Who invented magic 8 ball

Somewhere during this process Albert died, leaving Bookman and Levinson to patent subsequent designs of the object. Bookman first reduced the number of windows to one and changed the product name to the Syco-Slate. Molasses was swapped out for inky water. He then struck upon the idea of changing the overall shape to that of a crystal ball.

In this attracted the attention of a Chicago-based company called Brunswick Billiards, who were seeking a unique promotional item for the company. They contacted Bookman, who produced an 8 ball variant. The design was so successful that after the Brunswick contract was up, Bookman continued producing the design as an 8 ball.

The product was a big hit with children, and the Magic 8 ball went from novelty store to toy store. Fun Fact: Of the 20 possible answers provided by a Magic 8 Ball, ten are affirmative, five are negative and five are those lame non-committal answers.

We had some produced as giveaways for a tradeshow, not sure who made them. But the story is that during shipping, it was frigid temperatures and the balls froze pardon the pun and when they made it to the tradeshow, a majority of them did not work very well. Not sure why that would be but that was what we were told happened. What a strange and interesting series of events! Iterative design at its' finest.

If she was actually clairvoyant don't you think Mary would have seen how successful this has been? We have six dogs. Don't have an account? Join Now. If only those youngsters had known the whole story behind the toy and Don's dad, it might have been a big deal. Abraham Charles Buchmann -- he changed the spelling of his last name in the s to avoid the anti-Semitism his son said he experienced in business -- was born into the only Russian-Jewish family living in Blanchester, Ohio, in Abe's father, Samuel, who ran a foundry and spoke Yiddish, had come to Clinton County around after his farming project in South America was destroyed by a storm of locusts, Don said.

He worked as a junk dealer, according to the Census, before moving the family to Corryville. Samuel's name stopped appearing in the city directory in , replaced at the Piedmont Avenue address by his wife, Dora Schwartz Buchmann. Abe left the McMicken College of Liberal Arts after a brief stint in to help care for his family. Abe was the oldest of three children. He was small -- just 5 feet 3 inches tall -- but powerfully built and he excelled in gymnastics, Don said.

He was sweet yet stubborn and well-liked within his small circle of friends. As a boy, as a young teenager, he and his friends would walk on the rails across that open trestle.

When a locomotive came, they would hang off the structure and then pull themselves up after the locomotive had passed. Money was always an issue for the Buchmanns, even more so after Samuel's death, but Abe managed to put himself and his siblings through college. His keen sense of financial efficiency and reliance on Cincinnati's tight Jewish community were key to his personal and professional successes.

Yet, Abe's son said, "he never added up how much money they had because he worried he'd find they were running out. She had invented a chalkboard gizmo called a Psycho-Slate that allegedly could predict the future and made her a sought-after medium around town. His mother's mysticism fascinated Carter, and he went about inventing a more sophisticated future-seeing device out of a tube of thick liquid and floating dice with "yes" and "no" sides.

Max Levinson, a Cincinnati shop owner who happened to be Abe's brother-in-law, wanted to sell Carter's Syco-Seer but felt the "liquid-filled dice agitator" needed refining and that Abe was the man for the job. Carter and Abe combined their first names into one and formed Alabe Crafts in They applied for a patent, but it would be granted too late for Carter. Described as a "genius" and a "gypsy" by those who knew him, Carter was an alcoholic.

Carter, Don said, insisted he be paid in installments. Working out of his shop at W. Fifth St. He rebranded it as the Syco-Slate but had minimal success selling it. Abe put the slate inside a crystal ball but that did little for sales, though it did spark the interest of a major American corporation. Enter Brunswick Billiards. Wartime has long been a boom time for spiritualists, mostly because people long for any news about loved ones at the battlefront. How she did it remains a mystery.

It took some time for Carter to work out the details. It had to look mysterious, it had to offer a variety of answers and, because he had no capital to work with, it had to be cheap to build. He went to work using what he knew best—murky liquids in cans and bottles—and developed what he called the Syco-Seer Miracle Home Fortune Teller—a seven-inch can-shaped device with a glass window on each end.

One of the storekeepers, Max Levinson, not only wanted to stock Syco-Seers, he was very interested in helping Carter produce and market them. Bookman arranged for a manufacturer and planned for the retail release of the Syco-Seer in But I bought every idea he ever had, and that gave him enough to keep going. Given new creative freedom to experiment with the design, Bookman began making changes that Carter had resisted. In stores, models dressed as gypsies demonstrated how to use the device.

On the top of the cylinder were the instructions:.