Crookes and D. D. Home, 1871: the accordion cage and the moving balance

Crookes’s Experimental Investigation of a New Force concentrates on changes of apparent weight and sounds from musical instruments. He says he had already seen related phenomena several times before preparing special tests.

The setting was his own London house, in a room illuminated by gas. He invited a small group of observers rather than presenting a public demonstration.

Home was the participant associated with the effects. Crookes wanted the room, instrument and measuring equipment to be arranged so that an extraordinary observation could be described through its conditions.

The report’s vocabulary is ‘psychic force’. Crookes used the term without claiming that the apparatus itself identified the force as a visiting spirit.

The first device was a drum-shaped cage constructed from wooden hoops and narrow laths. Wire and string formed a mesh around it.

Its height was chosen to fit closely beneath the dining table. Crookes explained that the arrangement was intended to restrict a hand or foot reaching into the enclosure.

He bought a new accordion from Wheatstone’s in Conduit Street for the tests. Home had not previously handled that particular instrument, according to the report.

The observers sat around the table with people immediately beside Home. For important portions of the evening, Crookes says those beside him kept their feet on his feet to notice movement. The report describes these precautions because the central question was how the instrument could be operated.

Home held the accordion at the end away from its keys, with the instrument pointing down inside the cage. Crookes had opened the bass key.

The report describes movement, expansion and contraction, separate notes and then a simple tune. An assistant looked beneath the table, and another observer also examined the position.

Crookes then reports something more striking: Home withdrew his hand, yet the instrument continued to sound. Later it was seen moving within the cage without visible support.

The sequence matters. The report does not begin with a completely untouched instrument already floating. It describes a held instrument, several stages of activity and moments when Crookes says contact ceased.

The wire surrounding the cage could be connected to two Grove cells in another room. Crookes arranged for the connection to be made during the sitting.

The instrument again moved and sounded. He expressly declined to say whether the current helped produce the effect.

That short passage is revealing. An experimental change was attempted, but the author did not treat the result as a demonstrated electrical explanation.

The cage combined restraint with the possibility of another test. Its construction was meant to make the phenomenon easier to observe and harder to attribute to ordinary manipulation, while leaving Crookes with further questions about what the apparatus could actually distinguish.

The second apparatus was a board three feet long, with one end resting on a table and the other supported by a spring balance suspended from a tripod.

The balance included a registering pointer to preserve the largest reading. Small wooden feet beneath the board defined how it rested on the support.

Home placed his fingertips near the supported end. Crookes described the balance pointer moving in waves, with the far end of the board sinking and rising.

The arrangement was intended to turn an apparent force into a reading. A moving object could be surprising; a pointer and register promised a result that could be compared with the board’s ordinary supported weight.

Crookes gave the normal balance reading as three pounds. During the experiment an observer saw it reach six and a half pounds, and the register was later found at nine pounds.

These are readings within the particular lever arrangement. They should not be paraphrased as Home’s own weight changing or as a board gaining permanent mass.

Crookes tried an ordinary-pressure comparison by standing at the supported end. He reported a much smaller change in the balance reading than the claimed experimental effect.

He also described Home placing small objects beneath his hands as an additional precaution. The published account uses both measurements and the geometry of the support to explain why Crookes found the result persuasive.

The report originally uses initials for two observers, then appends letters identifying William Huggins and Serjeant Edward William Cox.

Huggins’s letter of 9 June 1871 accepts Crookes’s description of what occurred in his presence. He adds a specific qualification: his position did not allow him personally to see Home withdraw his hand from the accordion.

Cox’s letter of 8 June is more interpretive. He connects the effects with a force arising from, or dependent on, the human nervous organisation.

The letters therefore preserve both agreement and difference. Huggins limits what he personally observed; Cox offers an account of the cause. Neither should be made to say exactly what the other said.

Crookes published the experiments in 1871 and collected his writings in Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism in 1874. His report also acknowledges occasions when a sitting produced no positive result.

The attraction of this case lies in its unusually concrete description: a newly purchased instrument, a cage, a board, a balance and letters from identified observers.

It belongs alongside, rather than inside, the Ashley Place levitation file. The Florence Cook and Katie King case concerns Crookes’s later London observations with a different medium.

The portrait used here shows Crookes. The linked historical report contains the apparatus illustrations and lets readers follow the original description in its own order.

Before the reported test: Crookes says earlier observations led him to prepare apparatus.

1871: the experimental report is published.

8 June 1871: Cox dates his supporting letter.

9 June 1871: Huggins dates his letter and states the limit of his view.

1874: Crookes collects the report and related writings in book form.

William Crookes, Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, 1874 — Public-domain experimental report, apparatus descriptions and appended Huggins and Cox letters; digitised historical text.