How do divining rods work?

Question

this is something i have always wondered. would someone please tell me how divining rods find underground springs?

Answer 1

(This information is copy and pasted from http://connect.ab.ca/~tylosky/)

Divining rods and all common dowsing devices, are the simplest forms of electroscopes.

The divining rods are charged with static electricity from the dowser's own body.

The divining rod charged positively will rotate in the dowsers hand to line up parallel to a negatively charged object being dowsed. A divining rod charged negatively will remain perpendicular to a negatively charged object being dowsed.

When two divining rods are used, and they are seen to cross, one of the rods is being moved to line up parallel with the charged object being dowsed. The other rod is moving to line up parallel to the first rod. A second reason for the two rods crossing is that of dowsing over an alternating current source, such as a pipeline or buried cable. these are usually buried shallow and are conducting ground currents as the path of least resistance.  

Answer 2

I've never been able to use them, but all qualified telecom engineers used to be trained in their use in the UK - for locating buried cables.

Then someone invented a machine to do it.

I use a pendulum instead - this works for me accurately.

I think it is more like the needle on a gauge, where you are the gauge, but without a pointer, you can't tell what's going on. I've now developed it further so you don't need a physical pointer, you just interpret the feelings better. Most dowsers end up dong this.

Answer 3

They don't.  They cannot be proven under scientific conditions.  

You can pretty much strike water anywhere, if you dig deep enough.  It's depth varies.

So just a myth.  

Answer 4

branches like willow ..seek water and bend toward it ...simple as that

Answer 5

As a physicist, I can tell you that the two energy arguments given above are c**p.  In short, divining rods, and pendulums, and dowsing, all work through the ideomotor effect - which means they don't.  You're moving them, whether you realize it or not.  Since there's water under about 90 percent of the Earth's surface, it's easy to fool yourself into thinking the rods found it - but they didn't.  Every actual test done on divining rods under controlled conditions (when there was only water under one part of the floor, for example) has failed.  It's all in their heads.

But this guy will be happy to give you or them a million bucks if you can prove me wrong.  http://www.randi.org  Warning, many people have already tried and failed.

Answer 6

They are made of copper, copper is the best conduct for energy. The earths energy is interrupted by the flow of underground water running, this causes the rods to move/cross.

Answer 7

They dont, it is all just a myth. It is like eating crust of bread will make your hair go curly.  

Answer 8

they used to be used to find water. as to how i don't know.

Answer 9

As I understand it, a divining rod is used by a dowser or diviner to find something he is looking for, most famously water, but perhaps metal or something else.

No reasonable scientific mechanism that fully explains the divining rod phenomenon has been proposed. I am unaware of any controlled tests that have reliably demonstrated that the concept works at all. There is a statistical probability that during any given test, the diviner will "get lucky" and identify something by pure random chance. Anecdotal evidence is typically unreliable.

If there are examples of divining rods actually -finding- (not "getting lucky") water or anything else, the only currently available explanation is the supernatural. We have no scientific tools for evaluating supernatural phenomena for the obvious reason that science studies work only in the framework of the natural. I can not discount the possibility that a "spirit" of some sort occasionally guides a diviner, but at this point your interpretation of the effect depends on your beliefs about the supernatural.