Robert Rosenberg received a Ph.D. in History of Science and Technology from Johns Hopkins University. He spent two decades at RutgersUniversity on the staff of the Thomas A. Edison Papers, the last seven as director of the project. Since 2001 he has lived on the San Francisco Peninsula, working from 2005 to 2013 for John Wiley & Sons and otherwise as an independent scholar. Before undertaking his graduate studies he had worked briefly at the Psychical Research Foundation in Durham, N.C., and he has felt since that time that the epoch marked by the early empirical work of the Society for Psychical Research and its contemporaries has the potential to be as important as any watershed in the history of science — if we can figure out how to assign meaning or cause to the phenomena described by those researchers and their successors.