Sounds very similar to Robert Kennedy Jr.'s intense political anti-vax campaign. He's widely criticized in the media for it (same as Arthur Conan Doyle) but believes he's doing the right thing and will be proved right in the end, just like Doyle.
Doyle:
>"It is time which will prove our cause," he wrote. "Time will also prove to those who have misrepresented us that they are playing with fire. They are not judging the Unseen. The Unseen is judging them."
Kennedy:
> “One thing that keeps me buoyant about this, because otherwise, I’d be depressed,” he said. “I know I’m gonna win this one. I have the ability to push this over the finish line. I know I do. The truth will prevail.”
Ah, the “when you have eliminated everything else, whatever remains must be true” line. I remember it from Christian youth sermons and proselytising, where they would set up a strawman against God and then blow it down. One of the Holmes series' worse legacies.
"But, almost alone among skeptics, [Martin Gardner] believed passionately in God, prayer, and eternal life. He called himself a 'fideist' — someone who embraces belief in God without having a rational foundation to do so."
The wiki for the Cottingly Fairy pictures showed Doyle played a big role in his own deception:
> In a 1985 interview on Yorkshire Television's Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, Elsie said that she and Frances were too embarrassed to admit the truth after fooling Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes: "Two village kids and a brilliant man like Conan Doyle – well, we could only keep quiet." In the same interview Frances said: "I never even thought of it as being a fraud – it was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun and I can't understand to this day why they were taken in – they wanted to be taken in."
If he was working as a paranormal investigator, and getting paid, I can see why it would pay off to find at least a few of these illusions to be real. It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
> According to our current theoretical frameworks, human memory is best understood as processes of reconstruction, rather than one of reproduction. That is to say that remembering an event is less like replaying a mental recording and more like composing a story.
I appreciate the appearance of that oft-omitted qualifier, 'according to current theories'. Also, this reminds me of one of those ideas that came in a package with giant robots...
"In the words of Schwarzwald, who is closest to the truth: Imagination and memory are but one thing, which for diverse considerations hath diverse names."
> An acrobat, dressed entirely in black tights, scaled the building and entered through a window after the committee had completed their search of the room. According to the magicians, "the ghost" was a bit of gauze coated with phosphorescent paint that the acrobat removed from their pocket and waved around the room.
If they made a movie that just reenacted Tibbles and Wynter's illusions and other ingenious acts from the period, it'd be even more fantastical and thrilling than those in The Prestige and The Illusionist.
It costed a lot but I have seen adverts for such hidden radio in magician's magazines from the time.
There has always been a very lucrativ market for an engineer+magician that could provide hidden communication devices at the fringe of technology.
One of the best and oldest device I found used a telegraph (!) hidden in a turban and shoes with copper sole on a copper threaded carpet.
Radio was invented in the second half of the 19th century, so pretty mature by then. I guess a sufficiently miniaturized earpiece does sound impressive for the time, but it seems likely the radio itself would be too bulky and was likely hidden somewhere in her clothes.
a simple radio receiver works without a battery. we built those in school. the electricity induced by the radio signal is enough to drive a small speaker.
Such a device is commonly called a crystal radio[1] and they truly are ridiculously simple. If you don’t need a tuner or an amplifier, which in this case was likely, the only components required to build an AM receiver are an antenna, a diode, and an earphone. The name derives from an early type of diode based on a piece of crystalline mineral, discovered by Braun in 1874[2].
Especially if you have a transmitter at full volume one room over, you'd be able to pick that up loud and clear on a crystal radio. I think you could make a small unpowered crystal radio using 1919 tech, since there's no amplification.
In short - he was no Houdini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Houdini#Debunking_spirit...