Edison Worked on a Device to Record the Voices of the Dead

A long-lost chapter from Thomas Edison's memoir reveals that he was so interested in communicating with the dead that he worked on a spirit phone.

A long-lost chapter of the memoir of Thomas Edison has been found and published in France and it contains details of the great inventor’s plans to build a device to record the voices of the newly departed.

Edison’s original memoir is called “Diary And Sundry Observations” and was published in 1948, 16 years after his death. The first edition of the book contained a last chapter called “Spiritualism,” a collection of essays in which Edison talks about his beliefs in an afterlife and a way to communicate with the dead. Read more