Daniel Dunglas Home was, by the account of his contemporaries, the most impressive physical medium of the Victorian era, reporting levitations of himself and of objects, accordion music played without visible hands, and the handling of hot coals without apparent injury, performed in the homes of aristocrats, writers, and scientists across Britain, France, and Russia. His most famous reported feat, described by multiple witnesses at an 1868 sitting in London, had Home apparently float out of one third-floor window and back in through another.
Chemist William Crookes conducted a formal multi-year investigation of Home beginning in 1871, devising instruments, including a spring-balance apparatus, intended to measure any physical force Home exerted, and reported being unable to explain the results by ordinary means; Crookes's own scientific reputation and his growing closeness to some of his mediumship subjects later drew separate criticism, discussed further under Ectoplasm and Materialization. What sets Home apart in the history of physical mediumship is that, unlike Florence Cook, the Fox sisters, Eusapia Palladino, or Mina Crandon, no investigator, however skeptical, ever caught him in a specific act of trickery or produced physical evidence of a concealed mechanism, a fact both his supporters and his critics have had to reckon with ever since.