N-ray

[4] Blondlot, Augustin Charpentier, Arsène d'Arsonval, and approximately 120 other scientists in 300 published articles[3] claimed to be able to detect N-rays emanating from most substances, including the human body, with the peculiar exceptions that they were not emitted by green wood and by some treated metals.

[6] Physicists Gustave le Bon and P. Audollet and spiritualist Carl Huter even claimed the discovery as their own,[2] leading to a commission of the Académie des sciences to decide priority.

Following his own failure, self-described as "wasting a whole morning",[8] the American physicist Robert W. Wood, who had a reputation as a popular "debunker" of nonsense during the period, was prevailed upon by the British journal Nature to travel to Blondlot's laboratory in France to investigate further.

His report on these investigations were published in Nature,[9] and they suggested that the N-rays were a purely subjective phenomenon, with the scientists involved having recorded data that matched their expectations.

[3] Martin Gardner, making reference to Wood's biographer William Seabrook's account of the affair, attributed a subsequent decline in mental health and eventual death of Blondlot to the resulting scandal,[11] but there is evidence that this is at least some exaggeration of the facts.

Nearly identical properties of an equally unknown radiation had been recorded about 50 years before in another country by Carl Reichenbach in his treatise Researches on Magnetism, Electricity, Heat, Light, Crystallization, and Chemical Attraction in their relations to the Vital Force in 1850, and before that in Vienna by Franz Mesmer in his Mémoire on the Discovery of Animal-Magnetism in 1779.

[5][15] In the 2018 book The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, the section titled "Iconic Cautionary Tales from History" recounts the story of the "discovery" of N-rays.