Occult America_ The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation - Mitch Horowitz [35]
After Fuld took the reins of Ouija manufacturing in America, business was brisk—if not always happy. Fuld formed a volatile business alliance with his brother, Isaac, which landed the two in court battles for nearly twenty years. Isaac was eventually found to have violated an injunction against creating a competing board, called the Oriole, after being forced from the family business in 1901. The two brothers would never speak again. Ouija, and any thing that looked directly like it, was firmly in the hands of William Fuld.
So went the business history of Ouija. But the board had a still deeper set of roots. Contrary to the many conflicting claims of ownership, talking boards of a homemade variety were already a popular craze among Spiritualists by the mid-1880s. And here we encounter Ouija’s lost link to the Spiritualist movement. In its Sunday supplement of March 28, 1886, the New York Daily Tribune ran an article on “A Mysterious Talking Board and Table Over Which Northern Ohio Is Agitated.” The short piece featured a matchbox-size illustration of a rectangular alphabet board—the spitting image of Ouija, a full four years before its first patent was filed.
“I know of whole communities that are wild over the ‘talking board,’ as some of them call it,” an Ohio man was quoted. “I have never heard any name for it. But I have seen and heard some of the most remarkable things about its operation—things that seem to pass all human comprehension or explanation.” And best of all: “Anyone can make the whole apparatus in fifteen minutes, with a jack-knife and a marking brush.”
The 1886 eyewitness described how to use the “witching thing” as clearly as later instructions on a Ouija box top: “You take the board in your lap, another person sitting down with you. You each grasp the little table with the thumb and forefinger at each corner next to you. Then the question is asked.… Pretty soon you think the other person is pushing the table. He thinks you are doing the same. But the table moves around to ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ ”
Covering the spate of Ouija patent litigation, the New York World asked in 1920: “Who shall own the cable line to the spirit-land?” Well, if trial judges had been clearer on the history of the matter, it is possible that the question of who “owned” Ouija might have been tossed out of court, and the original patent with it. Obviously Bond, Kennard, and their associates were capitalizing on a Spiritualist sensation—not inventing one.
Ancient Ouija?
Another oft-repeated but misleading claim is that Ouija or talking boards have ancient lineage. In a typical example, Frank Gaynor’s 1953 Dictionary of Mysticism states that primeval boards of different shapes and sizes “were used in the sixth century before Christ.” In a wide range of books and articles, everyone from Pythagoras to the Mongols to the ancient Egyptians are said to have possessed Ouija-like devices. But these claims rarely withstand scrutiny.
Ouija collector and chronicler Eugene Orlando points out that the primary reference placing Ouija in the premodern world appears in Lewis Spence’s widely reprinted 1920 Encyclopedia of Occultism: “As an invention it is very old. It was in use in the days of Pythagoras, about 540 B.C. According to a French historical account of the philosopher’s life, his sect held frequent séances or circles at which ‘a mystic table, moving on wheels, moved towards signs, which the philosopher and his pupil, Philolaus, interpreted to the audience as being revelations supposedly from the unseen world.’ ” It is, Orlando notes, “the one recurring quote found in almost every academic article on the Ouija board.” But the story presents two problems: The “French historical account” is never identified,