Word: rinn
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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SIXTY YEARS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH (618 pp.)-Joseph F. Rinn-Truth Seeker...
Once the Kettle. This sort of thing may strike the average man as harmless pother, but not Author Rinn. At 82, he is a onetime Manhattan produce broker and skilled amateur magician who has spent most of a lifetime trying to expose fake mediums as "the vilest gang of crooks that ever lived." No magician at writing a book, Rinn has nonetheless succeeded in presenting a bulky and formidable blast against spiritualism in all its forms...
Like his friend and fellow fake-hunter, Magician Harry Houdini, Rinn spent a long time looking for evidence of psychic power he could believe in. As a youngster, he was bowled over when a medium ordered him to place the spout of a kettle to his ear and thus receive the words of a "spirit voice." Only after he himself became a magician did Rinn realize that he had been duped (out of $5) by a double-bottomed kettle equipped like a telephone receiver and in contact with a "spirit" hidden behind a panel...
Always the Normal. Thenceforth, Magician Rinn fervently practiced what he and most of his fellow magicians insistently preached: that no "spirit manifestation" existed that they could not duplicate by plain trickery. They showed how clammy "spirit hands" (that brushed the brows of spectators at dark séances) were concocted out of paraffin or simply from "a kid glove filled with wet sawdust . . . kept on ice." One piece of so-called "ectoplasm" ("ectopiffle would be a better name," remarked a surly magician) proved to be a chunk of animal lung. The only "spirit body" that Rinn failed to duplicate...
There is always, concludes Rinn, "a normal explanation...