💦 Dowsing: The secrets of water divination, unearthed

[Quartz Obsession] Dowsing January 08, 2018 This one weird trick --------------------------------------------------------------- Recently, a couple in the Midlands of England wanted to install a new pipe from their house to the water main. The technician assigned to locate the water main used not a set of blueprints, nor an app, but two “bent tent pegs”—a dowsing rod, also known as a divining rod. Sally Le Page, the daughter of the couple—and an evolutionary biologist at Oxford—was shocked to find that 10 out of 12 major water companies in the United Kingdom still [employ the age-old paranormal technique](. “The older methods are tried and tested,” the company’s representative, Severn Trent, told Le Page. This is half true: The dowsing rod has been used in England since the 1500s, when it was imported by miners from Germany, where the “modern” dowsing rod originated. It’s also been tested, and it doesn’t work any better than randomly drilling holes. But dowsing rods keep finding use again and again—by [Nazi Germany]( [drought-stricken California farmers]( [Indian builders]( the [Ottawa environmental services department]( and [a Montana coroner looking for unmarked graves](. Humans want to believe, and because the rods work about as well as pure random chance, our belief is rewarded. 🐦 [Tweet about this!]( [Post this on Facebook!]( Quotable “It’s the mind that does the work. The tool just does the indicating.” — [Greg Storozuk, former president of the American Society of Dowsers]( By the digits [$250:]( Cost for a dowsing-based well siting in California [>2,000:]( Members of the American Society of Dowsers [48%:]( Accuracy of dowsing homeopaths in a 2002 study [25,000:]( Number of American dowsers in 1967 [$38m:]( Worldwide gross of Russell Crowe’s 2014 film The Water Diviner explainer How does it “work”? --------------------------------------------------------------- One explanation for how the practice might have come about is an [old belief that metallic ores caused trees to bend down toward the ground](. The dowsing rod tries to make that phenomenon portable. More recent suppositions focus on electromagnetic gradients created by water, which are [somehow detected by dowsers](. What’s actually happening is the “ideomotor effect”—the same effect that powers Ouija boards and has [served as the basis for scams like fake bomb detectors and liver-disease detectors](. As the name suggests, the movements are caused by subconscious thoughts that trigger minute muscle spasms. In the case of dowsing for water, the signals are often right, but for a disappointingly banal reason: Drill deep enough in much of the world, and you’ll usually hit water. There’s a bit of evidence that dowsing rods could work, but only as a placebo, [tapping into subconscious instinct]( to improve a searcher’s odds a bit more than pure chance. A woodcut from Georgius Agricola’s [definitive 1556 mining and chemistry text]( [De Re Metallica,]( which outlined the modern dowsing method. Timeline [6,000 BCE:]( Algerian cave paintings appear to depict a dowsing rod [484 BCE:]( Herodotus describes the Scythians as dowsers [1518:]( Martin Luther condemns dowsing [1701:]( The Inquisition bans the use of dowsing rods to prosecute criminals [1833:]( French chemist Michel Eugene Chevreul uses the [ideomotor effect]( to debunk dowsing [1968:]( American troops dowse for Viet Cong tunnels during the Vietnam War [2011:]( The town of Llano, Texas uses a dowser to find a well [2017:]( Explorers find a massive cavern under Montreal using a dowsing rod Ye Olde Jargon Watch Why is it called dowsing? --------------------------------------------------------------- No one knows for sure. The [Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research from 1898]( has a roundtable about its etymology which centers around the Cornish language (the dowsing rod is believed to have been introduced to England via Cornwall, which has a centuries-old history of mining). “Douse” means to lower, dip, or strike, which the rods are supposed to do when they find their target. Another theory is that the Latin name, virgula divina (“divine rod”), translates to dowses or dewsys from the Cornish for “divinity” or “Godhead.” The [Encyclopedia Britannica of 1910]( favors the theory that it comes from the Cornish by way of the Middle English duschen, “to strike or fall.” Dowse in style If you don’t need to drill a well or mine for tin, the Belgian designer Frédéric Gooris [designed a Virgula Divina bottle opener]( for the Italian housewares company Alessi, which looks like a dowsing rod by way of Brancusi. Pop Quiz Which young fantasy heroine is a dowser? Lucy PevensieHermione GrangerMeg MurryCoraline Jones Correct. Neil Gaiman’s spooky titular character uses a rod made of poison oak. Incorrect. If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email. Person of interest The dowsing damsel --------------------------------------------------------------- Martine Bertereau, the Baroness de Beausoleil, is believed to have been [the first female mining engineer]( she came from a family of French mine owners and married Jean de Chatelet, himself a mining expert. The two became a power couple of European mining; she [published two works on the subject]( and they [received commissions throughout the continent]( to take advantage of their knowledge. But that knowledge included the use of dowsing rods, which was associated with witchcraft. That ([or perhaps politics]( got them thrown in a French prison, where they both died. She’s [given a place at the table]( in Judy Chicago’s legendary art installation The Dinner Party, a massive piece memorializing 400 women from history and mythology. Industry hazards The dangers of dowsing --------------------------------------------------------------- In 2009, The New York Times [reported]( that Iraqi security forces were employing thousands of a device known as the ADE 651, a “small hand-held wand, with a telescopic antenna on a swivel” that was supposed to work on “electrostatic magnetic ion attraction.” They were supposed to detect bombs and weapons; the Times sent a guard and reporter through nine dowsing-rod-defended checkpoints with rifles and ammunition and got through all of them—despite the Ministry of the Interior’s $85 million investment in the devices. In reality, they were modified gag toys for golfers; the CEO of the company was sentenced to [10 years in prison for the scam](. Because science! Dowsing in space --------------------------------------------------------------- For the past 15 years, two satellites known as GRACE (Gravitational Recovery and Climate Experiment) have been monitoring Earth’s water. [These NASA tools]( “measure the local gravitational field underneath their flight path by detecting each other’s slightest wobbles, with an accuracy of within one-fiftieth the width of a human hair.” Gravitational force tugs on the satellites, and that gravitational force can vary with the presence or absence of water. The technology has been used to track ice shelves, sea levels, and underground reservoirs—in a method eerily close to how dowsing rods are supposed to work. Fun fact The illusionist/[psychic warrior]( Uri Geller [made $350,000]( dowsing on behalf of an Australian mining company. 📚 Reading list [“Climate of Doubt”:]( Journalist Lois Parshley journeyed to California’s Central Valley during the drought of 2014 and to the annual meeting of the American Society of Dowsers to take a Basic Dowsing School class, in an attempt to figure out how dowsing works—at least on us. [“The Nazi Underground”:]( In The New Yorker, Jake Halpern follows amateur Polish treasure hunters searching for Nazi gold, one of whom is a dowser. [“A Professional ‘Water Witch’ Explains How to Find Water in a Drought”:]( The head of the Nor Cal Dowsers, with more than six decades of experience, tells Vice’s Motherboard how he goes about his business. Poll How do you feel about dowsing now? [Click here to vote]( BewitchedBuyer beware! 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