Murky past of seeing future
QUESTION When and why were crystal balls first used to see into the future?
This may date back to the druids, who were the holy men of the Celtic cultures that occupied north-western Europe before the arrival of the Romans. ‘Druid’ means ‘knowing the oak tree’ and their religion is strongly associated with the worship of the natural world.
it was believed that druids could ‘scry’, or see into the future, by gazing into reflective surfaces such as pools of water or crystals, which is probably where the crystal ball originated, though it was unlikely to have been a sphere at that time. The Ancient Greek oracles also used water for divination.
The Roman city of Aquae sulis, now called Bath, was built on a site holy to the druids because of its hot water pools, which may have been used for divining.
in the 1st century AD, Roman historian Pliny the Elder described the use of crystal balls by soothsayers and it is possible that the ‘art’ had travelled to Rome in the wake of the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar in around 51 BC or the invasion of Britain in AD 49.
soothsayers went against Christian teachings and were regarded as heretics. in the 5th century, st Augustine described fortune telling as ‘entangled in the deceptive rites of demons who masquerade under the names of angels’.
There was a revival in fortune telling during the Renaissance, when European scholars were influenced by the Arab world, where mysticism was regarded as a sort of science.
Crystal is difficult to cut so, it was the development of cheaper glass to manufacture spheres that encouraged fairground fortune-telling in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Roma gypsies adopted the crystal ball and introduced it to the masses.
Bob Cubitt, Northampton.
QUESTION Has Lois Gibson solved more crimes than any other person?
LOIS GIBSON (b.1950) is a forensic artist for the houston Police Department in Texas. she was awarded a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for having helped to identify 751 criminals and secure more than 1,000 convictions between June 1982 and May 2016.
Gibson’s crusade against crime came from personal experience. At the age of 21, she was a model and dancer living in Los Angeles, but a horrific rape changed her life. To deal with the trauma she was motivated to get a degree in forensic art from the University of Texas at Austin.
Gibson has since sketched murderers, rapists and thieves. she has re-created the images of faces belonging to those abandoned, lost or unidentified after death. she has created such accurate age progression portraits that she has helped reunite lost loved ones.
More often than not, the victims who come to her have seen their assailant only during the fleeting and traumatic time they were attacked.
Despite this, Gibson has an extraordinary ability to extrapolate the information the victims gave her. one celebrated case was that of Baby Grace, the body of a two-year-old, found in a storage container near Galveston in october 2007.
Gibson felt the girl resembled her daughter Tiffany and she was able to recreate a forensic reconstruction of the girl which was recognised by ohio grandmother sheryl sawyers as twoyear-old Riley sawyers.
The girl’s remains were then positively identified through DNA testing on november 30, 2007. her mother and stepfather were sentenced to life imprisonment for aggravated murder in 2009.
in an earlier case, Gibson created a sketch from the memories of a nine-yearold girl which led police to the rapist and murderer of the child’s mother, Barbara Jean Pullins, a 31-year-old houston bus driver. Jeffery Lynn Williams, who lived in an adjacent apartment, was executed for the crime in 2002.
outside police work, Gibson has helped solve other controversies. For instance, her work supported Glenn McDuffie’s 2007 claim of being the man seen kissing the woman in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photo of V- J Day in Times square.
Gibson is the founder of the institute of Forensic Art, author of Forensic Art Essentials, and co-author of the true crime book Faces of Evil with writer Deanie Francis Mills.
Alison Kidman, Windsor, Berks.
QUESTION Where was the first photographic studio in Britain?
THE first practical methods of photography were both announced in 1839. French artist Louis- Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787-1851) published his Daguerreotype process in Paris, and wealthy landowner William henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) announced his calotype (paper negative) system in London.
Both systems required the first commercial users to purchase a licence as they were covered by patents. These licences were expensive, but were only applicable in England and Wales, not in scotland and ireland.
The first commercial photographic studio is believed to be that of former coal merchant Richard Beard (18011885) at the Royal Polytechnic institute in Regent street, London, in March 1841, after negotiating a licence from Daguerre’s agent Miles Berry. Another early commercial photographer to establish a studio in London was French former glass merchant Antoine Claudet (1797-1867). his first experiments were made at the Gallery of Practical science in Adelaide street, and he later opened a commercial studio there known as The Adelaide Gallery, also in 1841.
Ian Charles Sumner, Shepton Mallet, Somerset. IS THERE a question to which you want to know the answer? Or do you know the answer to a question here? Write to: Charles Legge, Answers To Correspondents, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT; or email charles.legge@dailymail.co.uk. A selection is published, but we’re unable to enter into individual correspondence.
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