Scientific investigations of the pendulum were
carefully conducted as far back as the late 1700s. One
such investigator was Johann Wilhelm Ritter, known as
the father of electrochemistry. He performed many tests
with the pendulum and was soundly ridiculed by his
colleagues for dabbling in "superstitious nonsense."
However, Ritter proved through his experiments that the
pendulum could provide answers to anything by
connecting with the collective unconscious
(superconscious or universal mind), as Carl Jung called
it. Ritter's detailed studies interested other noted
researchers including Professor Antoine Gerboin at the
University of Strasbourg, who went so far as to publish a
book of 253 tests for using the pendulum.
This book, in turn, influenced Michel-Eugene
Chevreul, who gave twenty years of his life to studying
the pendulum. Chevreul was a director at the Natural
History Museum in Paris in 1830. Chevreul, like Ritter
before him, determined that there was a direct
connection between the subconscious and
superconscious minds of the user and the movement of
the pendulum. Today, the pendulum is still sometimes
called Chevreul's pendulum.
In the mid-1920s, a Major Pogson of Britain was
dowsing for water for the Bombay government, under
British rule. He was greatly successful at this, even when
more orthodox methods had turned up nothing. He
became the official Water Diviner and visited all the
districts of Bombay seeking underground water. One
official report on his work states that Major Pogson
found water in 220 of the 577 sites he dowsed and never
failed when he predicted water at a certain depth.
Evelyn Penrose, who was born in Cornwall, was hired
by the government of British Columbia in 1931 to find