Uri Geller and the Spoon-Bending Craze

Spoon bending as a mass cultural phenomenon began with Uri Geller, who rose to international fame in the early 1970s performing apparent psychokinetic feats, bending spoons and keys, seemingly restarting stopped watches, and reproducing simple drawings sealed in envelopes, on television and in demonstrations for scientists and journalists. Geller's claims briefly drew serious attention from physicists at the Stanford Research Institute, where Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ tested him alongside their remote-viewing subjects, though critics later argued Geller's SRI sessions were conducted under conditions too loose to rule out sleight of hand.

Geller's fame sparked a wider popular vogue: British television and radio audiences in the 1970s were invited to concentrate on household cutlery during broadcasts, and viewers reported bent spoons and stopped clocks in their own homes afterward, feeding a self-reinforcing cultural belief that ordinary people, not just a gifted performer, could produce the effect simply by trying. The craze made spoon bending, alongside telepathy, one of the most publicly recognisable psychokinesis claims of the twentieth century, discussed on chat shows and in newspapers around the world.