4 D The Secret Lfe of Nature
Gardner, impressed by Doyle's size and rmlitary manner, showed
him the two negative plates plus some extraordinary enlargements of
the photos that Doyle found "superlatively beautiful... .The exquisite
grace of the flying fairy baffled description."
Doyle promptly took the plates to the Kodak Company offices in
Gngsway, where he saw a Mr. West and another expert of the com-
pany. After careful examination, both could find no evidence of trick-
ery or superimposition.
The possibility that photographs of fairies could actually have been
taken in the north of England "under circumstances which seemed to
put fraud out of the question" appeared to Doyle to be no less mo-
mentous than Columbus's reputed discovery of a New World.
It was clear to Doyle that if the photographs and the manner in
which they were obtained could be made to hold their own against
criticism, they were bound to excite considerable attention. "It would
be no exaggeration to say that they will mark an epoch in human
thought."
At lunch at his club, the Athenaeum, Doyle showed the prints to his
friend and well-known physicist, Sir Oliver Lodge, whose opinion in
psychic matters he respected. As a member of the British Society for
Psychical Research together with Sir Wilham Crookes, inventor of a
tube for demonstrating cathode rays, forerunner of the television
screen, Lodge and other leading scientists had become interested in
phenomena of what was termed the "etheric world."
The four levels of etheric matter, finer than solid, liquid, and
gaseous, were labeled by theosophist Charles Leadbeater as EI, E2, E3,
and Eq, the last being the most subtle.
"I can still see his [Lodge's] astonished and interested face," wrote
Doyle, "as he gazed at the pictures in the hall of the Athenaeum Club."
As a first step toward possible authentication of the photographs, it
was agreed that Gardner visit the girls' parents in Yorkshire, Mr. and
Mrs. Eddie Wright, on whose property the exposures were reputed to
have been made.
In mid-July of 1921, Gardner duly took a train to Bradford, a large
industrial center in a valley of the Aire at the foothills of the English
Pennines, traveling with what he called "an open mind."