A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

oth by the Spiritualist medium and the new medium of telegraphy. While the potential for an
electrical system had been demonstrated by a variety of scientists as early as 1753, it was 1844
when Samuel B. Morse sent the first message on the trial telegraphy line he had persuaded the
U.S. congress to fund. 82
While this was not, strictly speaking, the first telegraphic message, it
has come to symbolize the birth of practical telegraphy. The content of the message further
indicates the link between matters spiritual and technological - “What hath God wrought?”
Spiritualists went so far as to refer to the method of communication used by the dead as the
“spiritual telegraph” (which was also the name of one of the main Spiritualist journals),
suggesting that the latter was “an actual technology of the afterlife, one invented by scientific
geniuses in the world of the dead for the explicit purpose of instructing the land of the living in
the principles of utopian reform.” 83
Aside from the ostensibly technical aspects of Lockwood’s “molecular hypothesis” the
parallels drawn between the then emergent generation of technology and the phenomena of
Spiritualism have a number of implications for our current discussion. One is the suggestion
offered by technological advances to the popular imagination that humankind was in an age in
which knowledge, technology and progress were poised to extend themselves to the very limits
of the universe. Spiritualism understood itself as one element of progress’ march to total
knowledge. Progress, in turn, was understood as “man’s conscious ego” moving onward to a
comprehension of “more and more of infinitude.” 84
In a world where “a whisper may be heard
across the continent,” why should communication across the boundary of life and death be seen
60 For a concise and cogent discussion of the technical development of telegraphy, see Steven Lubar, InfoCulture:
The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).
61 Sconce, 12.
84 Lockwood, 12.
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