Happy Birthday, Planchette! We are fortunate that Allan Kardec, the founder of Spiritism in France, collected séance transcripts that recorded the very moment of this revolutionary device’s invention on the night of June 10, 1853. At a table-tipping séance likely hosted by the Baudin family in Paris, “one of the most fervent partisans of the new phenomena” that “had been busily engaged in the evocation of spirits,” received a message from a spirit, or “invisible agent,” frustrated with the slow communications received through table-tipping. The spirit suggested to the group to “fetch the little basket from the next room; fasten a pencil to it; place it upon a sheet of paper; put your fingers on the edge of the basket." The transcripts further recount the mysterious actions of the makeshift device: “This basket, placed upon a sheet of paper, was set in motion by the same occult power that moved the tables; but, instead of obeying a simple and regular movement of rotation, the pencil traced letters that formed words, sentences, and entire discourses, filling many pages, treating of the deepest questions of philosophy, morality, metaphysics, psychology, etc., and as rapidly as though written by the hand.” Before too long, a cottage industry producing the apparatus as small boards, or “little planks”—“planchette” in French—sprang up, and slowly made their way to Great Britain and, finally, America, where 15 years later, in the wake of the Civil War’s aftermath, they exploded in popularity. There ya go! #planchette #automaticwriting #allankardec #talkingboard #spiritscribbles #ghostwriter #ouija #occult #spiritualism #spiritism #automaticwriter https://www.instagram.com/p/CBRdZFLFDNK/?igshid=18roe9gh0baru