Assignment:
According to Collins: “An illusion is something that appears to exist or be a particular thing but does not actually exist or is in reality something else.”
Exactly.
Take the Cottingley Fairies as a prime example of “in reality something else”.
The Cottingley Fairies came about when two English girls who were cousins, enjoyed playing in a creek called the Cottingley Beck. Elsie decided on a plan to prove to Frances’s very upset Mom, why they seemed to always came back from the creek with wet and dirty dresses. Elsie, then 16 years old, borrowed her Dad’s camera and and ‘snapped’ the picture of her playmate Frances (age 9) you see below:
Wikipedia.org
You have to hand it to Elsie, she was an accomplished artist, at 16 years old no less. Notice the soft light? We will come back to that later. There is no known record of the response from Mrs. Griffiths, if she believed that the girls had photographed the cardboard cutouts “fairies” that they played with down in the creek, and thus had soiled their dresses.
So, let’s press pause for a second, there is much to unpack here. This story happened way back in the summer of 1917. Elsie did not use an iPhone, a digital camera, or a AI image generator like Midjourney. She used this:
Wikipedia.org
This is a Midg falling plate camera made by the British firm of Butcher. (The camera illustrated here is a model 0, and the girls used a model 1, which was identical except it had a lens that could focus.) And in a “falling plate” camera, that is exactly what happens. The camera could hold six photographic plates, which you had to load by hand into the camera in total darkness. When the camera is loaded, the six plates are stacked together and held in place by the spring you see in the photo above. When you clicked the shutter and exposed the first plate, a lever was then shifted and allowed the first plate to release, tip over, and fall to the bottom of the camera by gravity, thus presenting the next plate for exposure. If one forgot to operate the lever and drop the plate, you would get a double exposure if you clicked the shutter again.
Is the photograph of the ‘fairies’ a double exposure? Maybe, the lighting seems to be very flat for the cardboard cutouts, the soft even light down in the creek bottom would have hidden the sharp shadows of the cutouts. But one has to admit, Elsie was a very accomplished photographer and, according to her father, an accomplished artist as well. Whether she used a double exposure, and had to align the two views in the camera, or she placed the cutouts somehow in front of Frances, the result is very good.
………………………………………………………………
Well, the Cottingley Fairies probably would have yellowed and molded away in a forgotten shoe box somewhere, except that Sherlock Holmes got on the case.
Yep.
You can tell me I’m wrong. You can correct me in saying that there was no episode of Holmes investigating the Cottingley Fairies. And yes, you would be correct, but, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who created Sherlock, did indeed, get involved in the photos of the fairies. And that, my dear Watson, is an interesting study.
The following is a cautionary tale. One where a train wreck of hope, belief, and bias, all derail objectivity and chugs off into the chasm made by human frailty.
You see, Frances’s mother might not have believed there were fairies in the photographs the girls had taken, but Elsie’s mother did. Later on Elsie’s mother, Polly Wright, took the photos to a meeting of the “Theosophical Society.” The meeting that evening was on “Fairy Life.” In 1917 Britain, belief in fairies was quite common, so this kind of gathering would not have been seen as especially unusual.
After the presentation, Mrs. Wright showed the photographs to attendees and they generated great interest. Thereafter the photos toured around England with the Society’s meetings. They ended up on display at the annual Society conference where they came to the attention of a leading member of the Society, Edward Gardner. Now the Theosophical Society was an organization that had as one of its tenets, that humanity undergoes cycles of evolution that lead to progressive perfection. And Gardner was completely taken in by the girls’ photos.
He is quoted to remark that, “the fact that two young girls had not only been able to see fairies, which others had done, but had actually for the first time ever been able to materialise them at a density sufficient for their images to be recorded on a photographic plate, meant that it was possible that the next cycle of evolution was underway.”
Gardner, being a proper British gentleman, obtained the photographic negatives from Elsie’s father, and took them to Harold Snelling, an expert on photograph processes and asked if he thought that the negatives had been retouched or tampered with. Snelling did not think that the negatives had been tampered with. Note that the conversation was not whither the fairies were real or not, the question posited was, did the negatives appear to be retouched.
The photos came to the attention of our esteemed Sir Arthur when the editor of the Light magazine told him of the girls’ images. Light was a spiritualist magazine that Sir Arthur written for many times in the past. It might come as somewhat of a surprise to many that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a spiritualist, but it is true. Sherlock Holmes, as you know, solved mysteries using deductive logic and astute observation. Holmes’s persona is just the opposite of what we see in this tale of fairies and hope.
Doyle had been commissioned to write a story about fairies for the Strand magazine’s Christmas edition, so these photos must have been a godsend to Doyle, (according to biographer M. Magnusson). Doyle wrote to Elsie’s father asking permission to use the photos in the magazine story. Permission was granted.
Now here at this juncture, I think more uneasiness is found, as both Gardner and Doyle sought more reassurance that the photos were real. They got technicians from Kodak to examine the photos and Kodak said the images seemed to be untouched, but cautioned that a photo should not be used as proof of fairies. Also it seems even the large English photography firm of Ilford came onboard with analysis. Ilford was more blunt: the photos were faked. (One wonders if the negatives were made on Kodak film plates and thus Kodak was less inclined to disparage their goods, whereas Ilford had no such reticence).
Well what should one do with that analysis? The photo expert Snelling said that the negatives appear to be fine, not retouched, Kodak agreed, but cautioned about believing what you see, and Ilford said they were fakes.
What would I do if I really believed in fairies and hoped that my belief could be true? The answer of course is cognitive bias. Imagine that in tying your shoes, you had to program each finger in separate thoughts and had to direct each individual muscle of each finger to actuate just the right amount, and had to do this each time you bent over to tie your shoes. If that was the case, we would all be walking barefoot for millennia. Biology by nature is very efficient. Your brain uses somewhere around 10 watts of power to function, whereas a single AI query can take 3 watts, which is about one third of what our entire brain is using to keep us alive and to do work. So in biology complex tasks or processes are often simplified in ways that are similar to what we call cognitive bias. To make complexity easier to work with, we as humans will instinctively find a ‘short cut’ to make something easier to understand, and this is why we fall to cognitive bias. It is natural to have bias, it is how we are wired. This allows us to be very efficient by developing habits that take no thought, like tying our shoes. So to combat bias we need to understand how information is sourced. If one weather source says it is raining outside and another source says it is sunny, we then need to find another way to solve a cognitive dilemna, like going outside and see what the weather actually is, for instance.
And credit goes to Gardner and Doyle. They did indeed get three different experts (sources). But the cognitive bias in interpreting the results led them to an emotional response instead of a rational one. Of the three analyses, two agreed, and one dissented, so therefore there are two that agree, so they must be correct.
And so fairies are real!
They wanted to believe this thing was true, and there was enough evidence to support it. And so they ran with it. Although one contemporary critic noted, “And knowing children, and knowing that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has legs, I decide that the Miss Carpenters have pulled one of them.”
It is interesting to note that not one of the experts said that the photos showed real fairies. They only stated that the negatives had not been retouched/manipulated. This, by the way, was a common thing to do to photos. There was a booming business during that era of photographing someone and then printing their dead loved one looking down from heaven behind them. Also note, Elsie had previously worked in a photo studio, so no doubt had been familiar with the various techniques used.
The girls admitted, decades later, to copying the images of the fairies from a children’s book. It appears that the cardboard cutouts were drawn by Elsie (she indeed was a very good artist, the copies she made compare very well to the originals). Researchers have noted that the fairies in the photograph are remarkably similar to the illustrations in the book, “Princess Mary’s Gift Book.” Elsie appears to have added butterfly wings to some of the figures to make them more like what everyone thought fairies should look like. Another aspect was that people noticed that the hair styles of the fairies were distinctly Parisian, and not anything like what an Irish fairy would have.
And yes, they are fake. How can I know? Look at the fairies. The fairies have no shadows, a dead giveaway that the figure is two dimensional. Elsie used the soft light in the creek bottoms to lessen the effect of shadows and this would have masked the stark nature of the cutouts to a large degree.
Does the story end there, where Sherlock Holmes’s author gets his leg pulled? Not hardly, for in 1998 the photographs and various other items, along with the book Doyle published, all sold at auction for 21,600 British Pounds. A few years later, the negatives were auctioned off for 6,000 Pounds! Fairies might not be real, but the money sure is.
So in keeping with English novelists, I present my image:
Sources include wikipedia.org, imdb.com, and google AI.