ABSTRACT
By the end of the 1880s Crookes was a nationally and internationally known figure for his investigations of radiant matter. Unlike Wallace, Crookes had been welcomed back into the scientific fold by his empirical work and the brilliance of his demonstrations and stimulating speculations. He had become a celebrity. Hence, despite its refusal to publish anything remotely to do with spiritualism in the 1870s, in 1887 the Royal Society was quite happy to publish Crookes’ experimental refutation of a supposed new force that had been postulated by a French physicist, Jules Thore. The latter had suspended an ivory cylinder on a silk cord over the centre of a table. Once this pendulum was motionless, Thore brought a second cylinder up to it until it was about a millimetre away from touching. At this juncture Thore observed that the suspended pendulum began to rotate clockwise (if the second cylinder was to its left) and anti-clockwise (if it was to the right). Thore claimed that this phenomenon occurred whatever the nature of the materials and that he had eliminated the possibility that light, heat, electricity, magnetism, gravity or air currents were responsible.
