Inventor of Kirlian photography
Semyon Davidovich Kirlian was a Soviet inventor and researcher of Armenian descent, who along with his wife Valentina Khrisanfovna Kirlian, a teacher and journalist, discovered and developed Kirlian photography.
First discoveries
By 1939 Kirlian had acquired a reputation as the best local resource for repairing electrical equipment, and was regularly called upon to fix the apparatus of scientists and laboratories in the area. In that year, he happened to witness a demonstration of a high-frequency d’Arsonval electrotherapy device. He noticed that there was a small flash of light between the machine’s electrodes and the patient’s skin, and wondered if he would be able to photograph it. (Kirlian was not the first person to witness this phenomenon, though the urge to photograph and investigate it seems to have been original with him.) Experimenting with similar equipment, he replaced glass electrodes with metal substitutes to take photographs in visible light; at the price of a severe electrical burn, he was able to take an unusual and striking photograph of an apparent energy discharge around his own hand and of others as well.
Development of Kirlian photography
Over the next ten years he and his wife developed and perfected apparatus for what we now call Kirlian photography. They employed a high-frequency oscillator or spark generator that operated at 75 to 200 kHz.
Gradually the Kirlians’ activity began to attract attention from professional scientists. Kirlian made controversial claims that the image he was studying might be compared with the human aura. An experiment advanced as evidence of energy fields generated by living entities involves taking Kirlian contact photographs of a picked leaf at set periods, its gradual withering being said to correspond with a decline in the strength of the aura. The Kirlians made many photographs of the leaves of various plants; by 1949, it was determined that Kirlian photography could detect incipient plant disease that was not otherwise detectable. In the same year, the Kirlians received a Soviet patent on their basic device, « a method of photographing by means of high-frequency currents. » Experimenting further upon themselves, the Kirlians acquired the first results showing that Kirlian photography could provide an index of a person’s physical health, and could illuminate the acupuncture points of the human body.
