Whither is Electricity Leading Us?

Radio Record, Volume III, Issue 41, 24 April 1930, Page 22

Whither is Electricity Leading Us?

XAMPLES of the power of thought have doubtless startled most of us at some time or other, and the interesting experiments recently conducted by Dr. Edmund Jacobsen 20 to prove the value of people in their thousands thinking and willing for peace, for progress,. or for the attainment of other ideals. He finds that two million people, linked together by a reaction to the same idea generate sufficient electric energy to light an ordinary incandescent lamp. His theory is that in the merest of ideas there is neuro-muscular action, capable of being measured by the amount of voltage produced. Dr. Jacobsen has devised a string: galvanometer, an instrument so sensitive that it will detect the millionth-part of a volt of electricity, and by its aid and that of a stethoscope, it is now possible to both hear and_ see oneself think. Electrodes, capable of detecting the slightest change in the eletcrical potential accompanying any muscular tension, were sealed to the subjects’ right biceps, forming a connection to the galvanometer, on which was a quartz string, one hundred thousandth-part of an ineh thick. Bach subject in the test agreed to imagine only, at a prearranged signal, that he or she was filexing the right arm; two-fifths of a second later a motion-picture camera recorded the vibration on the quartz string. The subject was given a signal to stop imagining, and a fraction of a second later the shadow of the quartz string lapsed to quiescence. One subject states that she not only saw herself think by watehing the vibration of the string but was able to hear herself by listening through a stethoscope connected with an amplifier. Fortunately, the records of the camera remain, or we fear some would consider even the result of the experiments to be no more than imagination.