Today -100: November 23, 1925: Of confidence and spirit photographs

France: the government of Paul Painlevé loses a vote of confidence in Parliament, the right wing and the Communists joining forces to defeat it.

An article in Scientific American debunks a “spirit photograph” of St John the Evangelist and some cupids which Arthur Conan Doyle defended as totally real. The article, by Walter Franklin Prince, who actually believes in some psychical stuff, identifies the original on which the fraud is based: a 17th-century painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, with some added “ectoplasm.” “Do London spiritualists never visit the National Gallery?” he asks.

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