Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to this spooky episode of tech Stuff. I'm
Speaker 1: your ghost host Jonathan Strickland, executive producer with iHeart Podcasts
Speaker 1: and today, Well, first, I want to give a shout out.
Speaker 1: I was pondering what to cover on today's episode of
Speaker 1: tech Stuff, and I idly asked my best friend Shaye
Speaker 1: Lee what she thought I should do. Now. Shye is
Speaker 1: a podcaster herself, but she's also a guide on ghost tours.
Speaker 1: I've gone on her ghost tour before in Marietta, Georgia,
Speaker 1: and it was quite entertaining. She's also a tarot reader,
Speaker 1: she's an astrologer, and she's an all around witchy person.
Speaker 1: And the fact that we can be such good friends
Speaker 1: speaks very highly of her patients as well. Because I
Speaker 1: am notoriously not a believer in any of those things.
Speaker 1: But when I asked Shaye her opinion as to what
Speaker 1: I should talk about, her response was seasonally appropriate that
Speaker 1: I should do an episode about tech that folks have
Speaker 1: used in order to pull the wool over other people's
Speaker 1: eyes when it comes to stuff like ghosts and spirits. Now,
Speaker 1: in past episodes of tech Stuff, I have done episodes
Speaker 1: about ghost hunting equipment. I did a recent rerun of
Speaker 1: ghost hunting equipment episodes. So the short version of those episodes,
Speaker 1: if you haven't heard them, is that I do not
Speaker 1: believe in ghosts, and in my mind, the equipment falls
Speaker 1: between two extremes. And on one end you have tech
Speaker 1: that actually does do something, but it's completely unrelated to
Speaker 1: ghost hunting, like an EMF reader for example. These devices
Speaker 1: measure electromagnetic fields and they're important for folks like say, electricians.
Speaker 1: If a house has faulty wiring, an EMF meter can
Speaker 1: point an electrician in the right direction so that they
Speaker 1: can address the issue. Now, on the other end of
Speaker 1: the spectrum are tools that, as far as I can determine,
Speaker 1: have no real purpose, but they've been adopted and promoted
Speaker 1: by ghost hunter types. So an example of this category
Speaker 1: would be spirit boxes, which just scan through radio frequencies.
Speaker 1: So the idea is that spirits are somehow capable of
Speaker 1: sending messages by manipulating radio waves in an inexplicable way,
Speaker 1: and not just manipulating radio waves, right, It's not just
Speaker 1: that you tune a radio to a frequency that's unused,
Speaker 1: so you're just getting static. That's not what you're doing. Instead,
Speaker 1: the ghost is somehow able to communicate across different frequencies.
Speaker 1: So this would be like having a pair of walkie talkies,
Speaker 1: but in order to hear what your best friend is saying,
Speaker 1: you would have to change the frequency channel at just
Speaker 1: the right time and in sync with your friend. Otherwise
Speaker 1: you would just get a blip of what your friend
Speaker 1: was saying as they went through the different channels, and
Speaker 1: that's it. Now. Some spirit boxes flip through frequencies relatively slowly,
Speaker 1: and that means the occasional word or sound from an
Speaker 1: actual radio station will make its way through and that
Speaker 1: you'll hear it and you'll understand it. But obviously, if
Speaker 1: it's going that slowly, that means you could just hear
Speaker 1: a local radio program and you might just use some
Speaker 1: creative thinking to make whatever you heard fit whatever narrative
Speaker 1: you are searching for in your quest to support the
Speaker 1: existence of ghosts. Other spirit boxes are designed to rapidly
Speaker 1: scan through frequencies so that you're not likely to hear
Speaker 1: anything clearly. But how a ghost is supposed to communicate
Speaker 1: through that kind of method beats the heck out of me.
Speaker 1: Like a ghost has to be really determined to talk
Speaker 1: to you if they are going to manipulate radio waves
Speaker 1: in a cascade of frequencies. Unless the idea is that
Speaker 1: when you hit upon something, you stop and then you
Speaker 1: try to listen in, because that would be just like
Speaker 1: hitting the scanner button on a digital radio, where it's
Speaker 1: just going to seeking out, you know, strong radio frequencies
Speaker 1: one after the other, and that doesn't really seem like
Speaker 1: a useful tool to be either. Now, this is a
Speaker 1: really good point to drive home. So much of ghost
Speaker 1: hunting technology is based upon a very faulty premise, which
Speaker 1: is the presumption that ghosts can manipulate phenomena ranging from
Speaker 1: electromagnetic waves in general to radio waves specifically. Because here's
Speaker 1: the thing, y'all, ghosts haven't been proven to be a
Speaker 1: thing yet in the first place. So to me, that's
Speaker 1: like you're putting the cart before the horse. You know,
Speaker 1: if you say, if this meter goes beep, there's ghosts,
Speaker 1: that's a problem. If you haven't yet proven that ghosts
Speaker 1: are even a thing. You have to do that first.
Speaker 1: Then you have to establish that these ghosts, which are
Speaker 1: definitely a thing, can do whatever it is you're cl
Speaker 1: they can do. In short, the argument the ghosts can
Speaker 1: manipulate phenomena at all presupposes that ghosts exist. That's not
Speaker 1: the way science works. This is where I have to
Speaker 1: again hammer home the fact I am a skeptic. Do
Speaker 1: I think it's outside the realm of possibility that ghosts exist? Well,
Speaker 1: if I'm being honest, yeah, I do think that. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know everything though, right I do not know
Speaker 1: for sure, but I don't believe it, and I'm pretty
Speaker 1: I feel pretty confident it's not a thing. What I
Speaker 1: do know is that no one so far has produced
Speaker 1: evidence that satisfies me to suggest otherwise that I can
Speaker 1: say for sure, even if ultimately, if you put all
Speaker 1: the truth into a sieve, you would come up with
Speaker 1: I don't know for sure. I have, however, plenty of
Speaker 1: evidence of people using technology to fake the existence of ghosts.
Speaker 1: Hoaxsters and hucksters, snake oil salesmen and con artists. These
Speaker 1: folks have made use of technology to fool wishful thinkers
Speaker 1: and those saddened by the passing of loved ones that
Speaker 1: communication beyond the veil is indeed possible, and that spirits
Speaker 1: persist after earthly life. Has been extinguished. We don't have
Speaker 1: satisfactory evidence showing that ghosts are a thing, but we've
Speaker 1: got lots showing how unscrupulous people have tried to fool
Speaker 1: naive marks. Now, to be clear, you don't need technology
Speaker 1: to fool people. You know, some folks are just predisposed
Speaker 1: to believing in spirits for one reason or another. They've
Speaker 1: done most of the work for you, and a charismatic
Speaker 1: medium might convince an audience that the medium can converse
Speaker 1: with spirits simply through some routines that make little use
Speaker 1: of technology at all, from an audience plant, which could
Speaker 1: be very effective, to cold reading practices, which are a
Speaker 1: variable effectiveness. It all depends upon the skill of the
Speaker 1: medium doing the cold reading, but technology we certainly can
Speaker 1: help out. Now, in this episode, we're mainly going to
Speaker 1: focus pun intended on photography. Now, to do a full
Speaker 1: history of photography would take multiple episodes of tech stuff,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna hit some major highlights, and we're starting
Speaker 1: in the early nineteenth century because there was a French
Speaker 1: Smarty Pants who had the temerity to have the very
Speaker 1: French name of nisseephor Nips, and he came up with
Speaker 1: this mad idea of finding a means to make permanent
Speaker 1: the images that could be projected by a camera obscura. Now,
Speaker 1: my drugies. The camera obscura was typically a darkened room
Speaker 1: where you have no source of light other than a
Speaker 1: tiny pinhole cut through one wall. Light enters through the
Speaker 1: pinhole and then projects on the opposite wall from where
Speaker 1: the pinhole is. Right, that's how light works. It travels
Speaker 1: in a straight line. The remarkable thing thing is this
Speaker 1: light would actually project an image of the scene that
Speaker 1: was outside the darkened room on the opposite wall. So
Speaker 1: if you set one of these up and it was
Speaker 1: across from let's say a mountainscape, Like you're in a
Speaker 1: nice field and there's a mountain in the background, and
Speaker 1: you set up a camera obscura. So you've set up
Speaker 1: a room, a dark room that has just a pinhole
Speaker 1: in it on the opposite wall. You could see the
Speaker 1: scene of the mountain. It would be gorgeous, it'd be dim. Oh,
Speaker 1: also it would be upside down and reversed. Now how
Speaker 1: is that possible, Well, it's physics. It's a property known
Speaker 1: as the rectilinear propagation of light. But the phenomena opened
Speaker 1: up artistic opportunities. You could have a sketch artist or
Speaker 1: painter set up inside a camera obscura and they have
Speaker 1: a canvas on the wall where the image will be projected.
Speaker 1: They could then use the projected light to guide their
Speaker 1: hand as they painted a copy of the scene, and
Speaker 1: then you would just turn the canvas over and you
Speaker 1: could look at it side up, though it was still
Speaker 1: reversed right, so that was an issue. Plus, the light
Speaker 1: coming through the pinhole was not really that intense. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a very strong projection, so it's still pretty dim. However,
Speaker 1: through the use of things like optics like lenses and mirrors,
Speaker 1: it was possible to one gather more light so you
Speaker 1: get a brighter image projected. But you could also with
Speaker 1: the mirrors re reverse the image so that it was
Speaker 1: right side up and not reverse left or right. Even so,
Speaker 1: the effect was ephemeral, right, The image wasn't permanent. You
Speaker 1: could go into the room and see the image projected
Speaker 1: on the wall, which is pretty, but you could also
Speaker 1: just go outside and look at the landscape directly without
Speaker 1: looking at the projection. So the best you could hope
Speaker 1: for was to sketch and paint a copy of the image.
Speaker 1: Nipps wanted to find a way to really capture an
Speaker 1: image and then have it stay put. Now, about a
Speaker 1: century earlier, a German professor of a natic demonstrated that
Speaker 1: a solution of silver salts would darken when it was
Speaker 1: exposed to light. It was photoreactive, and further, he proved
Speaker 1: that it was light that caused the darkening process and
Speaker 1: not heat. That was something that some other people had
Speaker 1: put forward as a possible reason for this silver solution
Speaker 1: to turn dark. Nips decided he would coat a sheet
Speaker 1: of paper with silver salts and project an image with
Speaker 1: a camera obscura onto that sheet of paper, and he
Speaker 1: produced his first image this way in May of eighteen sixteen. However,
Speaker 1: the image was not permanent because once you brought this
Speaker 1: image out into the light, well, that light would cause
Speaker 1: the rest of the sheet to darken as well. It
Speaker 1: would cause the reaction on all the untouched silver salts
Speaker 1: that were coated on this piece of paper to also
Speaker 1: turn dark, so your image would fade and just turn
Speaker 1: dark across the entire canvas. Plus, the image he created
Speaker 1: was also a negative. The areas that were hit with
Speaker 1: the most light were the darkest, and the ones that
Speaker 1: were hit with the least light were the brightest, so
Speaker 1: that meant that the brightest lit parts of your image
Speaker 1: would end up being the darkest parts in what you
Speaker 1: would get a negative image. Now, Nips experimented with photochemical
Speaker 1: compounds that would bleach rather than darken when exposed to light.
Speaker 1: But still there was the issue of this resulting image
Speaker 1: disappearing once the whole thing got exposed. But yeah, you
Speaker 1: could bleach parts and then you don't have a negative
Speaker 1: image anymore. But once you take it out of the
Speaker 1: camera obscura and sunlight starts hitting it, the whole image
Speaker 1: begins to have this photochemical reaction. He also began to
Speaker 1: work with some chemical compounds that react to light, but
Speaker 1: they don't produce visible changes on their own unless they're
Speaker 1: later treated to a separate chemical process. He eventually lit
Speaker 1: upon using bitumen of judea, which is a kind of
Speaker 1: naturally occurring asphalt. It's a tar like substance, and when
Speaker 1: it is exposed to sunlight it becomes non soluble with
Speaker 1: certain chemicals like nitric acid also known as aquafortis. He
Speaker 1: would coat a plate, typically a copper or ten plate,
Speaker 1: with a varnish of this bitumen of Judea. Then he
Speaker 1: would take some translucent paper he would have like an
Speaker 1: etching on a piece of paper, treat that paper so
Speaker 1: that the paper would become translucent, and then lay that
Speaker 1: on top of one of these plates. Then he would
Speaker 1: expose the whole thing to sunlight for several hours, and
Speaker 1: enough light would pass through the translucent parts of the
Speaker 1: paper to cause a photochemical reaction to the exposed bitumen.
Speaker 1: The stuff that was shaded by etching would not react
Speaker 1: to sunlight, right because it's not getting hit. Then once
Speaker 1: he was finished, once he had done this for a
Speaker 1: while and had developed or exposed, I guess I should say,
Speaker 1: exposed the plate to sunlight for a few hours, he
Speaker 1: would give the plate a rent in a pretty darn
Speaker 1: aggressive solution, and it would dissolve the bittermen that wasn't
Speaker 1: exposed to the light, and it left the stuff that was.
Speaker 1: The stuff that wasn't exposed to the light would remain
Speaker 1: soluble and would dissolve. The stuff that had been exposed
Speaker 1: to light was insoluble and would stay on the plate.
Speaker 1: So what you would end up with is a negative
Speaker 1: image where the exposed plate would be the stuff that
Speaker 1: was the original etching, and then the stuff that still
Speaker 1: had Bittmen on it would be the parts where light
Speaker 1: was able to pass through. He took a similar approach
Speaker 1: to make this work with a camera obscura, using lithographic
Speaker 1: stones originally that were coded in bittermen of Judea. To
Speaker 1: capture a scene. It would take days of exposure to
Speaker 1: have enough of the photochemical reaction take place to a
Speaker 1: point where the exposed bittermen would not wash away when
Speaker 1: treated with these very abrasive chemicals. He would take that
Speaker 1: negative image, typically used on a plate of silver, and
Speaker 1: he would put that in a box that had crystals
Speaker 1: of iodine in it, and the crystals would evaporate, exposing
Speaker 1: the plate to iodine fumes, and this would cause the
Speaker 1: exposed silver, the bits that were not covered with the
Speaker 1: bitumen coating, to oxidize, and this oxidized silver would be
Speaker 1: a coating of silver iodide. He then would clear the
Speaker 1: varnish of bittermen off the rest of the image, so
Speaker 1: he'd take off the stuff that had been reactive with
Speaker 1: the sunlight and he would expose it to light, which
Speaker 1: would then cause the silver iodide sections to darken, while
Speaker 1: the stuff that had been exposed to bitumen or had
Speaker 1: been covered by bittermen doesn't. So essentially he used two
Speaker 1: separate instances of photochemical reactions to create a positive image,
Speaker 1: and photography, the early science of photography was born. We're
Speaker 1: going to take a quick when we come back, we'll
Speaker 1: talk about how developments to use another pun would change
Speaker 1: photography and open up the opportunity for the spirits to
Speaker 1: commune with us, or so we were told. All right,
Speaker 1: so we talked about nips and the invention of photography. Now, obviously,
Speaker 1: over the following years a lot of people would advance
Speaker 1: this technique, but the basic idea would remain the same.
Speaker 1: You would take a photoreactive surface, you would expose that
Speaker 1: surface to light under controlled conditions for an appropriate amount
Speaker 1: of time. Then you would process the negative image in
Speaker 1: order to create a positive image. But there was another
Speaker 1: intriguing possibility. You could expose a photoreactive surface more than once,
Speaker 1: and you could create really interesting effects that way. Whether
Speaker 1: it was a glass plate that had been coded in
Speaker 1: photoreactive chemicals or a film with a suspension of similar
Speaker 1: chemicals that are coding it, you could capture two images
Speaker 1: on a single surface and combine the two actually you
Speaker 1: could do it more than twice, although the more you did,
Speaker 1: the messier things would typically turn out, until you would
Speaker 1: just get a big blur. But we're going to skip
Speaker 1: ahead a little bit. You could also, by the way,
Speaker 1: combine two different negatives together. You didn't have to actually
Speaker 1: physically take a photograph with the same negative. You could
Speaker 1: take two different negatives and combine them through superposition and
Speaker 1: develop a single image from the combination. But let's talk
Speaker 1: about how modern film cameras work to kind of understand
Speaker 1: the science of double images on photography. Now, keep in
Speaker 1: mind the principles I'm talking about applied throughout the history
Speaker 1: of the development of this art. But let's kind of
Speaker 1: talk about the basic elements of a modern care camera.
Speaker 1: So with a modern camera, you've got your optics. You've
Speaker 1: got a lens. This lens focuses light onto the surface
Speaker 1: of photoreactive film or maybe an image sensor. If you're
Speaker 1: talking about a digital camera, you've got a shutter. The
Speaker 1: shutter's job is to block light from coming through the
Speaker 1: lens and hitting your film or sensor until the photographer
Speaker 1: actually wants to take a photo. And you typically have
Speaker 1: a mechanism in film cameras to advance and rewind the
Speaker 1: film so that you can take distinct images. So when
Speaker 1: a photographer pushes the button on a camera, the shutter
Speaker 1: opens for a precise amount of time. Now, professional cameras
Speaker 1: let photographers adjust how long the shutter exposes the film,
Speaker 1: also how much the shutter opens in order to expose
Speaker 1: the film. So faster shutter speeds are used to capture
Speaker 1: fast moving subjects because if the shutter's open longer, it's
Speaker 1: gathering more light. If something's moving, it's going to be
Speaker 1: a blurry image. Sometimes you might want that, that might
Speaker 1: be the effect you want. But in other cases, let's
Speaker 1: say you want to take a very precise photo of
Speaker 1: something that's moving very very fast, you need to have
Speaker 1: the shutter open and close in a fraction of a second.
Speaker 1: So this is why cameras that are used to film
Speaker 1: extremely high speed subjects in very slow motion, they need
Speaker 1: a whole lot of light to do it. Because that
Speaker 1: shutter is open for just the tiniest fraction of a second.
Speaker 1: It has to be able to gather as much light
Speaker 1: as possible in order to form an image. So you
Speaker 1: need more light to light these kinds of scenes. Now,
Speaker 1: if something isn't moving at all, then you can use
Speaker 1: a longer shutter speed and much less light. In the
Speaker 1: early days of photography, you often had people sitting still
Speaker 1: for minutes at a time in order for a camera
Speaker 1: to gather enough light so that you could get a
Speaker 1: decent photograph. This is one of the reasons you hear
Speaker 1: people in old pictures aren't smiling. It's not because they
Speaker 1: were all dour all the time. It's because they would
Speaker 1: have to sit for a photograph for minutes at a time,
Speaker 1: and holding a rictus grin for like five minutes is
Speaker 1: not the most fun experience. So instead you would sit
Speaker 1: still and patient, and you would wait until the photographer said,
Speaker 1: all right, that's enough time, and then you could go
Speaker 1: about your day. So you would have a more neutral
Speaker 1: expression on your face, and that would mean that you
Speaker 1: would be able to gather enough light, even in a
Speaker 1: dim interior setting, to be able to develop a decent photograph. Well. Typically,
Speaker 1: cameras advance the film after you take an image. Essentially,
Speaker 1: it pulls the film so that the next section of
Speaker 1: unexposed film is in place in order for you to
Speaker 1: take your next photo. To create a double exposure, you
Speaker 1: would need to either prevent the film from advancing, or
Speaker 1: you would need to rewind it back to its original
Speaker 1: frame that you had already exposed with your original photograph.
Speaker 1: Then you would take a second photograph, so you are
Speaker 1: shooting over your previous frame. When you develop the film
Speaker 1: to produce negatives and then ultimately insper these to create
Speaker 1: positive images, you end up with a combined photograph of
Speaker 1: those two shots, the second one on top of the
Speaker 1: first one. So for your standard photography, the second photo
Speaker 1: typically ends up being a background shot. For most uses
Speaker 1: of double images here like you might take a landscape
Speaker 1: shot as your second photograph that lets you place your
Speaker 1: first photographic subject pretty much wherever you would like them
Speaker 1: to be, or have them interact with some sort of
Speaker 1: environment that otherwise they aren't present for now. For it
Speaker 1: to work really well, you typically want your first image
Speaker 1: to have a lot of dark areas in it, because
Speaker 1: those dark areas are under exposed to light, meaning that
Speaker 1: you haven't created this photochemical reaction for that part of
Speaker 1: the film, and your second photograph, the under exposed part
Speaker 1: of the film from the first one, are going to
Speaker 1: receive more exposure to light, and the images you capture
Speaker 1: will show up in those areas that were dark in
Speaker 1: the first photograph. Let me explain by giving an example.
Speaker 1: Let's say you take a picture. You have a model,
Speaker 1: and your model is standing close to you, and you
Speaker 1: have your model in silhouette. You've got a source of
Speaker 1: light behind the model, so you've set your camera so
Speaker 1: that you're focusing on this model, but they are in silhouette.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a dark shape and the light is
Speaker 1: coming from behind them. You take that image, so now
Speaker 1: you've got a picture of someone. Where that someone is
Speaker 1: you can't really see them very well, they're a silhouette.
Speaker 1: But then you take a second picture. Let's say you know,
Speaker 1: you've rewound the film so that you're using the same
Speaker 1: frame again, and you go and take a photo of
Speaker 1: a city scape at night. So it's this brightly lit
Speaker 1: city scape. Well, the under exposed parts of film from
Speaker 1: the first picture are going to bring in that light
Speaker 1: from the second one. That's what's going to show up
Speaker 1: in the silhouette. So when you develop your photograph, you're
Speaker 1: going to have this silhouette of a but instead of
Speaker 1: it just being a dark silhouette, it's a city scape
Speaker 1: in the shape of a person. Silhouette. It's really a
Speaker 1: cool effect, and there's lots of different ways of playing
Speaker 1: with this. This is just a very basic example, but
Speaker 1: photographers have been using this double exposure technique for years
Speaker 1: to produce all sorts of interesting compositions. You can do
Speaker 1: similar things, by the way, with digital cameras. In fact,
Speaker 1: you can do things with digital cameras where they have
Speaker 1: apps that allow you to do this and they'll just
Speaker 1: handle the whole all the processing and give you the effect.
Speaker 1: But in the old days, you could achieve this effect
Speaker 1: in camera. You didn't have to do any special processing
Speaker 1: after the fact to get it. Now you could by
Speaker 1: taking two separate images and then just combining negatives together.
Speaker 1: You could do that as well with the superimposing one
Speaker 1: negative on top of another, but this method, you did
Speaker 1: it all in camera. Then you would go and develop
Speaker 1: your film and see the result. So the medium of
Speaker 1: choice in the old days of photography wasn't film because
Speaker 1: we weren't really into plastics yet. Instead, what was being
Speaker 1: used in say the mid to late nineteenth century were
Speaker 1: glass plates that had been coated with photoreactive chemicals, and
Speaker 1: you would slide the glass plate into a camera. Then
Speaker 1: you would take a photograph with the camera. This would
Speaker 1: expose the areas of the glass plate to light. You
Speaker 1: could then remove the glass plate, use some chemicals to
Speaker 1: develop the image, then transfer that image to a sheet
Speaker 1: of paper where you get your positive photograph. Then, best
Speaker 1: of all, if you're a photographer, you could clean the
Speaker 1: glass plate thoroughly and then use that same glass plate again.
Speaker 1: You would coat the glass plate with new photoreactive chemicals
Speaker 1: and use it again to take another image. Now, clearly
Speaker 1: doing that would destroy your negative in the process, like
Speaker 1: the negative that you took with the first picture, but
Speaker 1: it meant that you didn't have to throw away a
Speaker 1: glass plate and go buy a new one. Now, generally,
Speaker 1: double exposures were something that photographers wanted to avoid. If
Speaker 1: it happened, it was often due to carelessness, and typically
Speaker 1: it resulted in an unusable image. But then we get
Speaker 1: a forward thinker, William H. Mumler, who was a true opportunist.
Speaker 1: Mumbler would take a photographic accident and turn it into
Speaker 1: a lucrative, though brief occupation. As he became a spirit photographer,
Speaker 1: some call him the first spirit photographer. Whether or not
Speaker 1: he really was the first, I can't say, but he's
Speaker 1: often credited as such. Well, he had a pretty decent
Speaker 1: career until he got arrested for fraud. That put a
Speaker 1: small hiccup in his plans, but ultimately he would be acquitted.
Speaker 1: I'll talk more about that in just a bit. Now,
Speaker 1: here's how the original story typically is told. In the
Speaker 1: early eighteen sixties, Mumler sat for a self portrait photograp
Speaker 1: He was an enthusiast. That was not his job. He
Speaker 1: was not a photographer, but he was interested in the
Speaker 1: art and technology of photography. So while he was taking
Speaker 1: a self portrait, he unknowingly did so while using a
Speaker 1: glass plate that had not been properly cleaned since the
Speaker 1: last time it was used to take a photograph, so
Speaker 1: the negative image of an old photograph was already on
Speaker 1: the plate when he used it. Now, this old image
Speaker 1: was of his cousin, who tragically had died more than
Speaker 1: a decade earlier. When Mumbler developed this self portrait, he
Speaker 1: was surprised to see a faded image of his deceased
Speaker 1: cousin apparently posing with him for this picture, and he
Speaker 1: appeared solid, but his cousin appeared transparent. Mumbler then allegedly
Speaker 1: got the idea to create a whole business around this phenomena,
Speaker 1: manufacturing images of spirits to cater to a nation that
Speaker 1: at the time was stricken with grief. In the wake
Speaker 1: of the Civil War. Countless families were mourning the loss
Speaker 1: of people who had died in that conflict, and it
Speaker 1: had given rise to a general interest in spiritualism and
Speaker 1: in ghosts. After all, families wanted the comfort of knowing
Speaker 1: that their loved ones were still out there somewhere, comforted
Speaker 1: in an afterlife, with the knowledge that those back on
Speaker 1: earth still thought of them and loved them. Now, maybe
Speaker 1: the whole accidental photograph thing is true, or maybe Mummler
Speaker 1: had a goal in mind and kept working until he
Speaker 1: was able to achieve it. You know, maybe he did
Speaker 1: double exposures to do it, just in camera double exposures,
Speaker 1: but he also could have used the technique of superimposing
Speaker 1: negatives before developing a final image, and that actually would
Speaker 1: give him more options to that if he just held
Speaker 1: on to negatives and then combined negatives together in the
Speaker 1: post processing part of photography. Now, the actual method he
Speaker 1: used wasn't really that important. What was important is that
Speaker 1: Mumler got to work providing images to grieving families for
Speaker 1: a fee. Of course, Mumbler maintained that he was just
Speaker 1: as surprised as anybody else that his seemingly normal camera
Speaker 1: had somehow attained the remarkable ability to capture images of
Speaker 1: the dearly departed. His shtick was that he was just
Speaker 1: a simple man who, through reasons unexplained, could take photographs
Speaker 1: of ghosts. He would make sure those customers knew there
Speaker 1: was never a guarantee that a ghost was going to
Speaker 1: show up, or if a ghost did show up, that
Speaker 1: that ghost would definitively be the person that the subject
Speaker 1: was hoping for, and that would mean at times that
Speaker 1: he didn't have access to a negative or a previous
Speaker 1: image that really fit a family's story, So it would
Speaker 1: leave him scrambling to work with the customer in order
Speaker 1: to figure out who a ghostly figure might actually be, like, well,
Speaker 1: that's clearly not Aunt Midge, but maybe it's someone else,
Speaker 1: So you know, now, this is a lot like cold reading.
Speaker 1: That's a practice where a supposed psychic fishes for information
Speaker 1: with a mark and relies almost entirely upon the subject
Speaker 1: to provide all the details, and later folks will often
Speaker 1: say the medium somehow came up with all these details
Speaker 1: on their own, when in fact it was the subject
Speaker 1: who supplied everything. It's an old con and it still
Speaker 1: works today. Mumbler did get tapped for fraud, but that
Speaker 1: took a while. I'll explain after we come back from
Speaker 1: this break. Just before the break, I mentioned that Mummler,
Speaker 1: our spirit photographer, got tagged for fraud, but it didn't
Speaker 1: happen right away. He even dodged some metaphorical bullets that
Speaker 1: theoretically should have brought things to an end much sooner
Speaker 1: than it happened. So. For example, according to an article
Speaker 1: by David Russ inistory dot com, Mummler once took a
Speaker 1: photograph of a woman whose brother had died in the
Speaker 1: Civil War, and so he produces this image that has
Speaker 1: this ghostly figure posing next to this woman, and she
Speaker 1: goes home thinking, I now have a portrait that proves
Speaker 1: my brother still persists after his untimely death in this
Speaker 1: terrible war. Except for one thing. Her brother later returned home,
Speaker 1: having miraculously not having died at all during the Civil War.
Speaker 1: Reports of his death, as they say, were greatly exaggerated.
Speaker 1: Now you would think that this would lead to Mummler
Speaker 1: being exposed as a fraud because here he was producing
Speaker 1: a photograph of this woman's ghostly dead brother. But he's
Speaker 1: not dead. He comes back. The woman, however, became convinced,
Speaker 1: either through Mumbler or otherwise, that the ghostly image in
Speaker 1: her photograph was actually some sort of vengeful, malevolent entity
Speaker 1: that was intent on leading her astray. So it wasn't
Speaker 1: Mummler's fault, it was just a malevolent spirit. Now. What
Speaker 1: was harder to explain away was a case in which
Speaker 1: a customer recognized that one of the ghosts appearing in
Speaker 1: a photograph was actually his very much not dead spouse,
Speaker 1: which indicated that Mummler was in fact holding on to
Speaker 1: old negatives that he produced in his photography business and
Speaker 1: then made use of those negatives to manufacture his spirits
Speaker 1: for his more gullible clients. So what did Momler do
Speaker 1: in that case, Well, he followed the early advice that
Speaker 1: you would hear in McElroy brother episodes of My Brother,
Speaker 1: My Brother, and Me, and he packed up and moved
Speaker 1: out of town. He left his operation in Boston, Massachusetts,
Speaker 1: and he set off for the greener pastures of New York. However,
Speaker 1: it was in New York that he got picked up
Speaker 1: for fraud in eighteen sixty nine. The trial had some
Speaker 1: notable expert witnesses, including the infamous P. T. Barnum, the
Speaker 1: ringleader of Circus, and Barnum brought along with him a
Speaker 1: portrait he had made that had himself in it, along
Speaker 1: with the ghostly figure of the very much dead ex
Speaker 1: President Abraham Lincoln in it. Barnum used the photo to
Speaker 1: show how Mummler's photographs could be produced through earthly means
Speaker 1: when no ghosts required, and apparently other experts gave similar
Speaker 1: examples and showed how different photographic processes could create the
Speaker 1: very same effects that Mummler had produced. So while they
Speaker 1: could not necessarily identify the specific method used by Mummler,
Speaker 1: they showed that there were lots of different approaches that
Speaker 1: could do it. So the jury hears about nearly a
Speaker 1: dozen different methods photographers could potentially use to produce photographs
Speaker 1: just like Mummler's, and they acquitted him. What. Well, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the jury understood that there were ways you could fake
Speaker 1: the photographs, but they said that no one had actually
Speaker 1: caught Mummler doing any of those. So since Mumler wasn't
Speaker 1: caught in the act, And since photography was such a
Speaker 1: new and, at least to the layman, largely unknown art form,
Speaker 1: it stood to reason that, hey, maybe photographs can also
Speaker 1: be capable of capturing images of the dearly departed. So
Speaker 1: this is like the opposite of Akham's razor is the
Speaker 1: Okham's raiser says that the simplest explanation is usually the
Speaker 1: best one. So what is simpler that photography could prove
Speaker 1: that ghosts exist something that has never once been proven ever,
Speaker 1: that it could be the one technology that cements forever
Speaker 1: the proof of spirits, or that humans, using documented, proven,
Speaker 1: replicable techniques created the effect. Well, Aukham's razor tells us
Speaker 1: that the thing we know for a fact can happen
Speaker 1: is far more likely to be the explanation than a
Speaker 1: thing we don't know at all. But the jury saw otherwise,
Speaker 1: and Mummler walked free. He would later make more contributions
Speaker 1: to the world of photography, legitimate contributions. In fact, in
Speaker 1: one obituary his connection with spirit photography barely merited a
Speaker 1: mention at all, So I would say that he definitely
Speaker 1: got off lightly, though I don't know how much business
Speaker 1: his spirit photography received after his well publicized trial. The
Speaker 1: reports on that are varying. Some people say, oh, no,
Speaker 1: he went right back into business and people didn't care.
Speaker 1: Others say, yeah, no, the spirit photography gig was pretty
Speaker 1: much up at that point. So I don't know what
Speaker 1: the truth is. But there are countless examples of similar
Speaker 1: photographs that have been submitted to support the existence of ghosts.
Speaker 1: And it's baffling in many ways because we know for
Speaker 1: a fact there are simple means of producing those effects,
Speaker 1: either on purpose or by accident, and yet the reliance
Speaker 1: on these images to serve as evidence persists. There are
Speaker 1: other photographic anomalies that are often presented as evidence of ghosts.
Speaker 1: A big one would be ghost orbs. Those are little
Speaker 1: floating balls of light within the frame of an image.
Speaker 1: These sometimes show up not just in photographs, but also
Speaker 1: in video as well. They are not the product of
Speaker 1: the development process or produced by taking multiple images on
Speaker 1: the same frame of film or whatever. These are just
Speaker 1: due to the nature of light and optics and photography, right. So,
Speaker 1: ghost orbs are something you see with photographs that are
Speaker 1: taken in dark situations or dark settings, and the orbs
Speaker 1: aren't orbs at all. They're just reflections. So in a
Speaker 1: dark place, you have to provide your own light, because
Speaker 1: that's what a camera is doing. It's capturing light, and
Speaker 1: if there is no light, then there can be no image,
Speaker 1: whether you're talking about a digital camera that has a
Speaker 1: light sensor or traditional film camera, unless you're capturing something else.
Speaker 1: It's like infrared light, which we can't see anyway, and
Speaker 1: then using a development process to actually make that into
Speaker 1: a visible image, you need to provide some light yourself.
Speaker 1: So you have a camera that's got a flash on it,
Speaker 1: and when you take a photograph, the flash goes off,
Speaker 1: the scene is briefly, very brightly lit. It's just long
Speaker 1: enough for light to pass through the lens as the
Speaker 1: shutter opens and exposes the film or light sensor to light.
Speaker 1: But in that flash, any motes of dust or bugs
Speaker 1: or droplets of water that are closer to the camera
Speaker 1: and the flash bulb also get illuminated, and the reflections
Speaker 1: from those tiny things show up as orbs in your
Speaker 1: finished photograph. It's called backscatter, and it's not indication that
Speaker 1: there are ghosts. They're just reflections of particles that are
Speaker 1: reflecting light and showing up very brightly in your camera
Speaker 1: because your camera's straining so very hard to collect whatever
Speaker 1: available light is there in order to make the image.
Speaker 1: And when you know what, a lot of ghost hunting
Speaker 1: stuff takes place in dark and dusty environments, and you
Speaker 1: need a flash or some other light source to eliminate
Speaker 1: the scene. We wouldn't see these orbs in person, but
Speaker 1: the camera, which is designed to direct light efficiently to
Speaker 1: the film or the sensor does and it's not a ghost.
Speaker 1: It's just a mote of dust or droplet of water
Speaker 1: or tiny little bug flying around. Dust particles that are
Speaker 1: closer to the camera are going to reflect more light
Speaker 1: into the lens, and because they're not in focus, you know,
Speaker 1: you're focusing on something else, some scene in which a
Speaker 1: ghost might appear, you know, like say some old shelves
Speaker 1: in a basement, or maybe you're shooting up an old
Speaker 1: staircase in an abandoned chateau or whatever. So you're focusing
Speaker 1: on a distant scene and a close up mot of
Speaker 1: dust is meanwhile reflecting light from the flash, and boom,
Speaker 1: you got yourself your ghost orbs. Now I think it
Speaker 1: might Next episode, I'm going to tackle some relatively recent
Speaker 1: additions to the ghost hunter's toolbox, namely the rim pod. Now,
Speaker 1: I imagine my disappointment when I learned that an rim
Speaker 1: pod is not some sort of insulated sleeping cabin that
Speaker 1: pumps songs like Losing My Religion or the Sidewinder sleeps
Speaker 1: Tonight into my ears. Now, rim pod stands for radiating
Speaker 1: electromagneticity pod, and I can't wait to dive into that
Speaker 1: for our next episode, because golly, it's silly. But that's
Speaker 1: gonna wait for Wednesday's episode. It's another Halloween appropriate topic
Speaker 1: for tech stuff. In the meantime, I hope all of
Speaker 1: you out there are doing well. If you are someone
Speaker 1: who has a deep belief in spirits and ghosts, I
Speaker 1: am not here to tell you that you are wrong.
Speaker 1: I am here to say that based upon my view
Speaker 1: of the world and my need for extraordinary evidence to
Speaker 1: support extraordinary claims, go hosts and spirits remain in the
Speaker 1: realm of fantasy for me. Maybe one day someone will
Speaker 1: produce evidence sufficient enough for me to say I was wrong.
Speaker 1: They do exist, and here's the proof that shows it.
Speaker 1: But it hasn't happened yet. Take care of my friends,
Speaker 1: and I'll talk to you again. Really, soon. Tech Stuff
Speaker 1: is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit
Speaker 1: the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
Speaker 1: your favorite shows.