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Date Posted: 21:56:38 07/04/02 Thu
The ART
of HONEST
DECEPTION
by Vincent H. Gaddis
John Mulholland, the well-known magician, was displaying his fascinating mastery of sleight of
hand before an audience of college professors and students. He picked up a coin with his left hand,
placed it in his right, then opened his hand slowly. The coin had vanished. Suddenly a book flew
through the air, narrowly missing the performer's head. An embarrassed professor arose from his
seat and quickly apologized.
A similar experience is described by Milbourne Christopher, another wielder of the wand. He was
performing before a social gathering in Philadelphia, and he asked a reserved, dignified lady to assist
him by selecting a playing card. "I changed the card in her hand from the king of hearts to the three
of spades without touching it," Christopher relates. "She looked up, exasperated. Then she gave me
a terrific shove, toppling me over a small table and onto the floor. Afterward she was most
apologetic."
This instinctive and violent reaction to being fooled occurred because the spectators did
not understand, and therefore could not enjoy, the principles in the art of honest deception.
Since all deception employs the same basic methods, you should know what they are. Not
only will your pleasure in witnessing magical performances be increased, but you will be
able to guard against dishonest attempts to fool you.
Let us analyze what happened when the professor was baffled. With a perfectly natural move, the
magician apparently picked up the coin with his right hand. Actually the coin remained in his left
hand, dropping down into the palm from the extended fingers. His eyes and directed attention
followed the moving, closed right hand, while his unobserved left hand slipped the coin into his coat
pocket. Then, when the performer slowly opened his right hand, the coin had apparently vanished,
and his left hand was empty also.
The coin did not vanish because the hand is quicker than the eye. The hand is slicker, not quicker,
than the vision of spectators. Magic is successful because it is nine-tenths simple distraction. Your
attention is cleverly misdirected. It is your own brain that deceives you.
You do not see with your eyes alone, but with your brain and mind, which sorts out the confusion of
outlines and colors, and forms them into definite, understandable images. Because the mind has so
very much to do with what is being observed, deception is made possible.
Your mind is a censor. If you see two men--one twenty feet away from you and the other
forty--your eyes tell you, falsely, that one man is only half the height of the other. Your intellect,
however, corrects this erroneous impression. The mind, on the other hand, has the habit of building
up familiar objects and individuals on the basis of a fleeting glance or a vague impression. If you
happen to see a friend, for example, passing through a doorway, you may actually see only a
familiar hat or ear or shoulder. But your mind fills out the incomplete picture, and you say to
yourself: "That's Mr. Smith!" Usually you are right, but sometimes you are wrong.
As a result of this mental habit details are not observed. Most men cannot tell you whether the
numbers on their watches are Roman or Arabic, whether all twelve numbers are present, or
whether the manufacturer's name is in view. Unimportant matters, despite clear observation, are not
registered in the consciousness.
We see what we expect to see, and it is difficult to recognize anything we are not prepared to
encounter. If we ran across a polar bear in a field near Chicago, we would likely recognize it as a
large white boulder--until it moved or we got close to it. But if we knew a bear had escaped from a
circus and we were searching for it, we might at first identify a rock as a bear.
A magician tosses an orange into the air. Three times the orange rises and falls, each toss being
made with the identical motions of the performer's body and hands. The fourth time we see the
orange rise--and vanish. Actually, the orange never left his empty right hand the fourth time, but the
repetition of his preceding movements had deceived us. We observed what we had expected to
see--and were fooled.
Most popular ideas about the trade of all tricks are false. When a magician tells you there is
nothing up his sleeve but his elbows, he generally means it. Sleeves are seldom, if ever, used in
accomplishing an illusion. The same is true about the use of mirrors, and as for trapdoors in the
stage floor--they went out with the gas lamp. The more intelligent you are, the easier it is to deceive
you; it is more difficult to mystify children than adults. Finally, the closer you are to the performer
and the more carefully you watch his movements, the more likely you'll gasp with astonishment
when his mystery is completed.
The belief about the use of sleeves originated back in the early days of theatrical performances
when prestidigitators customarily wore huge robes with large sleeves. In those days the
now-you-see-it-now-you-don't artists could conceal several rabbits and a bowl of goldfish up
around their elbows. But the evolution of clothing produced a development of magical methods. The
modern trickster can perform in a bathing suit. Mirrors, too, were once used, but the road show,
with its constant danger of breakage, caused the development of far better methods of creating
large stage illusions.
It is difficult to mystify children and mental defectives because their general knowledge is limited,
and their attention cannot be distracted or misdirected by suggestions of factors they do not
understand. Never be ashamed if you are fooled; only your intelligence is proved.
Let us suppose that the performer is causing a ball to float in the air. He refers to the powers of
magnetism and cosmic energy; he suggests that mental radiations may be the answer. The adults
present in his audience have heard that such powers and factors exist. They may not believe his
suggestions, but their attention has been directed away from the natural and obvious, and they seek
a complex solution. The children, however, are paying no attention to his remarks. They are looking
for the thread that is holding the ball up, and if the performer is not careful they finally see it.
Intelligent persons try to explain what they see in terms of their extensive knowledge of causes and
effects, and the remarks of the performer assist in confusing them. On the other hand, children,
lacking adult knowledge, rely on direct observation. When the performer points his finger at
something on the other side of the stage, the adults look in the direction indicated, but the children
first look at his finger. The more intelligent a person is, the more he uses his mind instead of his eyes.
Thus he fools himself.
It is for the same fundamental reason that being close to the magician aids him in deceiving you.
When you are close to him, he can easily misdirect your attention by merely looking in your eyes, or
calling attention to his left hand while his right hand is busy making the apparent miracle possible.
Angles of vision are much greater at a distance. The farther you are from the wizard, the easier it is
to watch both his hands.
But sight is not the only hazard the magician must guard against. Fred Keating, whose family placed
him under the observation of a psychiatrist when he took up the practice of magic as a boy, was
once performing at a party in honor of the famed violinist, Fritz Kreisler. Musicians are always
fascinated by the dexterity of a sleight-of-hand artist, and the renowned Kreisler was no exception.
He asked Keating to repeat a certain vanish, and then he smiled and said: "I know how you do it.
The coin bounces back into your right hand!"
Keating was astonished. He knew that it was impossible for the violinist to have observed the flight
of the coin since the rapid action was concealed from view. "How do you know?" he asked.
"I heard it," was the reply.
The musician's ear, trained to detect the slightest sound, had succeeded where his eyes had failed.
Misdirection is possible because of the power of suggestion. It is a psychological fact that the first
impulse of people is to believe. Doubting is usually secondary. And the power of suggestion wields
a tremendous influence on our lives and opinions.
An actor using suggestion can baffle trained magicians. Some years ago a group of twelve
professional prestidigitators in Chicago went to see Frederick Tiden play the part of Cagliostro in
the play, The Charlatan. During the performance Tiden produced flowers and silks from empty
boxes. The magicians knew that no magical principle or secret known to them was being used by
the actor. After the show they invited Tiden to have lunch with them.
Tiden was surprised when he learned that his tricks had fooled the wizards. He explained that the
man who appeared most innocent of helping him--the villain, a skeptic who opposed Cagliostro
constantly--had secretly introduced the silks and flowers into the boxes while apparently making
sure they were empty. The suggestion that Cagliostro and the skeptic were bitter enemies was made
so strongly throughout the play that the magicians never suspected that the villain was actually
Tiden's helper and made his miracles possible.
When suggestion succeeds in misdirecting the attention of his audience, the performer is in a position
to substitute one object for another, or obtain or get rid of other objects. One action can act as a
distraction for another action at the same time. For example, when a magician is picking up or laying
down his wand, he may be obtaining or disposing of another small object in his hand at the same
time. The wand acts as a mask for the real reason he approached his table.
"Give me the full attention of a man," Harry Kellar, the famous necromancer of the last generation,
used to say, "and a herd of elephants preceded by a brass band can march behind me, and he will
not know it." Kellar's mastery of misdirection is still a legend in legerdemain, but nevertheless he
was once fooled--very cleverly.
Handbills were left in all the New York magic stores one morning announcing that a new and
unknown magician would perform the floating woman illusion at midnight that evening at Broadway
and Forty-Second Streets. Apparently it was a publicity stunt by a newcomer in the profession, and
Kellar flew into a rage. The floating lady mystery was the feature of his show, and he had spent
$50,000 in perfecting it. To exhibit it on the street would expose its secret, and at that time he
regarded the illusion as his personal property.
Shortly before midnight a large number of magicians, Kellar among them, gathered on the corner to
await the show. Midnight came--and passed. The mysterious wizard did not appear. Finally an idea
dawned in the mind of one of the mystics.
"What's the date?" he asked Kellar.
"March thirty-first," Kellar replied.
"But it's after midnight. This is April First. Somebody has played us for a bunch of April fools."
The joker in the pack of performers was never discovered.
All of the tricks of the magician can be reduced to seven basic effects. These include a
disappearance, an appearance, a transposition of objects, a physical change in an object, an
apparent defiance of natural law, an invisible source of motion, and mental phenomena. In
the production of these effects the advance of magic has kept pace with science. Many modern
tricks use radio-control, electronics, and magnetic induction principles.
In addition to misdirection, the magician uses two other basic methods in the production of his
pseudo-miracles. In some large stage illusions the eye is deceived by an optical illusion--but not in
the manner usually suspected by the layman. There are, in fact, over thirty methods of stage
camouflage, some of them quite complex. These secrets are carefully guarded by the profession
since they represent investments of many thousands of dollars.
The final principle is simply the use of a little-known scientific law or bit of knowledge. These stunts
work themselves. When the performer turns water into wine and wine into milk with the aid of
certain chemicals, he is taking advantage of this principle.
As to little-known bits of knowledge, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the famed advocate of spiritualism,
once fooled a gathering of New York magicians with this method. He presented without comment a
remarkable and realistic motion picture of prehistoric dinosaurs which, apparently, could only have
been taken by supernormal means. Sir Arthur's collection of psychic photographs was famous, and
the puzzled magicians wondered if this film was his latest acquisition.
Several months later the explanation came to light when the motion picture The Lost World, taken
from Doyle's novel of the same title, appeared in the theaters. Sir Arthur had obtained a part of the
film in advance in order to briefly mystify the wand wielders.
By these principles are we deceived. Remember, the next time you see a magician, that he is
tricking your brain and not your eye. You are actually fooling yourself. The more you try to solve his
mysteries by using your intelligence, the more easily he will baffle you.
When deception is honest, it's fun to be fooled. So sometimes, strange to say, we are fooled
because we wish to be deceived. And that is the greatest, most important, principle of them all.
ARTICLE TAKEN FROM HERE:
<a rel=nofollow target=_blank href="http://www.strangemag.com/artofhonestdecept.html">http://www.strangemag.com/artofhonestdecept.html</a>
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