The craze drew scientific investigation almost as quickly as it drew participants, and the verdict that emerged, from figures including the chemist Michael Faraday, who devised simple mechanical tests in 1853 to detect unconscious pressure, was that table movement could be produced by sitters' own tiny, involuntary muscular movements rather than by any external spirit agency, a phenomenon later named the ideomotor effect and subsequently invoked to explain other apparently self moving devices such as the Ouija board's planchette and dowsing rods.
Faraday's explanation did not end the practice, since believers could and did read the same movements as evidence that spirits acted through, rather than instead of, the sitters' bodies, a position that scientific refutation of the mechanism could not straightforwardly disprove. Table turning's popularity as a mass craze faded within the decade as Spiritualism's more theatrical physical mediumship, and its dedicated professional mediums, took over public attention, but the simple technique never disappeared entirely, persisting in occult and Spiritualist practice into the twentieth century and beyond as an accessible entry point requiring no special gift, taught informally within Spiritualist home circles to newcomers still developing confidence before they attempted more demanding forms of mediumship.