Watters’ cloud chamber

A cloud chamber, also known as a Wilson chamber, is a detector used for visualizing the tracks of charged particles emitted from radioactive substances, perfected by the physicist Charles Thomson Rees Wilson in 1911.^[1] It consists of a sealed environment containing a supersaturated vapour of water and ethanol, droplets of which condense onto the ions as they pass through the chamber, leaving a trace of their track.^[2]

Wilson’s cloud chamber inspired the American psychic investigator Hereward Carrington (1880–1958) to suggest that the same technique could be used to capture an image of the soul as it left the body, if the death took place inside a similar chamber. In the 1930s the physicist R. A. Watters, of the William Bernard Johnston for Biophysical Research, built a cloud chamber to test Carrington’s idea, complete with a little internal guillotine.^[3] He administered lethal doses of anaesthetic to various small creatures including grasshoppers, frogs and mice, then quickly placed them into his cloud chamber.^[4] He claimed that his experiments revealed “misty shapes” formed in the chamber following the moment of death, resembling the bodily forms of those recently deceased animals. Watters published his results in The Intra-Atomic Quantity (1933), in which he proposed that the soul occupies the spaces between the atoms of the body’s cells.^[3]

Critics observed that the shapes Watters reported as having seen resembled the original creatures “only in the same way that the shapes we see in clouds … sometimes make us think of animals – in other words … a pareidolia effect”. Watters went on to improve his apparatus, as he reported in his Cloud Chamber Investigations into Post-Mortem Ions (1936), but by then he had concluded that the patterns of ionisation he was observing were simply the result of chemical decay.^[3]

Watters’ surviving photographs are stored in the archives of the Society for Psychical ResearchRegistered charity founded in 1882 to conduct scientific investigations into psychic and paranormal phenomena..^[4]

See also

• Hippolyte BaraducFrench physician who claimed to have taken photographs of souls leaving the bodies of the deceased.