves.

Crookes did not present himself as an occultist or adept. He framed the work as inquiry, denying in 1875 that he was even a spiritualist; the believers held that the dead communicated, while he claimed only to have observed effects he could not account for and to have followed them where the evidence seemed to lead. The private life ran ahead of the public case — he was initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890 — but the case he argued in print stayed narrower than his sympathizers wished, and narrowed further with age. The Society for Psychical Research, which he did not found — it was established in 1882 by Henry Sidgwick, F. W. H. Myers, Edmund Gurney and others — drew him in as an eminent recruit, and he served as its president from 1896 to 1899; by 1916 his public phrasing reached only toward another order of life continuous with this one.

His significance to the esoteric record lies less in any doctrine than in the spectacle of a first-rank scientist insisting that the question deserved investigation rather than dismissal. That insistence cost him, and it was never vindicated; it also kept open, for a generation, the possibility that the line between the measurable and the marvelous had been drawn too soon.

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