Subject: Phipson's Phosphorescence
From: "Sean B. Palmer" <sean@...>
Date: 22 Mar 2007 16:10
When I first started digging through the archives for Will-o'-the-wisp information, one of the first pieces that I found was a letter by Dr. T. L. Phipson to The Times. He mentioned "eight to ten pages" in a book of his called Phosphorescence devoted to the wisp, and his letter showed that he'd done a goodly amount of research on the subject. But though I found out that his full name was Thomas Lamb Phipson, and that the book had been published in the same year as his letter (1862), I wasn't able to find the book in my library, and for some bizarre reason I didn't give it precedent in my list of things to track down. So, I was quite pleased to find today that Google have digitised it, and as is my wont I've turned it from bitmap into ascii by hand. Here's my thousand word transcription: http://inamidst.com/lights/wisp/phosphor1862 - T. L. Phipson (1862), Phosphorescence, pp.63-9 Phipson starts by giving the common theory that ignes fatui are caused by "phosphuretted hydrogen", but then interestingly adds a skeptical note stating that nobody has actually been able to yet synthesize the mechanism. In this manner he prefigures Dr. Allan A. Mills's observations from 1980 and 2000. He then debunks the secondary theory of luminous insects (later to rise again in the luminous owl theory of the early 20th century), citing Derham's observations as proof against; though he admits that it may account for some percentage of the sightings. He also mentions a sighting by Weissenborn who talks of a light that travelled "half a mile in less than a second", being rather redolent of the Hessdalen report of the early 1980s, where a light was tracked at unbelievable speeds on radar. Betwixt mentions of Blesson and Priestley, common figures in wisp literature from the 19th century, he talks about the season wherein the wisp is most likely to show: he thinks autumn, into November. He notes that Priestley's informant saw it in December, however, and I know that Allies saw it in mid-winter. The transcription I made earlier today of Henry Duncan also mentions winter as being the time for wisps. It might be a good idea to do a more comprehensive survey about this, on the scant documentary evidence that we have (I already made a start on this in the form of a characteristics table, which some of you may have seen). After mentions of Beccari and Shaw, he returns to an interesting so-called artificial wisp that Priestly talks about; he says that it followed the experimenter around, in contradistinction to the natural wisp behaviour of receding upon approach. Overall he thinks that the observed phenomena are down to two separate causes: ignited streams of gas, and something to do with electrically luminous mists. I think this is quite forward thinking for his time; we can't really do much better with our theorising now. I'd say that a small percentage of the sightings were down to misidentifications of insects and so forth, but the majority of sightings do indeed seem to settle into "natural lit gas" and "electrical" categories, with varying levels of dynamic behaviour from the latter category, whereas the former category (seen by, e.g., Blesson) are always fixed to the ground. I personally think of these as the ignis fatuus minor and ignis fatuus major, or Lesser Wisp and Great Wisp. But again, this is dangerous. All we can say for sure is that the mapping of observational names to characteristics to phenomena is as yet very tentative, though we can at least start on the first part of the mapping (names to characteristics) from the anecdotal documentary evidence. Cheers, -- Sean B. Palmer http://inamidst.com/lights/