The scientific explanation for table tipping was established remarkably early and has never been seriously challenged since. Michael Faraday, already one of the most respected experimental physicists in Britain, devised a simple but decisive apparatus in 1853: thin sheets of card connected by soft cement between the sitters' fingers and the tabletop, arranged so that any sideways pressure applied by a sitter's fingers, even unconsciously, would show up as a visible displacement of the card layers before the table itself moved. Faraday found that participants who sincerely believed they were only resting their fingers passively on the table were in fact applying small, involuntary sideways pressure in the direction they expected or wanted the table to move, and crucially, when sitters were prevented from anticipating the table's direction, or their attention was deliberately diverted elsewhere, the table stopped moving entirely.
Faraday published his results in a letter to The Times in June 1853, describing the underlying mechanism as an unconscious muscular action now generally called the ideomotor effect, in which a strongly held expectation produces small, involuntary movements the person is not aware of making. Faraday's demonstration remains the accepted scientific explanation for table tipping and closely related phenomena, including the Ouija board, and is considered one of the cleanest and most durable debunkings in the history of psychical claims.