In 1784 a royal commission chaired by Benjamin Franklin invented the blind trial to test animal magnetism

historyThe Public Domain Reviewlate 18th century · Paris, France

In 1784 a royal commission chaired by Benjamin Franklin invented the blind trial to test animal magnetism

the gist

In late 18th century Paris, Franz Mesmer's animal magnetism sessions were a craze, with patients gathering around magnetised tubs and experiencing dramatic crises. Mesmer claimed an invisible magnetic fluid caused most diseases, and his popularity alarmed doctors who worried about lost business. In 1784 King Louis XVI set up a commission chaired by Benjamin Franklin, which included the chemist Antoine Lavoisier and the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly. The commissioners asked whether cures came from the magnetism or from the patient's imagination. They designed experiments in which patients were magnetised without knowing it, or believed they were magnetised when they were not. Mesmer refused to cooperate, and the study used his disciple Charles Deslon.

so what

The commission's blinded and controlled tests were a foundational step toward the placebo controls and double-blind trials used in modern medicine. It also shows how expectation can produce real-seeming effects.

fun fact

Antoine Lavoisier, a fellow commissioner, was guillotined during the Revolution.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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