One winter evening in 1868 at the London home of Viscount Adare, a 35-year-old Scotsman asked for the windows of the third-floor drawing room to be opened to the chilly December air. Then, to the astonishment of all those present, he promptly floated out of one window and back in through another.

It was feats like this that made Daniel Dunglas Home a household name throughout Europe in Victorian times, lionised by the Tsar, Napoleon III and the greatest artists and intellectuals of the day. To Mark Twain he was “a very fine fellow”. William Thackeray was in his thrall. To Elizabeth Barrett Browning he was simply “wonderful”.

Arthur Conan Doyle later praised Home as “one of the pioneers in the slow and arduous advance of humanity into that jungle of ignorance which has encompassed it so long”.

Not everybody was convinced. Charles Dickens denounced Home as “an impostor”, and to George Eliot he was “an object of moral disgust”. The renowned chemist William Crookes was among the many sceptics who tried in vain to prove this son of a Balerno paper worker was a fraud. In 1871, after observing Home make an accordion play by itself, Crookes concluded that a new natural phenomenon was at work and coined a new word to describe it: “psychic”.

This week at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the paranormal investigator Peter Lamont will recount Home’s story as told in a new book, The First Psychic, and describe his fascination with a man who is virtually unknown today, despite being a household name 150 years ago.

Lamont, 41, is a professional debunker of the “paranormal”. In his work for the Koestler parapsychology unit at Edinburgh University he has proved again and again that phenomena such as bending spoons can be replicated using the tricks of the magician’s trade.

Last year he published a book revealing the story behind the famous Indian rope trick, revealing its roots as a tale made up by newspaper reporters embroiled in a circulation war, which was then picked up by illusionists.

Himself a magician, Lamont routinely uses his knowledge to demonstrate how allegedly inexplicable phenomena can in fact be easily explained. But even Lamont cannot account for some of Home’s exploits.

“Virtually everybody else in this field was caught cheating at some point, but he never was. I’ve been a magician since I was a wee boy, and I have worked in parapsychology for a decade. And I don’t know how he did some things. Nobody has explained them to date.”

The most impressive example for Lamont is a demonstration Home performed in Amsterdam in 1858, where a group of renowned sceptics gathered in a hotel dining room around a table large enough to sit 14 people.

The sceptics held candles above and underneath the table so they could see what was going on at all times, and closely observed Home himself. Yet Home was able to make the table rise off the ground, and then to make it so heavy it was impossible to lift.

“They monitored the room constantly for signs of deception, but weren’t able to find any. They refused to believe it was the work of spirits, but they said they had no idea what was going on,” says Lamont.

Other specialities of Home included the conjuring up of a disembodied hand that would appear from the centre of a table and then float around the room, actually touching and shaking hands with astounded onlookers.

As for Lamont’s conclusions about Home, the author goes uncharacteristically coy. “If I ever see a table float and I’m convinced it’s a genuine levitation, then I will see Home as genuine — if the evidence is very impressive.”

The First Psychic by Peter Lamont is published by Little Brown, £16.99. Peter Lamont appears at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Thursday, August 18, at 8.30pm. Tickets are available on 0131 624 5050 or www.edbookfest.co.uk.

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