– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
It was out of thousands of stories like these that Myers coined the term telepathy in 1882, no doubt after the then cutting-edge technology of the telegraph and telegram. Interestingly, two of the three stories that I have just recounted involve precisely this new communications technology. And why not? Early models of Spiritualism had turned to the same kind of language, framing spirit-communications as a kind of “spiritual telegraphy.” Gauld also humorously reminds us that the spirits often claimed famous names, with Benjamin Franklin being one of their favorites, “perhaps because his electrical skills made him seem a likely inventor of the ‘Spiritual Telegraph.’” In a similar playful spirit, Bertrand Méheust goes so far as to describe Spiritualism as flowing out of a certain “mythology of telecommunications,” with the early knocks of the Fox sisters as a kind of celestial Morse code. On the other side of the equation, many of the earliest inventors of the new radio technology—Nikola Tesla, Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Lord Raleigh—were all intimately involved in psychical research and sometimes imagined their science along similar occult lines. And it would not be long before the American writer Upton Sinclair would soon frame his own successful experiments with telepathy as a kind of “mental radio,” with none other than Albert Einstein writing the preface. The comparisons were simply irresistible.
Pp. 79-80