Stage magic leaves a paper trail: patents, lawsuits, newspaper challenges and coroners' reports. The tricks that feel ancient are often only a century old, the famous names often borrowed someone else's idea, and the best stories are the ones the performers could not keep quiet about. These thirty-six cards follow magicians, illusions, escape artists and the long history behind the curtain.
Every tile in a Magic and Illusion game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Magicians
nine stories
1The watchmaker who became the father of modern magic
On the tile: Robert-Houdin1856
Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin worked as a watchmaker in France and did conjuring on the side, until the side trade took over. In 1856 the French government sent him to Algeria, where officials believed local religious leaders were stirring revolt with apparent miracles. His answer was a small chest that any volunteer could lift easily, until Robert-Houdin announced he had taken the man's strength away, at which point the box would not move at all.
Richard Potter was born in Hopkinton, Massachusetts in 1783. His mother, Dinah, had been captured on the Guinea coast and sold on a Boston pier. Potter went on the road as a magician and ventriloquist and, in the judgment of his biographer, became the most famous performer in the young United States and its first Black celebrity. The New Hampshire village where he built his estate is still called Potter Place, and so is the railroad station.
Adelaide Herrmann spent years assisting her husband Alexander, and the one act of his she hated watching was the bullet catch. He died of a heart attack in 1896 and left creditors behind him. She put the show back on the road with his nephew Leon, and on that first tour she performed the bullet catch herself. She was still working at seventy-four and retired in 1928, after a solo career of nearly three decades.
The story goes that at a magicians' gathering in Chicago in 1922, a young Canadian named Dai Vernon had Houdini initial a card, slid it back into the deck, and turned over the top card to show the initialed card on top again. Houdini kept asking to see it and never worked out how it was done. Accounts of how many times he asked differ, from three to seven. Vernon billed himself for years afterward as the man who fooled Houdini.
On March 23, 1918, at the Wood Green Empire in London, the magician billed as Chung Ling Soo was shot when his bullet-catching illusion failed, and he died in the hospital the next morning. He was not Chinese. He was William Ellsworth Robinson, born in New York, who for years had darkened his skin with greasepaint, worn his hair in a queue, rarely spoken on stage, and answered interview questions through an interpreter.
Richard Pitchford was born in the Welsh village of Mumbles in 1895 and served in the First World War. He practiced card manipulations in the trenches, and because his hands were freezing he kept his gloves on. Very few magicians could handle cards in gloves. He came home as one of the few who could, built an act around an impeccably dressed man baffled by the cards blooming at his fingertips, and called himself Cardini.
Sigmund Neuberger, billed as the Great Lafayette, doted on a dog called Beauty that Houdini had given him in 1899. When Beauty died in Edinburgh in 1911, the city agreed to a burial plot on one condition: that Lafayette be buried in the same ground. Days later a lantern hanging above the stage caught fire during his act. Eleven people died, including Lafayette. A quarter of a million people lined the route of his funeral.
The Armstrongs played magic shows across the South and up the East Coast as a family act. When John Hartford Armstrong died in 1939, his daughter Ellen took the show over, with her stepmother still assisting. She was the first Black woman magician to have a touring solo act, and she kept it going into the 1950s, through the Jim Crow era, with sleight of hand, ventriloquism, rag pictures and comedy.
On April 9, 1956, the BBC gave the Indian magician P.C. Sorcar a slot on Panorama. He began sawing his assistant, Dipty Dey, in half, and as the blade seemed to reach her spine the host Richard Dimbleby stepped in front of the camera and announced that the program had ended. Calls flooded in from viewers wanting to know whether Dey was alive, so many that the BBC assigned an operator to handle them.
Sawing a woman in half feels as old as conjuring itself. It is not. The British magician P.T. Selbit first performed it in public at London's Finsbury Park Empire on January 17, 1921, with Betty Barker in the box. Selbit was born Percy Thomas Tibbles and built his stage name by running that surname backward and dropping a letter, which is exactly the kind of detail that falls away once a trick turns into a tradition.
Horace Goldin had his own sawing illusion and protected it the modern way, with a patent: number 1,458,575, granted on June 12, 1923. Ten years later a cigarette campaign titled "It's Fun to Be Fooled ... It's More Fun to Know" printed how the trick worked. Goldin sued and lost. A patent is a public document, the court held, so by filing one he had abandoned his secret to the public.
3The ghost named for the man who did not invent it
On the tile: Pepper's Ghost1862
Henry Dircks worked out how to throw a transparent figure onto a stage and built models to show around. Nobody bit: scaled up, his version meant rebuilding the house. John Henry Pepper, a lecturer at London's Royal Polytechnic, got hold of a model and saw that an existing orchestra pit could hide the performer instead, at almost no cost. He put it in front of an audience at the end of 1862, and it has carried his name ever since.
On October 16, 1865, at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, a performer billed as Colonel Stodare set a box on an empty table and opened the lid. Inside was a human head wearing an Egyptian headdress. It opened its eyes, smiled, and answered questions, then vanished and left a small heap of ashes. Thomas Tobin had invented the effect. Two mirrors beneath the table hid the rest of the man.
Robert Harbin showed the Zig Zag on British television in 1965: an assistant standing in a cabinet, apparently divided into three. Copies turned up everywhere, and the illusion went into the record books as the most pirated trick in magic. Harbin's answer was to publish the method himself, in a 1970 book limited to five hundred copies, after which the printing plates were smashed in a ceremony at the Magic Circle.
6The Indian rope trick was born in a Chicago newsroom
On the tile: Rope Trick1890Myth busted
Everyone knows the trick: a rope stiffens, a boy climbs it, the boy vanishes. The historian Peter Lamont finds no reliable account of it before the Chicago Tribune ran an invented eyewitness report in 1890, printed to lift circulation, and the older tales that do exist, like Ibn Battuta's, describe China rather than India. The paper admitted the hoax four months later, astonished that readers had believed a story bylined Fred S. Ellmore. The retraction never traveled anywhere near as far as the story.
On January 7, 1918, at the Hippodrome in New York, Houdini walked an elephant named Jennie into a cabinet. The doors opened and she was gone. The house was so wide that only the people sitting straight in front could see into the cabinet at all, and everyone else had to take his word for it. The vanish gave him the longest engagement of his career, nineteen weeks.
Catching a fired bullet has been a stage effect for more than four hundred years. A French book of 1586 describes a version performed by a conjurer known as Coulen of Lorraine, who in 1613 was killed by one of his own assistants. Magicians repeat a legend that at least twelve performers have died doing the trick. The documented list is a good deal shorter than the legend, which is how these tallies usually go.
Joseph Buatier, who performed as Buatier de Kolta, invented illusions that magicians still carry in their cases, among them the vanishing birdcage and the expanding cube. The one that kept his name is the easiest to describe. A woman sits in a chair. He throws a large cloth over her, whips it away, and the woman and the cloth are both gone. He first presented it in 1886, and magicians still call the prop the De Kolta chair.
The Daily Mirror challenged Houdini to escape handcuffs it said had taken a Birmingham locksmith, Nathaniel Hart, five years to make. He took the challenge at a matinee at the London Hippodrome on March 17, 1904. The attempt dragged past the hour, with Houdini going in and out of his screen, and after an hour and ten minutes he came out free and wept as the crowd carried him on their shoulders. He called it the hardest escape of his career. Many modern biographers, pointing to the design of the cuffs, think the whole challenge was arranged.
A patent would have meant publishing how the thing worked, so Houdini reached for copyright instead. He performed the Water Torture Cell once in England, as a one-act play, in front of an audience of a single person. That gave him a legal hold on the act without explaining any of it, and imitators could be stopped. The escape had its first real public showing in September 1912, at the Circus Busch in Berlin.
Houdini first performed the Milk Can escape at the Columbia Theater in St. Louis in January 1908. He was handcuffed and sealed into an oversized can filled to the brim with water, a curtain was drawn across it, and the house sat there trying to hold its own breath. The posters did not undersell the thing. The line printed across them read: "Failure Means A Drowning Death." It became one of the escapes people remembered him by.
In January 1906 the Washington police tested Houdini in their newest station house. They took his clothes and locked them in a different cell, put Secret Service handcuffs on him, and shut him behind five separate locks in cell number three. Eighteen minutes later he presented himself to the guards and the police chief, fully dressed and, by the account of the day, smirking.
Houdini told the story this way: manacled and buried in a grave six feet deep, he found the weight of the earth more than he had reckoned on. For the only time in his career he panicked and shouted for help, and nobody could hear him. He clawed upward until his hand broke the surface, and his assistants pulled him out unconscious. His handwritten note reads: "Very dangerous; the weight of the earth is killing." The account is his own; no eyewitness report has turned up, and exactly where it happened has never been clear.
Theodore Hardeen worked as an escape artist for decades and usually introduced himself as the brother of Houdini. One idea was his own. Houdini was still doing his straitjacket escape hidden inside a cabinet in November 1904, and it was Hardeen who grasped that the struggle was the act and did it where the audience could watch. Houdini took the idea up within months, and so have generations of performers since.
The 1920 edition of Funk and Wagnalls' dictionary carried a new verb, printed with its pronunciation: hou-di-nize, to release or extricate oneself from confinement, bonds, or the like, as by wriggling out. Houdini was alive and still touring when the lexicographers let his name into the language. Most performers of his day got headlines and posters. He got a dictionary definition of his own surname.
Films have him dying inside the Chinese Water Torture Cell, and for decades that was the story most people carried. It is wrong. He had been suffering from appendicitis for weeks without seeking treatment when a McGill student in Montreal punched him in the stomach. He went on to Detroit, took the stage on October 24, 1926, with a fever of 104, and was in surgery for a ruptured appendix within hours. He died of peritonitis seven days later, on Halloween.
Houdini spent his last years exposing mediums who claimed to reach the dead, and he and Bess made a ten-year compact: whoever went first would try to get a message back. Every Halloween she held a seance. On the roof of the Hollywood Knickerbocker Hotel on Halloween 1936, after more than an hour with no answer, she closed his shrine and put out the light that had burned since his death. Her words were: "It is finished. Good night, Harry."
Reginald Scot thought the hunting and burning of witches was groundless, and in 1584 he published The Discoverie of Witchcraft to prove it: what looked like sorcery, he showed, was sleight of hand. It became the first book in English to explain how conjuring tricks worked. The story goes that James ordered every copy burned when he took the English throne in 1603. No contemporary evidence for that survives, though James had already attacked Scot by name in print in 1597.
The Westcar Papyrus, written down between roughly 1800 and 1550 BC, tells of a magician called Dedi brought before King Khufu, who built the Great Pyramid. Dedi is said to have removed a goose's head and put it back, then repeated the feat on other birds and on a bull. The tale is fiction, set a thousand years before it was written. It is still the earliest written account of a conjuring trick anyone has produced.
In 1634 a small book appeared in London called Hocus Pocus Junior, The Anatomy of Legerdemain. It was the first English book given over to conjuring, and it was popular enough to run through many editions. Its author has been identified as William Vincent, appointed juggler to King James in 1619, who worked under the stage name Hocus-Pocus. Where the words came from, nobody knows; the old guess that they garble a line of the Latin Mass began in an anti-Catholic sermon.
Wolfgang von Kempelen unveiled a chess-playing automaton in 1770: a turbaned figure seated at a cabinet, which beat most of the people who sat down opposite it. Open any door and you saw only machinery, because the operator inside sat on a sliding chair and shifted as the doors opened. The Turk toured for more than eighty years and burned in a Philadelphia museum fire on July 5, 1854, still officially a machine.
John Nevil Maskelyne watched the Davenport Brothers produce spirit music from inside a locked cabinet and concluded the answer was carpentry. With a cabinetmaker friend, George Alfred Cooke, he built his own cabinet and exposed the act at Cheltenham in June 1865. The exposure made the two of them famous. Maskelyne ended up installed at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly from 1873 to 1904, thirty-one years, in a room London came to call England's Home of Mystery.
6A magician stopped the camera and the lady vanished
On the tile: Georges Méliès1896
Georges Méliès had run the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris since 1888 when he got hold of one of the new motion picture cameras. In 1896 he filmed a vanishing act with Jehanne d'Alcy in his garden at Montreuil: she is seated in front of the lens, and then she is gone. Stopping the camera did the work the stage trick had done for a live audience. The Cinémathèque française calls it his first known trick film, and already his seventieth.
The Expert at the Card Table appeared in 1902 under the name S. W. Erdnase and has never gone out of print. It laid out the sleights of crooked gamblers so plainly that card magicians have studied it ever since. Read the pen name backward and you get E. S. Andrews, a clue that has sent researchers chasing men named Andrews for a century. Several candidates have been argued for. Nobody has been able to prove who he was.
Houdini collected as hard as he performed: books and pamphlets on magic and on spiritualism, reaching back centuries. He willed the whole holding to the Library of Congress. In 1955 two collecting friends and their wives, the McManuses and the Youngs, presented twenty thousand more items to the same shelves. What a vaudeville escape artist gathered on the road became a national research collection.
Jasper Maskelyne, grandson of the Egyptian Hall Maskelyne, served in the Second World War and afterward described a Magic Gang that decoyed bombers away from Alexandria with a dummy harbor and hid the Suez Canal behind whirling lights. The stories are still repeated in articles and documentaries. Then a researcher, Richard Stokes, went through the wartime records and found nearly every one of those triumphs was a fabrication built on a thread of truth.