Six years after the appearance of that article a patent for a “Ouija or Egyptian luck-board” was filed by Baltimore attorney Elijah H. Bond, who in turn assigned the rights to Charles W. Kennard and William H.A. Maupin. This early talking board (the patent was filed on May 28, 1898) was the first with the Ouija name.
Victoria Woodhull (September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927), a medium and carnival show clairvoyant, was the first woman-owned Wall Street brokerage house, the first woman to address a Congressional committee and the first woman to run for president. She championed free love, believed that marriage was institutionalized slavery and supported paid sex work.
Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, FRS (12 June 1851 – 22 August 1940) was a British physicist and writer involved in the development of, and holder of key patents for, radio. He identified electromagnetic radiation independent of Hertz‘s proof and at his 1894 Royal Institution lectures (“The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors“), Lodge demonstrated an early radio wave detector he named the “coherer“. In 1898 he was awarded the “syntonic” (or tuning) patent by the United States Patent Office. Lodge was Principal of the University of Birmingham from 1900 to 1920.
Lodge was also noted for his Spiritualist beliefs and research into life after death, a topic on which he wrote many books, including the best-selling Raymond; or, Life and Death (1916), describing what he believed to be detailed messages through a medium from his deceased adult son who was killed in World War I.
Daniel Dunglas Home (pronounced Hume; 20 March 1833 – 21 June 1886) was a Scottish physical medium with the reported ability to levitate to a variety of heights, speak with the dead, and to produce rapping and knocks in houses at will. His biographer Peter Lamont opines that he was one of the most famous men of his era. Home conducted hundreds of séances, which were attended by many eminent Victorians.
Leonora Piper (then Simonds) was born on June 27, 1857 and raised in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Don Pedrito Jaramillo was a famous South Texas Mexican folk healer. Don Pedro moved to Texas and settled in the small village of Los Olmos, near modern day Falfurrias, Texas, around 1881. It was thought he was born in 1829, and he died on July 3, 1907.
Achsa W. Sprague, a19th Century “Trance Speaker,” was an early abolitionist and women’s rights pioneer. She died on July 6, 1862.
Rosemary Isabel Brown (nee Dickeson, 27 July 1916 – 16 November 2001) was an English composer, pianist and spirit medium who claimed that dead composers dictated new musical works to her. She created a small media sensation in the 1970s by presenting works purportedly dictated to her by Claude Debussy, Edvard Grieg, Franz Liszt, Franz Schubert, Frédéric Chopin, Igor Stravinsky, Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Brown claimed that each composer had his own way of dictating to her: Liszt controlled her hands for a few bars at a time, and then she wrote down the notes; Chopin told her the notes and pushed her hands on to the right keys; Schubert tried to sing his compositions; and Beethoven and Bach simply dictated the notes. She claimed the composers spoke to her in English.