Random Picture Thread

The Revealer:
A commercial dowsing instrument, produced in Leeds, UK by J.C.Oliver, in the early part of the 20th Century, at least. They are not that uncommon, it appears.

This is from the blog of Alan Fisher:

‘Revealer’ations… https://goddammit.co.uk/2012/02/21/revealerations/

The instructions are precise and detailed. I have attached the pdf, and it is available on Alan's blog.

The comments on the blog give some sense of how widespread this device appears to have been.

 

It appears that a small British tech company, ATSC (uk) sold hi tech dowsing instruments, for the purpose of detecting explosives and narcotics, to the Iraqi government in 2008, and up to 20 other governments. The Iraqi deal was for a total of some $32 million dollars, with additional orders for perhaps another $53 million.

Dowsing rod scam exposed https://leftfootforward.org/2009/11/dowsing-rod-scam-exposed/

ATSC(uk) appear to still have a visible website,
ADE650, ADE 650, ADE651, ADE 651, ADE101, ADE 101, ADE750, ADE 750 - ATSC (UK) Ltd https://atscllc.en.ecplaza.net/products/ade650-ade-650-ade651-ade-651_49462

although according to Wikipedia, the company has been dissolved, and the founder imprisoned:

ADE 651 - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADE_651

 

Some more on the Revealer here, by Mike Caswell:

Untitled Document http://moonrakers.com/revealer/

 

I work for a natural gas utility company, and was in the pipeline division for a couple of years. We routinely kept makeshift dowsing rods in our trucks, that were simply brass brazing rods bent into ell shapes. If you hold a pair loosely in your hands with the longer ends pointing forward like handguns, and start walking, the rod tips swing towards each other as you pass over a pipeline. I made believers out of several people, by giving them a pair to hold and having them walk with their eyes closed...

I don't know about all that other stuff people claim, but I'll personally vouch that dowsing works on large gas or water pipelines.

 

Pipelines, like underground water, frequently come with their own magnetic fields. Which is how I would guess dowsing rods really work.

I dimly remember shaking my head when these bomb detecting systems were first mentioned, after all, if an IED is big enough and close enough to set off a dowsing rod you are seriously, seriously screwed. We're talking Lt George asking Captain Blackadder what the standard procedure was for stepping on a land mine screwed.

 

Transporting stone with man-powered tractor, England, c. 1880.
WorkCrews: Vintage Employee Photos • r/WorkCrews https://old.reddit.com/r/WorkCrews/?count=50&after=t3_85chti
What a contraption!

 

I'll bet they'd never heard of a forklift . .

Fortunately for the radial spoked driven back wheels the produced power and torque seems to be quite low . .

 

Troy, Ru, thanks for your responses.

This is a rabbit hole I'm currently going down, and finding it fascinating. I try very hard to maintain what I feel is a robust world view, which is liberal, open to all possibilities, even those that are unexplained, yet skeptical in a non militant way, just seeking objective, robust, repeatable evidence of 'phenomena'.

I find dowsing particularly interesting because I find it challenges my 'robust' world view.

It is very difficult to find documentation of scientifically robust, reproduceable evidence of successful dowsing.

Yet there is a vast body of reliable anecdotal evidence for its success, such as yours, Troy.

(Incidentally, Troy, my father worked for Plessey as a Radio and Radar engineer. I remember him teaching us how to dowse as children, using bent coat hanger wire held loosely in the tubes from old biros, much as you describe. He also worked on a personal project, which was a crawler for gas and oil pipes, using (I think) radio to detect cracks and flaws in the pipes. Sadly he ran out of funds and couldn't attract any development interest. This was nearly 50 years ago.)

In the UK, dowsing has a documented history going back to at least the 15th century.
In contemporary times it is used by many, many hard nosed public sector and commercial organisations; Local authorities, highways departments, engineers, the police. Generally the attitude seems to be a perfectly reasonable and down to earth 'we don't know how it works, but it definitely works and we find it useful.'


Rurudyne - yes, the possible explanation that we have a sensitivity to changes in possibly very weak electro/magnetic fields, or similar I find totally plausible. As I understand it, the devices (hazel wands, L sticks, revealers) are purely a visual amplifier of the subtle nervous system responses.
The skeptical view is that the subtle muscular twitch that produces the movement in the indicator is a psychological 'ideomotor response' rather than a response to a physical field.
Interesting to compare with the fascinating and subtle mechanisms by which animals/birds navigate that we are starting to uncover.

The ATSC(uk) affair is interesting too. Its hard to imagine anyone developing this totally cynically as a scam without some belief in it working. Its hard to imagine national governments shelling out on unproven technology. Perhaps the fatal flaw is that ATSC seem to attempt to transfer the functioning of dowsing from being essentially a nervous system response, which by all accounts comes more naturally to some individuals than others, to the idea of it being the instrument which is actually detecting, rather than just being an indicator. Either way, the consequences of it not working for an individual user who is relying on it are horrendous.

The use of samples of materials in the Revealer becomes a little harder to hypothesise about, and smacks a little of talismanic magic.

If you read down the comment section of the Alan Fisher blog in my post #8152 above, there are some amazingly optimistic claims - using triangulated dowsing to find someone lost at sea, preferably with something 'of' the missing person - fingernail clippings perhaps, attached to the dowsing instruments. This starts to sound a lot like voodoo to me. As does 'remote' dowsing such as dowsing from maps. This very quickly slides off into fluffy areas of crystals, 'energies', auras and general woo, IMO. There is one tale of a couple visiting the inventor of the Revealer, and taking the torn off tip of a blade of grass back to his house. The Revealer was, apparently, able to navigate back to the remaining part of the blade of grass still growing in the field.

There is an interest here too, in dowsing for ley lines, and the suggestion that this may have been a navigational method.

Undoubtedly, there is a considerable charlatanism industry surrounding the subject, and a vociferous debunking industry which doesn't make it easy to consider clearly. But consideration of the subject runs across scientific, cultural, anthropological and psychological fields.



I shall wrap up with a link to a book on dowsing and ley lines, by Gerald Chatfield, which explains in considerable detail how to make a device to *make* ley lines, and how he uses them for navigation at sea.

He refers to several different types of ley lines, and the ones he makes, using a quartz iodine bulb, are 'Quartz lines.'

Dowsing and Ley Lines https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=41IeDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT10&lpg=PT10&dq=quartz+lines+dowsing&source=bl&ots=OTzQ1RO0mG&sig=AtdnFpyCwrG6ZqK-T7fxlsFkWBI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWvpyLlNXbAhVIBsAKHe5JB0kQ6AEIGjAG#v=onepage&q=quartz%20lines%20dowsing&f=false

 

Great picture Sam Sam - thanks! Loving the articulated feet to increase the ground contact and spread the load. And that the chap steering is wearing the top hat and looking important, while the others do the hard work...

 

Separate drives to the rear wheels... would allow some rear wheel steering?

Also, the much lighter looking front end of the stone lifter looks like you might wind the chain up by sticking a lever in the hole(s) in the wheel at the top - presumably against a ratchet...

 

Some charlatan industry . .

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Geller was smart there, he took his loss in advance, and refused trying to do his tricks with the not secretly prepared items, so he could blame it on having felt he had a bad day, so his total failure couldn't be visualized, while Hydrick 21 y/o at the time wasn't that smart yet, and tried even though he knew he would fail, he just couldn't keep up the appearance like Geller, who kept on to amaze the public afterwards . . .

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Its an interesting area culturally, Angel. Do we see this stuff (Geller et al.) as entertainment, the same as being entertained by a magician, or perhaps a hypnotist? does that make it ok? Or is it a serious attempt to defraud?
I struggle to warm to Randi - He's certainly a showman, and has made a career of debunking. That's fine where the deceit goes beyond entertainment, and is hurtful or harmful; the ATSC case potentially, faith healers, mediums, perhaps, extorting money from grieving people at a time of great vulnerability.

I'm not aware of Geller being other than a showman or magician, but maybe I'm missing something.

Hypnotism seems to have gained considerable traction as a genuine therapy, but also exists as pure entertainment.

Perhaps three areas to consider:

1) the use of 'the supernatural/paranormal' to manipulate/defraud/control others....
2)'magic'/magicianship/illusion as a form of entertainment
3) An unclear or as yet to be understood phenomenon that does not appear to present robust scientific evidence, yet has persistent, stubborn, repeated anecdotal evidence.

Its number 3 that I'm thinking about really, and dowsing and hypnotism come into this. I think hypnotism has considerably more documented evidence that it works, but I'm not sure we actually know how.
Questions.
Is something happening here? are we seeing a genuine, unexplained phenomenon?
If we are, then what is the mechanism that explains it?
If we are not, then why culturally/behaviourally/anthropologically is the apparent phenomenon so persistent?

 

Geller claims to be not a showman or magician, but to do his tricks with psychic power and extrasensory perception, I think it's good when such claims are proved or refuted.

Showmen and magicians are OK for me, I don't need to know the nature of their tricks, as long as they don't sell it as the truth to the public like Geller does.

Far as I know Randi only exposes tricks when they're falsely sold as psychic power and extrasensory perception.

If those claimed psychic powers wouldn't be false, then they couldn't be debunked.

 

I had a co-worker who claimed to be a dowser and had helped many folks recover lost gold jewelry such as a heavy class ring that fell off a guys finger when he threw a stone out in a large field. He brought in to work his brass L wires that fit into brass tubes that he would hold in his hands. The other co-workers and I were rather skeptical and asked if we could perform a "Scientific" test on his abilities. In a large open area of the office we piled all our gold rings, watches and other pieces up under a Styrofoam cup. While he was in another room we set it out in a line other identical cups with nothing under them and moved them around like the classic shell game. He would come in with his wands and hover over each Styrofoam cup and pronounce where he thought all the gold was. After many attempts he never got the right cup. Statistics would predict that he would get an occasional hit but try as he could he could never locate the cache. He claimed we were producing too much "negative energy" for it to work.
Random contraption:

 

Negative energy? You used your wedding rings, didn't you?

I'm reminded of the scene from Ghostbusters where Venkman is shocking the guy who gets the right answers and as he becomes angrier and more frustrated he keeps getting right results while the girl Venkman is flirting with and telling her how amazing she was gets none right. Of course your friend seems to have had the opposite happen.