Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [34]
One involved a form of table-rapping in which questioners solicited spirit knocks when letters of the alphabet were called out, thus spelling a word. Many Spiritualists in the 1850s, however, found this a tedious and time-consuming exercise. A faster means was “automatic writing,” in which spirit beings could communicate through the pen of a medium, but some complained that this produced many pages of unclear or meandering prose.
Another invention directly prefigured the heart-shaped pointer that moves around the Ouija board. The planchette—French for “little plank”—was a three-legged writing tool with a hole at the top for the insertion of a pencil. The planchette was designed for one or more people to rest their fingers upon and allow it to “glide” across a page to write out a spirit message. The device originated in Europe in the early 1850s; by 1860, commercially manufactured planchettes were advertised in America.
Two other items from the 1850s are direct forebears to Ouija: dial plates and alphabet paste boards. In 1853, a Connecticut Spiritualist invented the Spiritual Telegraph Dial, a roulettelike wheel with letters and numerals around its circumference. Dial plates came in various forms, sometimes of a complex variety. Some were rigged to tables to respond to “spirit tilts,” while others—like planchettes—glided beneath the resting hands of questioners.
Alphabet boards further simplified matters. In use as early as 1852, these talking-board precursors allowed seekers to point to a letter as a means of prompting a “spirit rap,” thereby quickly spelling a word. It was, perhaps, the easiest method yet. And it was only a matter of time until experimenters and entrepreneurs began to see the possibilities.
Baltimore Oracles
The conventional history of American toy manufacturing credits Ouija to a Baltimore businessman named William Fuld. Fuld, we are told, “invented” Ouija around 1890. So it has been repeated in articles, books of trivia, reference works, and “ask me” columns in newspapers. For many decades, the manufacturer itself—first Fuld’s company and later the toy giant Parker Brothers—insinuated as much by running the term William Fuld Talking Board Set across the top of every board.
The conventional history is wrong.
The patent for a “Ouija or Egyptian luck-board” was filed on May 28, 1890, by Baltimore resident and patent attorney Elijah J. Bond, who assigned the rights to two city businessmen, Charles W. Kennard and William H. A. Maupin. The patent was granted on February 10, 1891, and so was born the Ouija-brand talking board.
The first patent reveals a familiarly oblong board, with the alphabet running in double rows across the top and numbers in a single row along the bottom. The sun and moon, labeled respectively YES and NO, adorn the upper left and right corners, while the phrase GOOD BYE appears at the bottom center. Later on, instructions and the illustrations accompanying them prescribed an expressly social—even flirtatious—experience: Two parties, preferably a man and woman, were to balance the board between them on their knees, placing their fingers lightly upon the planchette. (“It draws the two people using it into close companionship and weaves about them a feeling of mysterious isolation,” the box read.) In an age of buttoned-up morals, a toe-to-toe Ouija session could be a tempting dalliance.
True Origins
The Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore employed a teenage varnisher who helped run