Experimental Investigation of Table-Moving

Michael Faraday was a leading experimental physicist, and this Journal of the Franklin Institute paper is his own peer reviewed 1853 report of the apparatus he built to test table turning, demonstrating that unconscious ideomotor pressure from the sitters, not any external force, moved the table. Its strength is that it is a rigorous experimental test by a scientist of the first rank, designed specifically to rule out the sitters' own unconscious involvement, and its ideomotor explanation has stood as the standard scientific account since. Its limit is that Faraday tested table turning specifically, so a claim about a different purported physical mediumship phenomenon needs its own separate experimental evidence rather than an extension of this result.