HISTORY
A patent for the brad, or brass fastener, was issued to a man named George W. McGill in 1866. I’m surmising Discs-of-Fate-type divination tools, with their independently moveable discs, probably started appearing not long after that. The brad secures multiple levels of paper together, like the staple does, but the brad allows for more mobility around the joint when you know you’ll need to move the fastened papers around quite a bit. With this type of fortune-telling device, if the discs can’t be manipulated independently of each other, it’s useless. So this is a good example of a divination tool which came into being as a consequence of advancing technology. You have to hand it to divination, it keeps up with the times.
Once the brass fastener was invented, however, a variety of manipulable fortune tellers came into being. As you can see from the illustration, a company called the ‘Columbus Buggy Company’ in Ohio, USA, gave out a version of the fortune telling disc, apparently as free swag, to customers. Variations of the Discs of Fate could be run in magazines for the readers to assemble and use, most likely around Halloween.