I have been doing a bit of reading on this.
First of all, I found my Mysterious World book, and a lost bookmark from 1988 (a present from my aunt) which was nice. Maybe I dowsed it. Anyhow, it was Percival Lovell with the canals of Mars. An eminent astronomer, whose telescope guidelines we still use. A certain English chap, EW Maunder showed the canals were an artefact. At no point did he doubt Lovell’s integrity, just that Lovell was mistaken. Maunder was backed up by the Viking/Mariner trips made to Mars.
Sadly it has nothing on dowsing in it. It comes close with a section on standing stones, which has this rather excellent piece “Only one thing can be stated with certainty about structures such as Stonehenge: the people who built them were much more intelligent than may who have written books about them.”
I did find, using Storm’s favourite man, James Randi, another experiment looking at dowsing. It’s here -
http://www.skeptics.com.au/publications/articles/australian-skeptics-divining-test/ In that one a test similar, but much more improved, than the one I suggested to above was done. There was a prize of AU$40,000 for correct dowsing. All the entrants claimed very high detection rates, averaging out across gold (claimed 99%), water (claimed 86%), and brass (claimed 87%) to be 92%. That is 92 times out of every 100 tries the dowser would find the right thing. As it turned out, they didn’t. They didn’t get close. Water was at 22%, brass zero, and gold 11%. 22% is too low to be significant – sorry. That’s roughly a one in five chance of being correct.
I know he has not tested every possible dowser, but there really is no need. It’s called sampling. Again, a dowser should be able to prove he can dowse. All of them claimed to be dowsers, and rather good ones at that.
Moreover the author of the page notes – “Only two dowsers said there were natural streams running underground in the area and both agreed these would not interfere with the tests. But — and it’s a very big “but” — they also disagreed with one another about where these streams flowed, and thus also disagreed with all the others who said there were no streams!” which is a tad inconsistent. He then notes, and this is really important (assuming his statement is true, for which I have seen no reference “One thing must be made clear — dowsers on the whole are very honest folk. They believe in what they do. Unfortunately their belief is poorly placed. They CANNOT perform as they think they can. Having a string of successful wells to which one can point, proves nothing. A better test would be to ask the dowser whether he can find a DRY spot within 100 metres of a well he has dowsed. With more than 90% of the world’s land mass above reachable supplies of water, this should be quite difficult.”
I also had a look on the dowsers’ forum. Which did concern me a little, but still. I could find no tests there of dowsing. There may be some, I failed to find any. What concerned me was people dowsing photographs of places to find things or see if it was a picture of a UFO or whatever. You don’t have to be a sceptic to see that is a tad weird. But still, I assume it is for me to prove it is rather weird, rather than the dowser of photographs to prove it actually works. Ho hum.
Finally – two more quotes “By far the most important fact that emerges is this: The participants were all able to show strong reactions when they knew where the sought-after substance was, but failed grandly when they actually underwent a proper test.” And “Though diviners will continue to be hired by believers in such powers, and wells will be dug with great precision on spots located by forked-stick folks, these water supplies will not prove that dowsing works. They will only prove that there is a great deal of water down under the earth, and we do not need <snip> folks wiggling sticks to tell us that.”
