Just Give It A Shake

And the 8 ball says:

"The outlook does not look good"

Check the ouija board.....

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A/N

In the 1940s, a clairvoyant by the name of Mary Carter, in Cincinnati, inspired her son with an object she used with her clients – a container with a small chalk slate inside it. She would shake the container and open it to reveal the clients answer to the question, written on the slate. Her son, Albert Carter, advanced the design into an easier to operate device – the Syco Seer. A simple cylinder with both transparent ends, filled with molasses, and two dice with answers written on each face – a TOTAL of 12 answers. When it was shaken and up-ended, one of the dice would drift to the top, revealing a random face/answer.

Albert Carter took his idea to a local merchant, with the intention of getting it mass-produced. The merchant, Max Levinson, with his brother-in-law, Abe Bookman, altered the design by reducing the number of windows to one, changing the molasses to inky water and naming in Syco Slate. This version now had only one 6 sided die with answers – a TOTAL of 6 answers.

A standard Magic 8 Ball has 20 possible answers shown in the table below, including 10 affirmative answers , 5 non-committal answers, and 5 negative answers, such as Concentrate and ask again and Reply hazy, try again.

It was Bookman who then decided to change the overall shape to that of a crystal ball, in collaboration a Chicago-based company called Brunswick Billiards, in 1950. An 8-Ball variant was made, which was so successful that it eventually became the Magic 8 Ball that we see today, with a 20 sided die inside it – a TOTAL of 20 answers, manufactured and patented by the toy store, Mattel.