Black tourmaline is schorl, the iron-rich end of the tourmaline group, and it is by a wide margin the commonest tourmaline: the great majority of tourmaline in the earth's crust is schorl, and the coloured gem varieties are the exception.
The name is old and industrial rather than ornamental. Schorl is recorded in German mining usage from the fifteenth century, apparently after a village in Saxony near a tin working where the mineral was abundant, and for most of its documented history it was of interest as an unwanted associate of tin ore rather than as anything to be collected. The word tourmaline itself comes from a Sinhala term applied to mixed gem gravels, which entered European use through the Dutch East India trade in the early eighteenth century.
That leaves a gap worth stating directly. Black tourmaline has a substantial place in the modern crystal market, where it is among the most widely sold stones, and it has essentially no pre-modern record as a stone with attributed properties: no classical lapidary entry, no place in the navaratna, no medieval or early modern tradition. Its current reputation was assembled in the twentieth century.
What it does have is physics. Schorl is strongly pyroelectric and piezoelectric, like the rest of the group, and large crystals are common enough to demonstrate it. Whether that property is connected to the modern attributions is a question about the history of an idea, and the atlas records the attributions as modern rather than treating them as inherited.