The wizard of oil: Abraham james, the harmonial wells, and the psychometric history of the oil industry

American spiritualism and the oil industry developed around the same time and in relatively close geographic proximity. Both nineteenth-century phenomena were invested in a belief in the unseen, whether in the form of deceased loved ones or of underground oil reserves. Spiritualists such as Abraham James turned to the oil industry because of its lucrative financial opportunities and because of its potential to demonstrate the "practical" applications of spiritualism and Harmonial philosophy. Spiritualism offered an alternative to evangelical Christian and classical republican conceptions of industry, and a vibrant communication network through which events in the oil fields could be related to the general public. Reading accounts of James's work as an "oil wizard" reveals the industrial aspirations of spiritualism and the psychometric aspects of the oil industry, both of which have been largely erased in twentieth-century historiography. Spiritualist publications, newspapers, technical manuals, and popular accounts of the oil industry throughout the nineteenth century produced James as a new kind of male medium, capable of meeting the exigencies of the oil fields. He proved infinitely reproducible as an agent of "practical spiritualism" and was discussed alongside the other drillers, operators, laborers, teamsters, and investors at work in the oil region. As petroleum geology began to establish itself as a discipline in the early twentieth century, accounts of the early oil industry reframed James, along with other practitioners of divination, as an amusing, if somewhat embarrassing, anomaly in an attempt to distinguish the modern "scientific" oil industry from its chaotic and superstitious beginnings. While later historians have offered a more sympathetic reading of divination's role in the oil fields, James and his Harmonial wells have largely disappeared from the historical record. Yet, despite scientific innovation and revisionist history, the oil industry still bears traces of its psychometric past and must contend with the ways in which its future is dependent on successfully channeling the unseen.