I saw a headline today that got me thinking about an American figure that garners lots of attention at the time, and lots of opinions online today when you post about him… so here we go.

On August 9, 1926, a paper ran through what by then was old news to most readers: Thomas Edison had been granted patents on more than a thousand inventions. The light bulb, the phonograph, the movie camera. A career's worth of paperwork, thick enough that most papers just gave up trying to list it all and printed the number instead.

Of course we know this was a team and research lab, not some singular genius at work. But it got me thinking. What was Edison and team’s strangest invention? I started looking around and most were pretty mechanical, nothing out of the ordinary. But then I read online that he once discussed a telephone to speak with the dead.

Huh? Yeah that was worth looking into.

Six years earlier, Edison had told a magazine reporter he was building an instrument delicate enough to record messages from the dead. Not through séances or mediums, which he considered nonsense dressed up as science. I’ve covered Houdini’s exposure of that in front of congress, and Edison apparently was of the same understanding.

Instead, he thought he could do it through a real scientific apparatus. If personality survived death, his reasoning went, it likely retained memory and intelligence, and would want to reach whoever it left behind. The story ran everywhere within days.