PLANCHETTE, plan-chk' (Fr. plifi-shEt), a thin heart-shaped piece of wood supported on two castors at the ends of the base and on an ordinary pencil at the apex that was popular about 1860 to 1880, before the Ouija board supplanted it. If the finger-tips be placed upon this device, the pencil may readily be made to trace characters without conscious movement on the part of the operator. Like the Ouija board it was used by two classes of persons: (1) Believers in Spiritualism, who asked ques tions of a spiritual control and believed that they received answers from intelligences on the spirit plane; and (2) people who regarded the mechanism as a game and amused themselves by pushing it to write messages for the benefit of others present. When used by some per sons the planchette seemed to begin to move of its own accord after a little space of time and if the person .wished, for instance, to have
an answer to a certain question, writing was formed on the sheet of paper on which the instrument was placed, containing something more or less pertinent to the matter. Consult Huntley, F., The Great Psychological (Chicago 1912).
PLANgON, plail-san, • Pol, French bass singer: b. in the Ardennes, France, about 1855; d. 1914. He studied music at the Ecole Duprez in Paris and in 1881 made his debut at Lyons in In 1883 he appeared in the Paris Grand Opera as Mephisto in and scored a great success, which was followed by an equally praiseworthy presentation of Ramfis in He has been warmly received at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. He has created roles in Saint-Saens' canion'; Massenet's etc.