The Tele-Gastrograph

Annotation of other people's texts is, I find, one of the most enjoyable things one can do.

Working on EHB's Spiritualism -- Is It A Savage Superstition? this evening, I find, in the columns of the Melbourne Age (as reprinted by the Brisbane Courier for 10 July 1878 and several other papers in Australia and New Zealand) a marvelous discussion of EHB's doings, as an experimenter testing a new invention: the electro-gastrograph, “a machine by which, through the aid of electric currents, the flavour of any food or liquor can be transmitted by wire to any distance, and the sensation of eating and drinking conveyed by merely placing the end of the wire between the teeth.” EHB was at one of the five points in a network set up to test the machine, in the offices of the Mebourne Age newspaper, with (among other people) the unjustly-not-famous Australian novelist Marcus Clarke (For The Term Of His Natural Life). The correspondent for the Age, who was clearly not a believer in the efficacy of the machine, intimates the EHB had too much sherry-and-bitters, and concludes that “the business of the ‘restauranteur’ promises to be severely injured if not abolished” by the tele-gastrograph.

Recalling the Vitapathy foray of a few days back, and looking up on the shelf above my monitor at my much-prized copy of The Electric Physician, I am suddenly reminded of the human battery scene in Ghost Land:

Let no sneering skeptic doubt the possibility...

Update: Must learn to be less opaque. This article is, of course, satirical. No such machine was ever made.

On The Road (Recovered)

EHB's On The Road, or the Spiritual Investigator: A Complete Compendium Of the Science, Religion, Ethics and Various Methods of Investigating Spiritualism (Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide; George Robertson, 1878) has been found, digitized and will be available shortly in the Archive. Roughly, an 8-inch by 5-inch pamphlet of (iv) + 62 pages.

The title page is instructive:

A quick check of the text reveals some not-obviously scissored-and-pasted text, and references to Modern American Spiritualism as The History of Modern American Spiritualism throughout. Most obviously interesting, after 10 minutes reading, are EHB's recommendations for further reading for the spiritual newbie.

And, as per usual, adverts in the back:

One wonders if George Robertson was the publisher of Art Magic and Ghost Land in Australia, and if so whether those were set up from copies of the US editions, or from manuscript or printers' proofs of the US edition.