Scholars and Miners: Dowsing and the Freiberg Mining Academy

Abstract

The Freiberg Mining Academy (f. 1765) illustrates how state control and the Enlightenment came to dominate European mining. Notwithstanding calls for a break with mining tradition, however, prospecting remained steeped in the tacit knowledge of miners, which legitimized the divining or dowsing rod. After 1800, German physicists and Romantic scientists developed a new theory of dowsing that drew on Galvani’s and Volta’s research. The famous Freiberg physicist Ferdinand Reich examined a dowser in the 1840s who claimed to experience a galvanic response to mineral ore. This case demonstrates a new synthesis of traditional prospecting and scientific theory that would mark dowsing practice in the modern age.