Benjamin Franklin: The First Parapsychologist and His Creation of the Blind Protocol (PDF)
This paper describes the first reported blind protocol, which was devised by Croesus, King of the Lydians (BCE 560-547) and reported by Herodotus (~ BCE 484 – ~ 424). It was used in the first Remote Viewing experiment to enter the historical record. The next documented use of a blind protocol occurred in 1784, when it was explicitly employed in the interest of science, and its history as a research technique begins. King Louis the XVIth’s created a commission to evaluate Friedrich Anton Mesmer’s claims concerning healing through “animal magnetism”, administered while people were in a trance. Franklin was asked to be the commission’s head. The paper argues that Mesmer was probably looking for a scientific model to explain what he was observing, and settled on the, then, fashionable alchemical idea of ‘animal magnetism.” Mesmer could not practice medicine, so his claims were represented by his colleague, d’Eslon, a licensed physician. Franklin could not attend the commission’s early efforts, which failed, so he arranged a series of experiments conducted in his house in Passy. To do them, Franklin created the blind protocol to answer the king’s question as to whether or not “animal magnetism” was real. Franklin literally blind-folded recipients of d’Eslon treatments, which is why the protocol came to be called “blind”. These experiments also included a demographic variable in the experiment design. Franklin also conceived an experiment incorporating not only blindness but “treated” and “control” populations, in which d’Eslon attempted to “magnetize” a tree. A blindfolded boy could not distinguish three control trees from a treated tree. The commission concluded “animal magnetism” did not exist, but was at pains to acknowledge that something had occurred. Franklin commented on the psycho-physiological
implications. But only the headline was remembered and the development of hypnotism, and psychosomatic medicine, would be crippled for half a century, an unintended consequence of Mesmer’s linking them to animal magnetism. Although Mesmerism died out in France, the English surgeon John Eliotson (1791-1868) apparently saw through Mesmer’s explanatory model to the psycho-physical self–regulation in the form of hypnosis that was Mesmer’s real discovery. He seems to avoided all attempts at explaining how it worked, but conducted a considerable number of surgeries using hypnosis as the anesthetic, anticipating its usage in this capacity a century later. So great was the disapproval of Mesmer, however, that no one seems to have gotten Eliotson’s point. Franklin’s protocol, however, rapidly became the gold standard of science, and he the first parapsychologist.
