As a schoolchild, she had delighted in using a pendulum to make drawings in her exercise books, but it was not until midlife that she found in this process a portal to a larger world of ideas. In 1938, using a silver pendulum with a jade end she believed was guided by energy fields — a technique she termed radiesthesia — she began making large-scale drawings in pencil and crayon on graph paper, hundreds of them, to divine diagnoses of physical and psychic ailments and heal people, often with results bordering on the miraculous.
On January 3, 1851, French physicist Leon Foucault started to experiment with his eponymous pendulum, by which he was able to proof the earth's rotation. Actually, how can you prove that the earth is a rotating orb in an easy-to-see experiment and - of course - without space flight? By today, Foucault's simple device is part of numerous natural science museums around the world.