The Science Of the Dead!

A year ago or so, I was watching a documentary on TV, which really made me stop and think at the time, and since I'm harking back to it now, I'm obviously still thinking about it. The subject matter discussed the personalities the likes of: Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Thomas Edison, John Logie Baird and many others besides, and seemed to suggest that although each of them had invented devices which we take for granted nowadays, their reasons for doing so were quite different to those which we now put them!

It was suggested that each of these esteemed scientists and many of their peers and predecessors were obsessed with making contact with the dead, or rather capturing the voices of the dead, and that each one of them believed that the devices they had designed might enable them to achieve that end.

You see, science never really ever achieves the ends for which it is intended, and most great discoveries are either accidental or coincidental, and often scientific research and design travel under the guise of something else, such as Bell's insistence that he was working on a device to aid the deaf. That wasn't what he was doing at all, but nobody would have funded his research had they known his true intentions. And, the outcome of his work was neither what he had hoped for, or indeed what he had claimed to be working towards. Nevertheless, where would we be without the phone, eh?