Planchette

"It's odd.

I had just the same feeling as you about it." "That explains Planchette writing gardener over and over again," said I.

"You had the gardener's cottage on your mind." "How ingenious," said Margaret.

"Hurry up and dress." A gleam of strong moonlight between my drawn curtains when I went up to bed that night led me to look out.

"Oh, mayn't we play one more hand?" asked Hugh.

"It's the best game I've seen for years.

Planchette will be dismally slow after this." "Darling, if the gardener will only communicate again, it won't be slow," said she.

"But it is such drivel," said Hugh.

after quietly waiting a short time for the connection or rapport to become established the board if conditions are favourable

will begin to move carrying the fingers with it it will move for about one person in every three or four and sometimes it will move with the hands of two or three persons in contact with it when it will not move for either one of the persons singly at the first trial from a few seconds to twenty minutes may be required to establish the motion but at subsequent trials it will move almost immediately the first movements are usually indefinite or in circles but as soon as some control of the motion is established it will begin to write at first perhaps in mere monosyllables yes and no in answer to leading questions but afterward freely writing whole sentences and even pages for me alone the instrument will not move for myself and wife it moves slightly but its writing is mostly in monosyllables with my daughter's hands upon it it writes more freely frequently giving correctly the names of persons present whom she may not know and also the names of their friends living or dead with other and similar tests its conversations with her are grave or gay much according to the state of her own mind at the time and when frivolous questions are asked it almost always returns answers either frivolous or i am sorry to say it a trifle wicked for example she on one occasion said to a planchette where did you get your education to her horror it instantly wrote in h l without however being so fastidious as to omit the letters of the word here left out on another occasion after receiving from it responses to some trivial questions she said to it now write something of your own accord without our prompting but instead of writing words and sentences as was expected it immediately traced out the rude figure of a man such as school-children sometimes make upon their slates after finishing the outlines face neck arms legs etc it swung around and brought the point of the pencil to the proper position for the eye which it carefully marked in and then proceeded to pencil out the hair on finishing this operation it wrote under the figure the name of a young man concerning whom my daughter's companions are in the habit of teasing her my wife once said to it planchet write the name of the article i am thinking of she was thinking of a finger ring on which her eye had rested a moment before the operator of course knew nothing of this and my wife expected either that the experiment would fail or else that the letters r i n g would be traced but instead of that the instrument moved very slowly and as it were deliberately and traced an apparent exact circle on the paper of about the size of the ring finger she had in her mind will you try that over again said she when a similar circle was traced in a similar manner but more promptly during this experiment one of my wife's hands in addition to my daughter's was resting lightly upon the board but if the moving force had been supplied by her either consciously or unconsciously the motion would evidently have taken the direction of her thought which was that of writing the letters of the word instead of a direction unthought of While Planchette, in her intercourse with me, has failed to distinguish herself either as a preacher or a philosopher, I regret to say that she has not proved herself a much more successful prophet.

While the recent contest for the United States senatorship from the state of New York was pending, I said to my little oracular friend, Planchette, will you give me a test? Yes.

Do you know who will be the next U.S. senator from this state? yes please write the name of the person who will be chosen mr sutton was written said i i have not the pleasure of knowing that gentleman please tell me where he resides in washington i do not relate this to disturb the happy dreams of the hon ruben e fenton by suggesting any dire contingencies that may yet happen to mar the prospect before him in justice

to my little friend however i must not omit to state that in respect to questions as to the kind of weather we shall have on the morrow will such person go or such a one come or shall i see or do this that or the other thing its responses have been generally correct

OK, so what did they do?

What their chemists and engineers invented was the planchette.

Planchettes.

It sounds like the little wooden pointer you use on a Ouija board to talk to ghosts.

But what is it in the context of high security paper?

Planchettes are tiny, perfectly circular, brilliantly colored paper disks, slightly smaller than they have a match.

The technological breakthrough wasn't just making the little dots.

It was figuring out how to embed these colored disks directly into the internal structure of the paper during the actual manufacturing process at the crane paper mill.

November 3, 2022.

End of The Salem Witchcraft, The Planchette Mystery, and Modern Spiritualism by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Samuel Robert Wells.

... and how that movement affected the authors of the Victorian era of that time, how that influenced them.

Um, and so we wrote a book about that called, uh, The Pen and the Planchette.

Yeah.

And then, like, our, our, our lectures that we do, um, they kind of are born out of our experiences.