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Tomorrow people: For a century, it felt like telepathy was around the corner
For the entire 20th century, it had felt like telepathy was just around the corner. Why is that especially true now?
In a period of rapid innovation in electrical science and technology, the press marvelled at the arrival of telephones and phonographs that disembodied voice, and at detectors of ‘invisible’ waves made manifest somehow with the magical invention of both X-rays and wireless telegraphy. In the early 1970s, the physicists Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff at the Stanford Research Institute explored the technique of projective visionary experience they termed ‘remote viewing’, through which a ‘telepath’ was able to ‘see’ scenes of a crime, or spy on enemy undertakings, from vast distances. Coined by Myers and his fellow psychical researchers in the 1880s, telepathy gained traction because it was formulated inside a moment of scientific and technological revolution, where uncanny transmissions proliferated across the visible and invisible spectrum, seeming to collapse the natural and the supernatural together.
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