笔仙碟仙的洋亲戚：大家玩的“灵应板”，其实是1890年一家玩具公司卖的

Foreigners' version of planchette writing or glass spirit writing is called a "talking board", pronounced something like "Ouija" in English. It's a board printed with letters, numbers, and "yes" and "no", with a small triangular pointer placed on top. Several people rest their fingers on it, and it slowly slides among the letters, spelling out a sentence.

Many people think this thing is an antique, but it isn't. It was created around 1890 by a small group of businessmen in Baltimore, USA, who patented it and sold it as an "interesting family game". Those years, spiritualist séances were popular in America. Having a board at home meant you didn't need to hire a medium; you could talk to "the other side" yourself, and it suited people's tastes perfectly.

Legend has a famous detail: the investors wanted to name the board, so they asked the board itself. A medium placed fingers on it and asked what it was called, and it "answered" with two words that sounded like "good luck". These two words later became the product name.

Later, a man named William Fuld took over, turned it into a big business, and kept selling it until his own death. Fuld died in 1927 at his own factory, falling from the roof. Some say he was "revenged" by the board he sold, but that was added later; contemporary reports said it was just an accident. After his death, his family continued running it until 1966, when they sold the rights to a large toy company.

Why does everyone think it's supernatural? Psychology has a specific name for this: the ideomotor effect, meaning your hand will gently push something without you noticing. Several people place fingers at the same time, and each feels "it wasn't me who moved", so the pointer seems to move by itself.

A similar experiment was done by Faraday in 1853 with "table-turning": he placed a layer of easily sliding stiff cardboard on the table surface and found that people's hands moved before the table did, proving it was the people moving. After the experiment, whether the table was "spiritual" or not was left to everyone's own opinion.

#Paranormal #网络转载 #通灵