What’s central to Andriopoulos’s argument is that these devices included instruments specifically designed for pursuing supernatural research—for visualizing the invisible and showing the subtle forces at work in everyday life. In his words, these were “devices developed in occult research”—including “televisionlike devices”—invented in the name of spiritualism toward the end of the 19th century that later “played a constitutive role in the emergence of radio and television.”

This was, in the author’s words, part of “the reciprocal interaction between occultism and the natural sciences that characterized the cultural construction of new technological media in the late nineteenth century,” a “two-directional exchange between occultism and technology.”

So, while the television itself—the living room object you and I most likely know—might not be a supernatural mechanism, it nonetheless descends from a strange and convoluted line of esoteric experimentation, including early attempts at controlling electromagnetic transmissions, radio waves, and even experiencing various forms of so-called “remote viewing.”

An Occult History of the Television Set   

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