The sympathetic medium

"The nineteenth century saw not only the emergence of the telegraph, the telephone, and the typewriter but also a fascination with seances and occult practices like automatic writing as a means for contacting the dead. Like the new technologies, modern spiritualism promised to link people separated by space or circumstance; and like them as well, it depended on the presence of a human medium to convey these conversations. Whether electrical or otherworldly, these communications were remarkably often conducted - in offices, at telegraph stations and telephone switchboards, and in seance…