The Flames That Outlasted the Magnet

The woman stared at the magnet in the dark and saw nothing. James Braid, the surgeon who had brought her into a small closet, told her to look carefully: she would see fire coming from it. Soon, in his account, she noticed sparks. The display grew until it reminded her of an artificial eruption of Vesuvius she had once watched in a public garden.

Without telling her, Braid closed the lid of the trunk that held the magnet. She went on describing flashes. He asked what she saw in another part of the closet, where there were only bare walls, and the details shifted with his questions. In later trials he had the magnet moved elsewhere in the house. The lights, he reported, continued. Two weeks later the woman entered the closet on her own and said she saw them again.

The striking thing is not that someone described an object giving off light. It is that the object could disappear without taking the reported light with it.

A force only some people could see

In 1846 Braid was challenging the researches of Baron Karl von Reichenbach, who attributed unusual sensations and luminous appearances to a new force, later commonly called Od, perceived by especially sensitive people. Some witnesses described coloured flames at the poles of magnets. Others disagreed about the colours, the size or where the flames appeared. Braid had read an English account of these experiments and suspected that expectation, sometimes carried by the wording of a question, was affecting what people reported.

Braid had suggested what the woman should see. He was testing the role of expectation, rather than collecting an unsolicited account of an apparition. He did not accuse her of lying: he regarded her as sincere, but guided by a preconceived idea. The pamphlet records how Braid presented these trials; it cannot independently establish what happened in the room.

A witness that cannot hear a suggestion

There was a serious objection. Reichenbach had reported that a plate prepared for the daguerreotype process, shut away from daylight with a magnet, seemed to change. A photographic plate cannot be persuaded by a doctor's questions. If it registered the effect, evidence would no longer depend only on a person's account.

In the same pamphlet, Braid described a separate series of trials with nine plates prepared by Akers, a Manchester photographer. Three were exposed near the poles of a large horseshoe magnet; three more were positioned similarly, with two sheets of black paper interposed. A seventh was enclosed in a box away from the magnet. He reported exposures lasting between 66 and 74 hours. The final two plates were placed in a camera directed at the poles, one for 66 hours and the other for roughly 35 and a half.

Braid reported no image of the alleged flames. He did describe chemical changes and, on the plate left longer in the camera, a few small spots; he attributed these to decomposition of the materials rather than light. On that basis, he concluded that the poles emitted no light capable of affecting an iodised plate.

What the comparison can bear

Braid's conclusion was firm; the comparison his account allows is more limited. The plates did not measure what the woman experienced: in a separate series of experiments, they sought a physical trace of the light attributed to the magnet. These were not two observers looking at the same scene at the same time. A negative result also depends on the material's sensitivity and the conditions of the trial, which have not been reconstructed here.

Historians, including Richard Noakes, have already examined the dispute over perception, suggestion and photography. The woman's story was circulating in the nineteenth century. Reading it alongside the nine plates brings a specific question into focus: what can corroborate a person's account when the means of looking for the phenomenon changes?

In Braid's account, removing the magnet did not make the flames disappear. The plates retained no image of them. Both results come from the same author; they need to be kept distinct before either is used to explain the other.