The Spoon That Kept Bending

Uri Geller rubs a teaspoon by his pool, hands it to his guest and jumps into the water. The guest, the Hungarian researcher George Egely, puts the spoon in his pocket. Every few minutes he takes it out, and it has bent a little more.

This file is Dr. György (George) Egely's own story, told on a page and a half of his book Titokzatos erők (“Mysterious Forces”, revised edition 2004), in a section he calls an interlude. The spoon from that afternoon is in the book too, photographed, and the figure of how Geller held it. This page holds both, and what the film could not: the context Egely gives the story, an earlier account of the same visit, and where the question stands today.

THE RECORDWhat he wrote

Why he went. In the summer of 1987 Egely visited Uri Geller near London, in Reading. He was working on his book on ball lightning at the time, and Geller's autobiography had caught his eye. Egely retells it earlier in the same chapter: at the age of four, playing in a park, Geller saw a small glowing ball come buzzing towards his forehead; when it touched him he felt a strong blow and fainted, and he came round only hours later. Egely suspected the ball was ball lightning. By the pool, Geller confirmed it and added a few small details to what his book had said.

The offer. Then Geller offered to bend a spoon. Egely knew he could do such things, he writes, so he said it was not necessary: he had not come prepared and had not even brought an object of his own. Geller waved it away, smiled, picked up a teaspoon and brought it to the edge of his pool. He was in swimming trunks, about to swim.

The grip. He took the spoon in his right hand, the way the book's Fig. 4 shows, and began gently rubbing its neck with the index finger of his left hand. After perhaps twenty seconds the handle visibly began to bend, in the direction the figure shows. The figure's caption makes the point that matters: pressing the spoon the way the finger rests on it would bend it the other way.

The handover. Geller gave him the spoon, jumped into the pool and, as Egely puts it, plainly lost interest in the matter.

The fingernail. In brackets, Egely adds the detail he used as a check. Geller stroked the spoon gently, without any physical effort, because the flesh under his nail did not turn white. Later, at dinner, Egely watched him use a knife, and then his nail changed colour, as anyone's does.

The pocket. Geller swam at his ease; Egely put the spoon in his pocket. For about a quarter of an hour they talked undisturbed, with nobody else nearby. Curiosity kept nagging him, so every two or three minutes he took the spoon out and looked at it. It kept bending. The change of shape stopped after a quarter of an hour at most.

The spoon today. It has kept that shape ever since. In the book he writes that it stands in a cabinet at his home, and he still has it today. He asked a physicist colleague to examine the metal: ordinary silver alloy, with the usual slight impurities and alloying additions.

Another account. Egely wrote about the same poolside in another book too. In Parajelenségek (“Paranormal Phenomena”, 1993) he describes his first meeting with Geller: Geller, getting ready to swim at the edge of his pool, asked him to think hard of something so he could guess it. A table was easy; he got it in moments. Then Egely thought of the middle of a huge black board, nothing but blackness from horizon to horizon, and Geller said, nervously or in surprise, that he saw nothing at all. That account has no spoon in it, and the 2004 account has no guessing game. That they describe the same afternoon is our reading: both are a first meeting at the pool, with Geller about to swim.

EGELY'S NOTESWhat he made of it

Fifteen minutes, not three weeks. The chapter that holds the interlude also takes apart a pamphlet, Confessions of a Psychic (1975), published under the name “Uriah Fuller”, which Egely reads as a pun and calls the work of an anonymous author; it is known today to have been written by the American science writer and sceptic Martin Gardner. Posing as advice to a fake psychic, it explains spoon bending as tricks, and one passage, as Egely quotes it in Hungarian (pp. 143–144), goes straight to the heart of this file: the fake psychic should tell people that the spoon will go on bending by itself for two or three weeks; it will not, but people want to believe it so much that a few days later they think it has bent further.

His own spoon fits his figure: a quarter of an hour at most. Whether a check every two or three minutes is the kind of observation that is easy to remember correctly is exactly what the sceptics ask; we come back to it below.

EGELY'S LENSWhy the neck

The interlude sits between two longer accounts of laboratory work, and in the second one Egely gives his explanation of what a spoon like his goes through. He draws on John Hasted, professor of solid-state physics at Birkbeck College in London, who tested Geller and, more often, teenagers who could bend metal, with strain gauges glued to or set inside the samples, and who described his work in The Metal-Benders (1981). In Egely's summary, Hasted's results answered a basic question: the objects are not pushed by some paranormal force; their material temporarily softens, its elastic limit drops, and ordinary small stresses are then enough to deform it.

That, Egely writes, also explains why it is the neck of a spoon that bends. Making a spoon leaves internal mechanical stress in the metal; heat a spoon until it softens and that stress is released, and the metal distorts. In his reading the same happens in paranormal metal bending: where manufacture has concentrated stress, the metal gives way, because its elastic limit falls dramatically. He adds that the changes in structure can leave the metal slightly but permanently harder or softer.

Applied to the Reading spoon, this would mean that Geller's finger did not need to push, which is what the fingernail suggested to Egely, and that the bend could continue in a pocket for as long as the metal stayed soft, then stop. Connecting his explanation to his own spoon this way is our reading; the book puts the two a few pages apart without drawing the line itself.

TODAYWhere the question stands

What rests on one witness. We found no other account of this afternoon, by Geller or anyone else, and no photographs of the spoon along the way. The bend was not measured while it happened; what is left is Egely's account and the spoon itself, which he still has. The spoon was also not his: he had brought nothing, and Geller picked up a teaspoon of his own. Magicians and sceptics have described for decades how a spoon can be made to look as if it bends in front of you: a spoon bent beforehand and turned slowly, edge-on to the viewer; metal weakened in advance by flexing it back and forth; a bend made while attention is elsewhere and revealed slowly. Egely knew this literature and argued with it in the same chapter. Whether any of it applies here, his account cannot tell us, and neither can we.

“It's still bending.” The second half of the story, the bend that went on in his pocket, has been studied as a question of perception. In 2005 the psychologists Richard Wiseman and Emma Greening showed people a film of a fake psychic who put a bent key on a table. When he said it was still bending, about 40 % of viewers reported that it kept bending; without that remark, about 5 % did. In Egely's account nobody says anything of the kind: Geller is in the pool. But Egely did expect something (he knew, he writes, that Geller could do such things), and he judged the change by eye, every two or three minutes, from memory of the last look. The study tested a key on a video, not this spoon, and cannot tell us what he saw.

The metal. At room temperature silver is far below the range where creep usually becomes significant (about a quarter of its melting temperature on the absolute scale). Materials science does know smaller cases of metal changing shape after it is released: bent sheets of some aluminium alloys, for example, kept changing shape for months, which the researchers linked to stresses left in the metal, while steels tested the same way did not. From these results it cannot be determined what happened to this spoon, and Egely's account, with the one check he reports (ordinary silver alloy), is not enough to decide it afterwards.

EGELY'S OTHER WORKThe search behind the wheel

Early in the same book Egely says where he expected progress to come from: not from theoretical physics, but from engineers, and only very slowly. His own example is the vitality meter, about ten years of research, whose forerunners were primitive experiments with rotating water. It is still made today as the Egely Wheel: a small wheel designed to make the connection between a person's inner state and the wheel's movement observable through direct experience. If the stories in this series make you want to try it, the wheel is made and sold by us.

Sources

1. György Egely, Titokzatos erők, revised and expanded edition of the 1990 book written with Magdolna Dús, Budapest, 2004.
2. György Egely, Parajelenségek / Elhallgatott találmányok, K.u.K. Kiadó, Budapest, 1993.
3. Uri Geller, My Story, Praeger, New York, 1975 (his own account of the ball of light; not checked by us in the original). archive.org; Jonathan Margolis, The Secret Life of Uri Geller, extract in Jewish News. jewishnews.co.uk
4. “Uriah Fuller” (Martin Gardner), Confessions of a Psychic, Karl Fulves, Teaneck, NJ, 1975. martin-gardner.org. Summarised here from the Hungarian translation in Egely's book; not checked against the original.
5. J. B. Hasted, D. J. Bohm, E. W. Bastin, B. O'Regan, “Scientists confronting the paranormal”, Nature 254, 470–472 (1975), correspondence. doi.org; John Hasted, The Metal-Benders, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981; “Metal-bending research”, Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research. psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk
6. Richard Wiseman, Emma Greening, “‘It's still bending’: verbal suggestion and alleged psychokinetic ability”, British Journal of Psychology 96(1), 115–127 (2005). herts.ac.uk
7. Methods of apparent spoon bending, with the magicians' literature (James Randi, Flim-Flam!, 1982; Ben Harris, Gellerism Revealed, 1985): Wikipedia, “Spoon bending”. en.wikipedia.org
8. University of Cambridge, DoITPoMS, “Creep deformation of metals: homologous temperature”. doitpoms.ac.uk; J. F. Wang, R. H. Wagoner, W. D. Carden, D. K. Matlock, F. Barlat, “Creep and anelasticity in the springback of aluminum”, International Journal of Plasticity 20, 2209–2232 (2004). doi.org
9. Geller's home near Reading (Sonning Court, Sonning; England his home from 1985): “Uri Geller”, Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research. psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk; The Jewish Chronicle on the house and its pool. thejc.com
10. egelywheel.com: “Invented in 1994 by Dr. George Egely and refined over decades.” egelywheel.com

AI-assisted research, writing and illustration. Edited by Egely Wheel.