Whilst most spiritualists ascribed the table movements to the agency of spirits, two investigators, Count de Gasparin and Professor Thury of Geneva conducted a careful series of experiments by which they claimed to have demonstrated that the movements of the table were due to a physical force emanating from the bodies of the sitters, for which they proposed the name ectenic force. If the experiment was successful the table would rotate with considerable rapidity, and would occasionally rise in the air, or perform other movements. When the movement of Modern Spiritualism first reached Europe from America in the winter of 1852–1853, the most popular method of consulting the spirits was for several persons to sit round a table, with their hands resting on it, and wait for the table to move. Scientists and skeptics consider table-turning to be the result of the ideomotor effect, or of conscious trickery.
The process is similar to that of a Ouija board.
The table was purportedly made to serve as a means of communicating with the spirits the alphabet would be slowly spoken aloud and the table would tilt at the appropriate letter, thus spelling out words and sentences. Table-turning (also known as table-tapping, table-tipping or table-tilting) is a type of séance in which participants sit around a table, place their hands on it, and wait for rotations.
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