In the autumn of 1853, Count Agénor de Gasparin and a circle of associates conducted a series of table experiments at Valleyres in Switzerland. They claimed rotations, tiltings, movements after hands had been raised and responses corresponding to numbers held in an experimenter’s mind. Gasparin argued for a physical agency connected with the living participants, while rejecting an explanation involving spirits of the dead.
The principal first-person source reviewed here is the nineteenth-century English translation of his account: A Treatise on Turning Tables, volume one, translated by E. W. Robert and published in New York in 1857. Its recorded series runs from 20 September to 2 December 1853, with earlier experiments described as background. The substantial account includes failures, discarded demonstrations and changing precautions, as well as the successes its author considered decisive.
What was being tested
Gasparin distinguished personal conviction from a demonstration capable of convincing readers who had not attended. He acknowledged that ordinary rotations, knocks and dances with hands resting on a table did not, by themselves, exclude unconscious muscular action. The point of his later tests was to go beyond that difficulty.
The commonly used table had a circular top about thirty-two inches across, a heavy central support and three projecting feet. Other tables were also tried, including a larger model with four feet and a folding part. Around ten people ordinarily formed the chain, though the number varied. Gasparin describes them placing their hands together around the table and waiting for movements to begin.
An important limitation follows from the vocabulary. Many of the reported elevations concern a foot leaving the floor, a table tilting or a table standing upright. Those descriptions should not automatically become claims that the entire object floated freely with every foot simultaneously clear of the ground. Different operations and arrangements need to be considered separately.
Numbers, hidden information and failure
The first recorded sitting, on 20 September, includes a simple test of supposed divination. Three nuts were placed in an experimenter’s pocket. Asked for their number, the table struck nine times. Gasparin reported that failure rather than quietly converting the episode into a successful communication.
He contrasted such tests with numbers known to a participant in the chain. In these, he claimed that the appropriate number of blows could frequently be obtained. The group changed procedures when objections were raised: numbers were written rather than whispered, eyes were closed and different table feet were nominated to make the response.
Gasparin interpreted those results as an influence of thought and will. They do not establish communication with a dead person. His own discussion insists on separating information already known to someone present from genuinely unknown information. Later in the series, he says attempts to obtain facts unknown to the circle performed no better than ordinary guessing.
That is a more specific historical claim than a general story of a talking table. The surviving account describes people trying to determine what kind of process was involved, and using both positive and negative results in their argument. It supplies their interpretation of those results, rather than an independent modern verification of the experiments.
From continuing rotation to starting movement
At the sitting of 26 September, the group first set the table turning with their hands upon it and then raised the joined hands a short distance above its edge. Gasparin says the table continued for several turns. He also describes occasions on which it stopped and appeared to resume when the chain returned to its intended position.
The distinction between continuing a movement and initiating one was recognised in the account. On 29 September, the experimenters attempted to begin with both themselves and the table at rest. Gasparin claimed that the table then started to turn beneath the raised hands. The same sitting included reported tiltings and overturning without finger contact.
These were the central demonstrations for his case. Their force depends on whether unintended or unnoticed contact was actually excluded throughout, rather than merely on the sincerity of the observers or the number of times a result was reported. That became a central issue for later critics.
Experiments Gasparin did not accept as decisive
The report is not an uninterrupted catalogue of triumphs. A comparison of resistance to weights was set aside because an inclined table could possess a favourable point of balance. Experiments with rings, frames, platforms and a piano keyboard produced little or nothing that the author regarded as useful.
A trial involving hands immersed in a bucket of water was also withheld from the decisive evidence because an objection about contact remained possible. On 8 October, a counterweighted suspended table moved, but Gasparin explicitly allowed that a sideways mechanical disturbance could have lifted the remaining foot from the ground. He did not treat that arrangement as proof of his proposed agency.
Other sittings were disappointing. The record describes fatigue, unsuccessful attempts and changes in the participants, which Gasparin interpreted in terms of the availability of his proposed fluid force. Those explanations belong to his theory. A fluctuation between success and failure does not, by itself, exclude ordinary action or observational error.
Heavy loads and later sittings
On 9 November, the experimenters replaced a person sitting on the table with inert loads. Buckets of sand and stones were successively added, reaching a reported combined load of about 150 pounds. Gasparin says the table raised its feet in turn before its central support split, causing the load to fall dangerously towards the participants.
The incident supplied an especially vivid part of his argument that the effects exceeded what the hands could normally produce. It also illustrates why a dramatic outcome and a demonstrated cause are different questions. The published account describes the breakage; it does not independently settle which forces acted upon the table.
In the final recorded sitting, on 2 December, the large four-footed table did not rise without contact. Gasparin instead described it sliding towards him, and later reported a series of tiltings with the more familiar table. He omitted several incomplete movements from the count he considered successful. Retaining those distinctions avoids turning every test into an identical instance of free levitation.
Thury’s involvement and Podmore’s criticism
Marc Thury, a professor at Geneva, published a separate discussion of the experiments. Frank Podmore’s Studies in Psychical Research, published in 1897, reviews both Thury’s pamphlet and an abridged edition of Gasparin. Podmore describes precautions including watching the table’s surface and feet and, on some occasions, dusting the top with flour to make contact easier to detect.
He nevertheless argued that the precautions were inadequate against all possible mechanical action. In particular, an observer could not continuously watch both the upper and lower parts of the table at once, and knees might act even if hands and feet seemed excluded. His criticism concerns a gap in the control of the experiment; it is not a report that he caught a particular participant cheating at Valleyres.
The disagreement is therefore substantive. Gasparin and Thury regarded the observations as evidence for an additional agency associated with the operators. Podmore considered the possibility of unnoticed ordinary action insufficiently controlled. Neither a detailed report nor a later proposed method should be silently promoted into a conclusive demonstration of its preferred explanation.
Assessment and location
The case is classified as Disputed. The first-person account argues for a force beyond ordinary muscular action; Podmore’s published critique challenges whether contact and possible deception were adequately excluded. The reviewed material does not demonstrate a new physical force, a spirit presence or a particular participant’s fraud. The case belongs under spiritual and psychic research; no feature tags are assigned to that topic.
Valleyres is the older spelling used in the source. The broad map reference is Valeyres-sous-Rances in Vaud, Switzerland, at approximately 46.75, 6.533, rounded from the sourced municipal coordinates. It does not identify an experimental room or provide directions to a private residence. No building is offered as an authenticated public visitor venue for these sittings.
Caroline Henriques’s photograph of the village church and vineyards, dated 5 November 2020, provides modern geographical context under CC BY-SA 4.0. The church is not presented as the experimental venue, and the photograph is not evidence of a nineteenth-century table movement.
Sources and further reading
Valeyres-sous-Rances: municipality, Vaud geography and broad reference46°45N6°32E