Spirit communication in early Spiritualism was slow. Sitters called the alphabet aloud and counted raps, or watched a tipping table lurch at the right letter, and the obvious inefficiency invited invention: planchettes that wrote with a pencil had a craze in the late 1860s, and by the 1880s American Spiritualist circles were using homemade alphabet boards over which a pointer slid directly to the letters, an arrangement the newspapers called the talking board. Commerce followed.
In 1890 the Kennard Novelty Company of Baltimore began selling the board as a parlor amusement, and Elijah Bond's patent was granted in February 1891; the trade name Ouija, of disputed origin but attached to the product from the first, passed to the employee William Fuld, whose company dominated the market for half a century, then to Parker Brothers in 1966, and with it to Hasbro, which holds the trademark today. That trademark is why careful usage keeps the generic name: any maker may sell a talking board, but Ouija names one company's product. The object itself has barely changed since Fuld: the arc of letters, the numerals, yes and no in the corners, goodbye at the bottom, and the heart-shaped planchette on which the sitters' fingers rest. Sold as a game, used in earnest, and condemned from pulpits, the board has spent its whole career on the border between toy and instrument, which no owner of one needs explained.