Magicians One thing I love is a good magic act, as a matter of fact I look at Fool Us every week. Fool Us is a show where magicians perform from Penn and Teller’s theatre and the object is for them to be able to fool two of the greatest magicians with their act. While most don’t, there are a few who do and they are rewarded with the Fool Us trophy and a place in the Penn and Teller Magic Show in Los Vegas, which is the very famous. Some of the tricks are so amazing it makes one wonder how they possibly could be carried out. One example of an incredible trick is when a magician appears on a monitor from his home country and tells the two magicians to pick a card from their deck and look at it, and each one picks a card. The guest magician then asks them to put the cards back into the deck and shuffle. Then he tells them to go down so many cards and there is the first card which was picked and then to go down again a number of cards and there is the second card. This magician is thousands of miles away and yet the trick works. It is just amazing. Sometimes a trick which seems impossible is so simple you feel stupid if you find out how it was done. I remember a famous street magician who appeared in a long robe claiming he could float and rose up off the ground a few inches or so it looked. Everyone in the street was amazed. What he was really doing was stepping up on a curb. The trick was all in the way he did it. No one detected what he was doing. I have always been amazed at some magic tricks like saw the lady in half. When I was a young man, I went to the most famous magic store in New York City. It was run by magicians. You could buy many of the famous tricks and saw the lady in half was one of them. The going price at that time was $5000. The salesmen were all magicians and would demonstrate tricks for you. There were hollow coins, rings that could be pulled apart when entangled and boxes with secret compartments, among many other things. Some were very simple things like two headed coins. Many incredible tricks fool us every day, but the most incredible trick of all wasn’t done for entertainment. The British government were very worried during World War II that the Germans were going to bomb the Suez Canal. They had to do something to protect it, but they couldn’t figure out how this could be done. Sure, you could put more anti-aircraft guns around it, but that wouldn’t stop all the planes and a couple of well placed bombs would knock the canal out of the war, preventing British and allied ships from using it, and cause them to have to go all the way around Africa taking much longer and making them more vulnerable to attack. So, who could possibly help in a situation like this? Perhaps one of the most famous magicians of his time, Jasper Maskelyne. He patiently looked the situation over using something no one else had and that was the eyes of a magician. Incredibly he came up with a solution, he would make the Germans think the canal was miles away from its real location. How could something as large as the canal be hidden? He had to conceal Alexandria and the canal. The very idea boggles the mind. The first thing he did was build night lights just like those around Alexandria only miles away from the city. Then he built fake buildings, a lighthouse and anti-aircraft guns. To hide the canal, he built a revolving cone of mirrors which dazzled aircraft for nine miles around the canal hiding it from bombers. During a night bombing attack the Germans completely fell for the ruse and their bombs fell miles away. Maskelyne had created the most successful illusion ever. Magicians have been fooling us for thousands of years. Back in ancient times people believed tricks were really magic and some magicians were promoted to positions of power. There are pictures of ancient magicians performing different acts painted on ancient walls. This was not perceived as a trick they were doing but some kind of divine gift they had from the gods which allowed them to perform miracles. Many if not all of ancient Egyptian priests were magicians. In ancient times a magician could write his own ticket except if people began to perceive what he was really doing, which was tricking them. Another pitfall was if people began to believe your power came from the devil. The top magicians of our time are said to be Harry Houdini, David Copperfield, Doug Henning, Siegfried and Roy, Ricky Jay, Mark Wilson and Penn and Teller. David Copperfield is said to be the most famous magician in the world. His acts include illusion for which he is most famous but also include manipulation and close up magic. He levitated a Ferrari in 1980, made a plane vanish in 1981, made the Statue of Liberty disappear in 1983 and so many other incredible tricks. He even walked through the Great Wall of China in 1986. If Maskelyne was alive today, Copperfield would be giving him a run for his money. I think everyone is familiar with Harry Houdini. He was a magician who specialized in escapes from supposedly inescapable places and things. So much is known about him from television programs, books and movies, he was famous for the escape from a straight jacket suspended hanging upside down in the air and his famous water torture trick among others and was also a debunker of the paranormal. Doug Henning has done many different tricks as a magician. He was credited for bringing back stage magic in the 1970s. Henning was famous for recreating one of Houdini’s famous tricks the water torture. Henning had started out as a Canadian magician, but quickly became famous everywhere. He made an elephant vanish in 1976. He walked through a brick wall in 1977. Some magicians have thought up and constructed some incredible tricks. They are geniuses of their trade and you have to wonder if they were in other professions such as science or engineering what they might have been able to do. I like magic and hope I will continue to be amazed by the best of them.
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