Post by caridwen on Mar 9, 2015 4:00:58 GMT
"Call me old-fashioned, but I rely on my rods," engineer Dougie Scriven told journalists as he retired from Yorkshire Water in 2001. "I've used them for 24 years now and they have come up trumps when everything else has failed." Before leaving, Scriven trained several new employees in the use of dowsing rods, just as he was taught to use them on joining the firm in the 1970s.
Divination for water, oil, minerals and other objects - traditionally using a forked twig of hazel or yew, copper wire, a pendulum or even a bent coat-hanger - is still practised all over the world. Known as water witching, radiesthesia, rhabdomancy, divining or dowsing, it's a skill that has been carried out for thousands of years across every continent. There are numerous historical accounts of successes, from the 1692 case of Jacques Aymar in Lyon, who used divining rods to track down three murderers, to US engineers finding tunnels and traps in the Vietnam war.
The forces behind the ability have been ascribed to everything from electromagnetism and radiation to subconscious readings of the landscape or human body language, but ultimately remain unidentified.
They are also temperamental. Typically, when studied under controlled conditions, the dowsers are unable to perform as well as they had expected, often scoring results close to chance. As yet, no dowser has claimed the million dollars offered by arch-debunker James Randi to anyone satisfactorily demonstrating paranormal abilities.
One famous study, carried out near Munich in the late-1980s, saw 500 dowsers perform almost 10,000 double blind trials detecting pipes buried underground. While the physics professor behind the experiment, Hans-Dieter Betz of Munich University, declared that he had incontrovertible evidence of the dowsers' abilities, hardline statisticians have since called the findings into serious question.
But for every doubting scientist there's a success story. In 2003, a dowser hired by the Ysgol Gyfun Preseli school in Pembrokeshire located an underground water supply which, it is hoped, could save them £10,000 a year in water bills.
It's likely that the Munich experiments will remain the most extensive for some time, but we can be sure that forked twigs and copper rods will be part of the well-digger's toolkit for generations to come.
Mark Pilkington
Divination for water, oil, minerals and other objects - traditionally using a forked twig of hazel or yew, copper wire, a pendulum or even a bent coat-hanger - is still practised all over the world. Known as water witching, radiesthesia, rhabdomancy, divining or dowsing, it's a skill that has been carried out for thousands of years across every continent. There are numerous historical accounts of successes, from the 1692 case of Jacques Aymar in Lyon, who used divining rods to track down three murderers, to US engineers finding tunnels and traps in the Vietnam war.
The forces behind the ability have been ascribed to everything from electromagnetism and radiation to subconscious readings of the landscape or human body language, but ultimately remain unidentified.
They are also temperamental. Typically, when studied under controlled conditions, the dowsers are unable to perform as well as they had expected, often scoring results close to chance. As yet, no dowser has claimed the million dollars offered by arch-debunker James Randi to anyone satisfactorily demonstrating paranormal abilities.
One famous study, carried out near Munich in the late-1980s, saw 500 dowsers perform almost 10,000 double blind trials detecting pipes buried underground. While the physics professor behind the experiment, Hans-Dieter Betz of Munich University, declared that he had incontrovertible evidence of the dowsers' abilities, hardline statisticians have since called the findings into serious question.
But for every doubting scientist there's a success story. In 2003, a dowser hired by the Ysgol Gyfun Preseli school in Pembrokeshire located an underground water supply which, it is hoped, could save them £10,000 a year in water bills.
It's likely that the Munich experiments will remain the most extensive for some time, but we can be sure that forked twigs and copper rods will be part of the well-digger's toolkit for generations to come.
Mark Pilkington