Spare a thought for poor Madame Darget. How she must have sighed when her husband bounded over to the sofa in his office where she was attempting to rest. In his hands, he clutched a box of photographic plates.

“I am going to put out the lamp and try to take a fluidic print over my forehead,” Louis Darget later reported himself as telling her. “I will hand you a plate for you to do it as well.”

Dutifully, Mme. Darget held the plate about an inch in front of her face as her husband had instructed and, in the darkness, felt her eyelids droop. She was awakened with a jerk as the cool, smooth plate pressed against her face.

The next day, Commandant Darget burst into his wife’s room brandishing the developed photograph. Beneath the ill-defined, bird-shaped blur on the paper, her husband had scrawled in his loopy handwriting: “Photographie du reve. L’Aigle.” It translates as “Dream photography. The Eagle.” (see image, below)

The inner workings of Madame Darget's mind? (Credit: IGPP)

This was one of the images that convinced Commandant Darget he had successfully captured a photograph of thoughts being projected from the human brain. In a letter to the French Academy of Sciences in 1904, he claimed the method could reveal the inner workings of a person’s mind. While he was clearly misguided, his story holds some important lessons for modern scientists.

At the turn of the 20th Century, Darget’s experiments were certainly in line with the fashion of the time. A decade earlier, German physicist Wilhelm Rontgen had been the first to describe X-rays, using them to capture an image of the bones in his wife’s hand. Soon afterwards, Marie and Pierre Curie demonstrated the radioactivity of polonium and radium.

Suddenly, the world appeared full of strange, invisible phenomena that could be revealed using technology. Today, Instagram filters and Photoshop touch-ups are used to obscure reality, but to a handful of pioneering scientists – and pseudoscientists – in the early 1900s, photography was the gateway to a previously unseen world.

Soon enough, all sorts of radiation were being ‘discovered’, including Rene Prosper Blondlot’s now thoroughly discredited ‘N-rays’. Then there was Darget’s offering: “human radiation” in the form of thoughts, which he dubbed ‘V-rays’. The ‘V’ stands for “vital”.