'Spirit Machine brought back to life'

Kolkata (PTI): A Wiccan priestess here has claimed to have successfully experimented with a replica of the controversial 'Spirit Machine' which is believed to have been devised by Thomas Edison to communicate with spirits.In her new book 'Spirits I have known', enchantress Ipsita Roy Chakraverti says Edison, the famous American inventor credited for inventing the motion picture camera and the phonograph, had also come up with a 'spirit machine' of which little is known.

A probable model of the machine, which the author brought from the US, has a photoelectric cell that can register the slightest presence of ethereal mist or spirit activity when a strong beam of light strikes its active surface. An accompanying phonograph-like box records and playbacks spirit voices.

It is widely believed that Edison and his assistant Dr Miller Hutchinson were working to build a machine to achieve spirit communication but little is known whether they were successful or not. "Edision's instruments worked at a frequency that would be able to pick up the waves at which spirits were detectable," writes Chakraverti.