Narrative Quiz of the Day: William Hope

TAB hobbies-summer-2022 Hope 8 Would landscapes exist before photography? If we foolishly assume that photography is “Truth” and painting is “Lie”, this question cannot be resolved. We will accept as real the landscapes of that original photograph by Nicéphor Niépce (1824): he left an enormous exposure time, several days to capture the Truth. Beethoven failed to grasp the truth of ‘The Ninth Symphony’ at its premiere (1824). He was almost deaf. The tools that others create shape us. And they give us business opportunities. The photographer William H. Mumbler quickly understood (1862) that those marks that appeared on his portraits due to not cleaning the plates well could be sold as ghosts associated with the person photographed. “Your cousin! The one that palmed twelve years ago!». Mumbler fell into disgrace because of another great swindler, the circus PT Barnum: he unmasked him by “fabricating” a picture of himself with the dead Lincoln. Photographing spectra does not cost as much as the axiomatization of geometry or the theory of proof proposed by the mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943). Hundreds of fakers fester for each born scientist: our Will Hope, future photographer of spirits, was germinated in Manchester in 1863. He assured that shortly after he saw ghosts. That year human architectures were opened: they, not ghosts, made it possible to narrow the globe with the Suez Canal. Hope’s business was going at lightning speed: in 1905 he glimpsed the possibility of capturing ectoplasm and billing! Eleven years later he tried to fool chemist William Crookes with a photo of his dead wife. He was lucky: Crookes knew that the Afterlife exists and, gullible, did not accept evidence to the contrary. He did not read his colleague Ramón y Cajal, who wrote in ‘Psicología del Quixote y el quijotismo’ (1905): «Yes, with the dreamy eyes of an artist, you are captivated [observando el mundo] (…) you will think that paradise arose spontaneously by strange whim (…) but examine the subsoil with the calm analysis of science». With the scientific method -at times, only-, the English Society for the Study of Paranormal Photographs (1918-23) wanted to analyze the veracity of esoteric photos, perhaps encouraged by the case of the Cottingley fairies, based on photos of two girls playing with mythological beings. A fraud that fueled the writer Arthur Conan Doyle: great writer for his pen and spiritualist for his balls. The company closed as it could not prove the veracity of any of its snapshots. They disappeared at the same time that the Spanish flu pandemic was forgotten (1918-21) after excessive use: it is estimated that more than 50 million people died. Hope’s dealings ran into the Society for Psychical Research, a mix of spiritualists eager to confirm and scientists eager to discover. Without telling him, they put some marked photographic plates on him before taking the snapshot and it was revealed that he changed them for others. That evidence was not enough for Conan Doyle. He typed a furious pro-Hope pamphlet, ‘The Case of Spirit Photography’ (1922): “[La frente de Hope] she is tall and that indicates a good, untrained brain beneath her.” While Doyle was dealing with the mystery, young George Frost from Chicago was getting down to business: he wanted to hear Al Jolson sing in his car. As seen in a non-doctored photograph from the time, the happy man installed a radio in the left door of his Ford. Tricksters are destroyed with science: the one Baird used to broadcast color television (1928) or the one the future magician and skeptic James Randi (1928-2020) would use to unmask frauds like Hope. In 1960, receiving part of Conan Doyle’s “mysterious” photo archive, anthropologist Eric Dingwall settled the issue: “They are proof of human stupidity, credulity and superstition.” That same year the book ‘The Return of the Sorcerers’ was published; of the charlatans Pauwels and Bergier. It was supported by conspiracy, pseudoscience or ghosts. It became an instant hit, selling millions of books around the world. Desktop code Image for mobile, amp and app Mobile code AMP code APP code