In her new book 'Spirits I have known', enchantress Ipsita Roy Chakraverti says Edison, the famous American inventor credited for inventing the motion picture camera and the phonograph, had also come up with a 'spirit machine' of which little is known.
A probable model of the machine, which the author brought from the US, has a photoelectric cell that can register the slightest presence of ethereal mist or spirit activity when a strong beam of light strikes its active surface. An accompanying phonograph-like box records and playbacks spirit voices.
"Edision's instruments worked at a frequency that would be able to pick up the waves at which spirits were detectable," writes Chakraverti.