Hello again.

After requests from my most recent blog post to go deeper into the history of a trick more, I thought it would be fitting to talk about the history of magic itself. I also promise to go into the history of individual tricks more next week.

It is hard to give an exact date or even time period as to when the art of illusion became popular. Going back to the ancient world, magic was directly correlated to religion, which meant the priests were the magicians! Egyptians were the first known culture to correlate magic and clergy, and you can even see proof of this in the bible. Moses has to compete with Egyptian magicians who can “replicate” the plagues Moses brings, like turning a staff into a snake.

So magic is nothing new to the human race.

The first known magician was an Egyptian named Dedi who performed for the pharaoh by cutting off the heads of geese, bulls, or chickens, have them run around headless, and then restore their heads, returning the animals to their original state. And of course, this illusion was attributed to the power of the gods.

I’m sorry to say I can’t tell you how this trick was done. There isn’t enough information or even credibility with this illusion that his secret died with him. The most important piece of information about Dedi though is his legacy as the first ever magician.

Moving forward a couple thousand years, ancient Greece left us (among many, many things) the world’s oldest magic trick still known today. You might even see street performers doing this as it is still a popular trick. The illusion is called ball and cup, and it is actually about as simple as tricks come. Take a look at my favorite modern day magicians, Penn and Teller, perform a variation of this trick. I will warn you, this is a video of them both performing it and explaining it, so only watch the first 1 minute and 30 seconds, and then once you tried to make sense of my explanation, feel free to watch the rest of it.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8osRaFTtgHo

So, the key in this trick is there are four balls to begin with. Three are placed on top of the cups, visible to the audience, but another has its starting place under the first cup. The magician picks up the first ball and using sleight of hand, he makes it “disappear”, when in reality he is still holding on to it. Then the first cup is lifted up, where the fourth ball was sitting, and it looks like the first ball magically appeared there. The first ball is actually placed under the second cup, and then the trick is repeated through all the cups.

Now, because Penn and Teller are awesome, they added some fancy parts with bigger balls they had hidden in their pockets. But the fundamentals of the trick are the same, and you are now welcome to go watch their explanation now of the trick.

So that was the oldest known trick in the world, and in my opinion, it’s pretty cool to watch the same trick ancient Greeks were watching 3,000 years ago.

Hope you liked some of the history!

We’ve all seen it before. A magician comes out on stage with a box in front of him. He has his lovely (why are they always lovely?) assistant step into the long horizontal box, lying flat on her back. To the horror of the audience, the magician uses a massive saw to cut her body in half, then pulling the halves of her apart as proof this woman is now in two! Once put back together, the woman steps out, without a single scar or anything (magicians would make great plastic surgeons).

This has become such a well-known trick, performers rarely use it. Some magician broke the code many years ago and now the secret is almost common knowledge. But if you don’t know it, you’re in for treat. If you do, I promise to go into the history of the trick and still make this post at least a little interesting.

I actually find the history very funny. It is rumored (though it’s probably not true; I like to believe) the trick was first performed by a magician named Torrini in front of Pope Pius VII in 1809. I like to picture His Holy Excellency staring wide mouth at this magician who’s face probably looks like

and then the Pope promptly has him executed for witch craft.

Anyways….

The trick uses flexibility as its main source of amazement. The other key is the number of people involved in the trick. It appears there are only two people, the magician and his lovely helper, but there is a third person involved, one you never even see. There is a second female inside of the box who has been there since the beginning of the trick. Take a look at this lovely diagram which illustrates how the other person plays a role.

As you can imagine, person number two gets a little cramped after a while.

When the lovely assistant steps into the box, the other lady sticks her legs out the other end, creating the clever illusion that only one person is in the box.

As you may be getting this impression from my blog, the most crucial part of a great magic trick is a believable illusion. Any person can play off an illusion, but what makes a true magician is the presentation of an act! When was the last time you saw a magician with a monotone voice and an unenthusiastic attitude? Never! There is always dramatic music, loud noises, and unnecessary sound effects.

You should try this in your own life, it really makes for an exciting afternoon.

Back to the trick, there are actually many variations of this trick. Sometimes people use a buzz saw or really tiny boxes, but often the fundamental of the trick remains the same.

Hope you found this trick interesting!

“Sawing A Woman In Half.” American Heritage. Published March 23, 2007. http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/1994/3/1994_3_34.shtml.

Magicians can be very sneaky.

They know how to get you to do exactly what they want, without you ever noticing. Something I learned long ago is called “Magician’s Choice” which is a way to get you to pick what the magician needs you to pick. Imagine you have three cards

I (the magician) have put your card in the middle, and I ask you to pick a card. There are three scenarios as to what can happen

1. You pick the middle card. That certainly makes my job easy because you just picked up your own card and it appeared as if I knew you would pick that card. I look fantastic, you are amazed, and that’s the end of the trick!
2. The next scenario can happen one of two ways. You will pick either the right or left card, but regardless, it is not the card I want you to pick. Is that the end of the trick? No! Of course not! So if you pick the card on the right, I will pull that card away and put it in the discard pile, as if no matter what card you chose, I was going to pull it away. No you have two cards left! The card on the left, and the new card on the right (which I know is your card). I’m going to ask you again to pick a card from the remaining two. If you pick the one on the left, I will pull it away just as I did to the original card you chose. Now you have one card remaining and it’s yours! And the trick is done.

Everything I described to you has had no special illusion or trick to it, I’m merely keeping or pulling cards away, depending on which one you picked. But there is one scenario where I’m in big trouble.

          3. Let’s say you chose the card on the right, and I’ll pull it away. What happens                   when I ask you to pick another card, and you chose the one on the right (which               is your card!)? I can’t pull it away like I did originally, then the only one left is                   the wrong card. This is where the illusion come in, and I count on the fact that                 you aren’t paying to much attention. Of the two remaining, when you choose                   your card that was originally in middle, I’m going to pull away the card on left. It               is now like you chose the one in the middle, so I’m going to keep the card you                 chose, even though I originally pulled away a card! It combining the two                           strategies of pulling away cards I don’t want and leaving cards I do want.

It’s a little mind boggling, but this technique is very common among magicians to give the audience the illusion of choice. If the crowd believes they chose their own card, it makes the magician seem, well, more magical! I hope this made some sense, and please ask me to show you this trick, because I will happily oblige!

You know what I love about magic? Its power to amaze. How do you keep the attention of crowd with nothing but a pencil? Magic. How do you saw a man in half? Magic. How do you turn yourself into the coolest person in the room? Magic. Or a leather jacket. But magic takes the ordinary and does something incredible with it, and that’s why I’ve been addicted to it since a little kid. I’ve gone to magic camps and spent hours on the internet looking for party tricks or illusions, and I look up to Harry Houdini the same way a typical kid looks up to Tom Brady. Is that a little strange? Maybe, but everyone has their own unique interests and passions. In this blog I’m going to talk about some of the greatest magic tricks ever performed and reveal their secret, assuming the world ever figured out how the magician did it. I would like my first trick to be one of my favorites done by my second favorite magician (take a guess at who is #1).

David Copperfield made the Statue of Liberty disappear.

How could he make something over 450 feet tall, weighing thousands of tons, disappear before a live audience? It truly was an incredible trick, and you can watch it on YouTube in a short three minute video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=823GNH4Rczg

So good old David made the icon of freedom evaporate, even running spotlights through the area where the statue had been only minutes before. While the video showed the circumstances to be fairly free, the illusion was done under very strict conditions. The audience had to be exactly where they were sitting, otherwise the whole thing would have fallen apart.

The key to success in this trick is the stage and the two pillars holding up the curtain. As soon as that curtain hid the statue, the lights illuminating Lady Liberty were turned off, and the entire stage, pillars, and audience begin to shift to the right. Once they were enough degrees away, another set of lights were turned on in the same pattern and the curtain was dropped. Wowzah! The Statue of Liberty is gone! Then Copperfield ran search lights through the area that had nothing there. Once the crowd was thoroughly amazed, the curtain went back up and the stage shifted back to the original position, making the statue “reappear”.

Some other tricks he used to make this trick successful

1. He was playing loud music, which would have hid any noise or vibration the machines were making to shift the stage.
2. The trick was done at night, meaning there was no reference point for the audience to notice the shifting of the stage. It’s the same idea of being in a boat with no windows; there is no way to tell what direction you are going or if the boat changes directions (in calm waters).
3. The stage was moving very slowing, and though you cannot tell in the video, a couple minutes passed between the curtain being raised and the statue disappearing.
4. The “radar detector” used were merely an added illusion that could be controlled, and just a button was used to make it vanish on the screen.

The idea behind it is fairly simple, but brilliant in engineering and design. David Copperfield took an old illusion and modernized it on a very large scale, and this brilliance he part of the reason he is as famous as he is. And if you liked what he did in that trick, I promise this will not be the last time you hear from him on Matt Roda’s Passion Blog.

Source:

“David Copperfield’s Statue of Liberty Trick Revealed.” Break.com. 14 October 2008. http://www.break.com/video/ugc/david-copperfield-statue-of-liberty-revealed-587881