The Spiritualist newspaper > No.140, April 30th 1875

VOiLUjVIE ^IX. JMUJVIBEFJ EIQHTEEN.
LONDON, FRIDAY, APRIL SOtli, 1876
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A GREAT SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY BY MR.
CROOKES.
Mr. Crookes has made one of the greatest discoveries
in relation to the action of light, which has come
before the world since spectrum analysis was first made
known; the minor portion of this discovery, he com¬
municated to the Royal Society towards the close of
1873, but the chief portion of it came under the notice
of that body last week, in the presence of several .of the
leading philosophers of the day, including Professor
Stokes, Professor Huxley, Dr. Huggins, Mr. Siemens,
Dr. Carpenter, Mr. Francis Galton, and several others.
It has long been supposed that light could not by direct
action set any mechanism in motion, and the assumed
fact that light would not move a lever arm in vacuo,
even when the arm was suspended in the most delicate
manner, has often been quoted in standard text books
as evidence against Newton’s emission theory of light.
In these pages it is not our province to consider minutely
new discoveries in physics, so it may he briefly stated
that Mr. Crookes has discovered that when four pith
discs white on one side, and blacked on the other, are
placed upon the extremities of four arms made by cross¬
ing two pieces of straw which are suspended upon a
pointed pivot where the arms cross each other, and the
whole arrangement is included in a glass bulb, from
which the air has been highly exhausted by means of a
Sprengel pump, the said arms and discs will spin round
like a windmill, when the light of the sun or of a
candle is allowed to fall upon the apparatus.
This great discovery, fraught with unknown uses to
society—for already practical photographic applications
of it have become evident—may be fairly claimed as
having been given to the world by Spiritualism. It
will be remembered that when Mr. Crookes, as a pure
physicist, first joined his friend Mr. Serjeant Cox and
endorsed the psychic force theory of tho latter, he
was not only anxious to obtain instrumental evidence
relating to the force, but in testing mediums desired
that if the powers about them could lift tables, they
•should move a few grains only, suspended inside a glass
vacuum tube, where of course no tricks of the medium
could possibly do anything. • What more natural than
that in the attempt to discover the reality of the
assumed psychic force, Mr. Crookes should suspend a
light ball of pith by a cocoon fibre inside a glass
tube from which the air was exhausted, so that the
resistance of the air should not oppose its motion,
and that he then should present his finger to the bulb
to see if any psychic force would move the light
object suspended inside. He did so—whether he
were acting upon, this hypothesis or not—and the
result was that he discovered a motion of repulsion
produced by an unknown cause, and this was the full
sum and substance of the facts contained in his first
paper to the Royal Society. The fact once discovered,
it was easy to follow it up. The results were found
not to be due to psychic force, whatever that may he,