Dowsing

alanw

alanw

Well-known member
There have been a couple of previous threads mentioning dowsing. I came across this video today about a "professional" and "scientific" water and oil detection apparatus, manufactured by W. Mansfield & Co. of Liverpool in 1908.


It was priced at up to £175 in 1908 (£18,370.89 today, according to the Bank of England's inflation calculator)

It was debunked (along with many other dowsing techniques) in this 1917 US Government report https://pubs.usgs.gov/wsp/0416/report.pdf

Also a mention in Nature in 1909.
 
Obligatory ...

the_economic_argument.png
 
Different people get different “results” and even the same person will often get different “results” in blind tests aiming to show replication.
In my book dowsing is probably worse than useless as it produces lots of hydrological red herrings. There’s a really good paper by Trevor Ford somewhere (CRG Newsletter?) that goes into detail about this.
 
100% with pitlamp on that

Mentioned in the other thread, an occasion when I was invited to dowse to locate underground water for a borehole by a farmer (relative) in hill country in New South Wales. A professional dowser had already indicated where he thought it was (but I wasn't told anything). While the wires "indicated" a spot to me (uncanny and weird) my dowsing had no correlation whatsoever to the professional dowser's "finding", not did any of this have any correlation to what the farmer had done himself before the dowser had come. The correlation was as good as blindfolded darts throwing at a map. The dowser did occasionally find water in unlikely spots which is how he earned a living, but in my opinion he just gets lucky occasionally and 90% red herrings get forgotten due to people only telling stories about the 10% lucky guesses. As pitlamp said... worse than useless. It confuses the real info amongst the BS
 
BCA library gives us:
Cave Research Group of Gt. Britain (CRG) : TransactionsVol 6 (1) (1961) held by: BCL
PageAuthorContentTag
1-18Ford T.D.Underground Water, Geology and Water Divining
 
I dowsed a mine adit but I was told where it was so I wasn't convinced when the divining rods crossed as the placebo effect is so powerful I probably unconsciously got them to tilt. Come to think of when the OR reads this he'll probably insist I try it up at our mine dig!
 
Ive a set of 1970s "professional " oil dampered roads - as used for drain plotting.


I could bring them to the Dump for a play sometime
 
As an archaeologist I have tangled with dowsing and not been impressed. Structures located by this technique were not there. Once I tried it myself, and collapsed with chest pains, nasty episode the doctors concluded was viral pleurisy…. Maybe just coincidence but for some reason I have not tried it since. Steer clear.
 
Cantclimbtom said:
How about someone making literally millions and million selling dowsing rods and likely getting a number of people killed as a result
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That is incredible - how can people be so gullible? It wouldn't surprise me, thought, if MoD bought some too.
 
There are currently multiple high-tech armies fighting multiple high-tech wars, driven purely by the logic and arguments of ancient preachings carved onto stone tablets and written on parchment, so not much about gullibility would surprise me these days.
 
pwhole said:
There are currently multiple high-tech armies fighting multiple high-tech wars, driven purely by the logic and arguments of ancient preachings carved onto stone tablets and written on parchment, so not much about gullibility would surprise me these days.
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Amen to that , brother.
 
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