In the case of a Ouija board, your brain may unconsciously create images and memories when you ask the board questions. There are multiple scientific studies that have shown various instances of the ideomotor effect in action. In one well-known and oft-repeated variant of the Ouija board test, blindfolded participants spell much more incoherent messages.
You can try this one at home. These experiments easily demonstrate that the Ouija board only works when the participants are able to manipulate the pointer themselves. If a ghost or spirit were really in the room, it would be able to direct the planchette to spell out coherent messages without any assistance. But there is no ghost, and when the Ouija board users are deprived of their ability to spell out words they can see, the game rapidly devolves into gibberish.
Talking boards first became popular in midth-century America, when millions of people suddenly gained an interest in talking to the dead following the tremendous loss of life in the Civil War.
The popularity of talking boards, and their use as a tool to exploit grieving war families, meant scientists actually started studying the ideomotor effect in the midcentury , well before Ouija boards and planchettes were patented in Over the years, research has determined that the ideomotor effect is closely tied to subconscious awareness — and that its effect is maximized when the subject believes he has no control of his movements.
Paradoxically, the less control you think you have, the more control your subconscious mind is actually exerting. The Ouija board, in fact, came straight out of the American 19th century obsession with spiritualism, the belief that the dead are able to communicate with the living. Spiritualism, which had been around for years in Europe, hit America hard in with the sudden prominence of the Fox sisters of upstate New York; the Foxes claimed to receive messages from spirits who rapped on the walls in answer to questions, recreating this feat of channeling in parlors across the state.
Aided by the stories about the celebrity sisters and other spiritualists in the new national press, spiritualism reached millions of adherents at its peak in the second half of the 19th century.
The movement also offered solace in an era when the average lifespan was less than 50 : Women died in childbirth; children died of disease; and men died in war. As spiritualism had grown in American culture, so too did frustration with how long it took to get any meaningful message out of the spirits, says Brandon Hodge, Spiritualism historian.
Calling out the alphabet and waiting for a knock at the right letter, for example, was deeply boring. People were desperate for methods of communication that would be quicker—and while several entrepreneurs realized that, it was the Kennard Novelty Company that really nailed it.
The article went far and wide, but it was Charles Kennard of Baltimore, Maryland who acted on it. In , he pulled together a group of four other investors—including Elijah Bond, a local attorney, and Col. Washington Bowie, a surveyor—to start the Kennard Novelty Company to exclusively make and market these new talking boards. The first patent offers no explanation as to how the device works, just asserts that it does. That ambiguity and mystery was part of a more or less conscious marketing effort.
And it was a money-maker. And by , Kennard and Bond were out, owing to some internal pressures and the old adage about money changing everything. Notably, Fuld is not and never claimed to be the inventor of the board, though even his obituary in The New York Times declared him to be; also notably, Fuld died in after a freak fall from the roof of his new factory—a factory he said the Ouija board told him to build. In , with the blessing of Col.
Bowie, the majority shareholder and one of only two remaining original investors, he licensed the exclusive rights to make the board. Reed Toy Company a cease and desist letter or threatened to file a Bill of Infringement. In , the Associated Press reported that spiritualists in Ohio were taken by a new phenomenon, the talking board, which was essentially the precursor to the Ouija board. A businessman named Charles Kennard saw an opportunity for a new business venture and jumped on the chance to be the first to patent a talking board.
Kennard gathered four more investors in , including attorney Elijah Bond, and started the Kennard Novelty Company to manufacture and sell these new boards. According to Robert Murch, who has extensively researched the history of Ouija board, the name for the board was revealed by the board itself. Your email address will not be published.
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