E. E. Fournier d’Albe

1868–1933

Edmund Edward Fournier d’Albe was a physicist and inventor whose optophone turned printed letters into patterns of musical tones for blind readers. He also translated scientific and psychical works and promoted Celtic languages. His investigations of mediumship included both an endorsement of reported materialisations and a later account of deception in the Goligher circle.

Physics, language and the optophone

Fournier d’Albe was born in London and educated in Düsseldorf before studying chemistry and physics at the Royal College of Science in London. After graduating in 1891, he moved with his family to Ireland in 1895. He worked with George Francis FitzGerald at Trinity College Dublin and later in the physics laboratory of the Royal College of Science in Ireland. Teaching appointments took him to Birmingham and then Lahore.

His life in Ireland also involved an energetic commitment to language. He edited Celtia, helped organise Pan-Celtic congresses and published an English-Irish dictionary and phrasebook. His support for Esperanto belonged to the same search for communication across national boundaries. These interests accompanied his scientific work rather than replacing it.

The optophone turned variations in light reflected from print into patterns of sound. A trained listener could distinguish letters through those changing tones. The Science Museum preserves a 1918 instrument, and Fournier d’Albe’s 1921 letter to Nature describes an amplified demonstration that made the signals audible to several blind pupils in one room. This was reading by learned sound patterns, rather than a machine speaking the words aloud. Cost and the difficulty of learning the system limited its adoption, despite his years of development.

He married Edith Consuelo Hitchcock in 1906. They lived apart for many years, and in 1924 he was convicted of assaulting her. A later stroke left him partly paralysed, but he continued writing and scientific correspondence. He died in St Albans in 1933.

Books and contributions

1 work in the current library

Phenomena of Materialisation

Albert von Schrenck-Notzing; translated by E. E. Fournier d’Albe

Consciousness & Psychic Phenomena

Sources and further reading

Materialisation and the test of evidence

Fournier d’Albe’s speculative books, including Two New Worlds and New Light on Immortality, tried to imagine survival after death in physical terms. These were proposals about mind and matter, rather than discoveries established by his optical inventions. His work with the Dublin section of the Society for Psychical Research brought him into the experimental study of mediumship.

In 1920 he translated Albert von Schrenck-Notzing’s Phenomena of Materialisation. His preface explains that the English version incorporates supplementary research and was prepared in consultation with the author and Juliette-Alexandre Bisson. He explicitly endorsed the reported phenomena, drawing partly on sittings with Eva C. in London, while saying that a spirit explanation was not yet required. The library’s 1923 copy is a reissue of that first English edition and retains his preface dated August 1920.

His investigation of the Goligher circle in Belfast the following year reached a different conclusion. Having begun with the hope of independently confirming William Crawford’s results, he recorded twenty sittings and found the claimed phenomena unconvincing. The Goligher Circle, published in 1922, reported evidence of ordinary manipulation and disputed the supposed ectoplasmic structures. He criticised lighting that left legs and the floor in darkness, and arrangements that allowed the circle to determine which tests could proceed. His conclusion arose from the conditions and observations of those sittings.