Planchette

From the French diminutive of *planche*, a small board. A heart-shaped, three-legged piece of wood designed to glide across a flat surface beneath the lightly placed fingers of two or more sitters. The earliest models, recorded in eighteen-fifties Paris, held a pencil at the apex and were used to produce automatic writing. The later commercial form, paired with a printed alphabet board, became the talking board, then the ouija. The object is not the spirit. The object is the surface on which the question and the answer pass between hand and table without the hand admitting that it is the source.

The planchette outlasted the séance because it required no medium. Two participants and a flat table were sufficient. Spiritualist literature of the period treated it with appropriate caution. Twentieth-century commercial editions did not. The archive notes only that the object is older than the brand it became.