This article was written at the time the forked Y-shaped rod was universally used in dowsing. Here the author lists some of the virtues or otherwise of this device, for instance noting that it is particularly valuable when dowsing in a car! But when dowsing for long periods of time, it seems the Y rod is tiring to use. Today L-rods have become the main device for field dowsing, but before their “discovery”, other methods were adopted. One such is introduced here as the “singe handed rod”.

Essentially this is a traditional walking stick with curved handle. The stick is held in a state of unstable equilibrium. When the dowsing reaction occurs, the stick rotates around its long axis, thereby providing two possible reactions, just as with a forked Y rod.

The author also describes briefly how he conducts his dowsing. To begin he often using a sample of the object sought, a method characteristic of this period.

He was obviously a dowser experienced in locating water and minerals and describes how he estimates the properties of what he seeks.  For the flow rate of underground water, he asks whether the stream is the width of something familiar to him, eg the width of a finger or arm. And for coal seams he counts upwards in some unit of length, until a reaction occurs, yielding an estimate of the seam thickness.

For estimating the depth of water, he uses two methods. One is counting, imaging increasing depth, until a reaction occurs. For the other, he uses the “Bishop’s rule”, but with a difference. First, he finds centre of stream, then walks out to the “first parallel” reaction. (see blog post 03-04-2020). For most dowsers the distance between the two is a direct estimate of the stream depth, but for the author it represents only half the depth. This is a small but very interesting observation. In my reading of the BSD journals I have only encountered one other dowser who has reported this, Dr Arthur Bailey, writing 50 years later. But the implication of this exception to the rule, seems to be that the dowsing is not reacting to a something physical at the parallels, but to something else, more like an unconscious presumption about the significance of the parallel reaction.

This is just another example of how the dowsing reaction to what is sought can be “programmed”, by with respect to its meaning. This filtering may be attuned either consciously, or unconsciously, with the dowser being unaware they are influencing the results.

The article is: “The single-handed rod” by Hans Falkinger

http://www.dowsing-research.net/blog_extracts/BSD_No7_1935_p13.pdf