Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/227

WHITE MAGIC.] Pinetti showed two figures sketched upon a wall, one of which put out a candle, and the other relighted the hot wick, when the candle was held to their mouths. By wafers he had applied a few grains of gunpowder to the mouth of the first, and a bit of phosphorus to that of the other. A striking trick of this conjuror was to extinguish two wax candles and simultaneously light two others at a distance of 3 feet, by firing a pistol. The candles were placed in a row, and the pistol fired from the end where the lighted candles were placed ; the sudden blast of hot gas from the pistol blew out the flames and lighted the more distant candles, because in the wick of each was placed a millet-grain of phosphorus. A more recent conjuror showed a pretty illusion by appearing to carry a flame invisibly between his hands from a lighted to an unlighted candle. What he did was to hold a piece of wire for a second or two in the flame of the first candle, and then touch with the heated wire a bit of phosphorus which had been inserted in the turpentine-wetted wick of the other. But in 1842 Louis Dobler, a German con juror of much originality, surprised his audience by light ing two hundred candles instantaneously upon the firing of a pistol. This was the earliest application of electricity to stage illusions. The candles were so arranged that each wick, black from previous burning, stood a few inches in front of a fine nozzle gas-burner projecting horizontally from a pips of hydrogen gas, and the two hundred jets of gas passed through the same number of gaps in a con- ducting-wire. An electric current leaping in a spark through each jet of gas ignited all simultaneously, and the gas flames fired the caudle wicks. Robert-Houdin, who opened his " Temple of Magic " at Paris in 1845, originated the application of electro- magnetism for secretly working or controlling mechanical apparatus in stage illusions. He first exhibited in 1845 his light and heavy chest, which, when placed upon the broad plank or " rake " among the spectators, and exactly over a powerful electromagnet hidden under the cloth covering of the plank, was held fast at pleasure. In order to divert suspicion Houdin showed a second experi ment with the same box, suspending it by a rope which passed over a single small pulley attached to the ceiling ; but any person in the audience who took hold of the rope to feel the sudden increase in the weight of the box was unaware that the rope, while appearing to pass simply over the pulley, really passed upward over a winding-barrel worked as required by an assistant. Remarkable ingenuity was displayed in concealing a small electromagnet in the handle of his glass bell, as well as in his drum, the electric current passing through wires hidden within the cord -by which these articles were suspended. In one of Houdin s illusions throwing eight half-crowns into a crystal cash- box previously set swinging electricity was employed in a different manner. Top, bottom, sides, and ends of an oblong casket were of transparent glass, held together at all the edges by a light metal frame. The coins were con cealed under an opaque design on the lid, and supported by a false lid of glass, which was tied by cotton thread to a piece of platinum wire. Upon connecting the electric circuit, the platinum, becoming red-hot, severed the thread, letting fall the glass flap, and dropping the coins into the box. Down to the latter part of last century no means of secretly communicating ad libitum motions to apparently isolated pieces of mechanism had superseded the clumsy device of packing a confederate into a box on legs draped to look like an unsophisticated table. Pinetti placed three horizontal levers close beside each other in the top of a thin table, covered by a cloth, these levers being actuated by wires passing through the legs 209 and feet of the table and to the confederate behind a scene or partition. In the pedestal of each piece of apparatus which was to be operated upon when set loosely upon the table were three corresponding levers hidden by cloth ; and, after being examined by the audience, the piece of mechanism was placed upon a table in such a position that the two sets of levers exactly coincided, one being superimposed upon the other. In one " effect " the confederate worked a small bellows in the base of a lamp, to blow out the flame ; in another he let go a trigger, causing an arrow to fly by a spring from the bow of a doll sportsman ; he actuated a double-bellows inside a bottle, which caused flowers and fruit to protrude from among the foliage of an artificial shrub, by distending with air a number of small bladders shaped and painted to represent them ; he opened or shut valves which allowed balls to issue out of various doors in a model house as directed by the audience ; and he moved the tiny bellows in the body of a toy bird by which it blew out a candle. Other conjurors added more complicated pieces of appa ratus, one being a clock with small hand moving upon a glass disk as required by the audience. The glass disk carrying the numbers or letters was in reality two, the back one being isolated by ratchet teeth on its periphery hidden by the ring frame which supported it, and, though the pillar-pedestal was^ separated into three pieces and shown to the spectators, movable rods, worked by the table levers, were in each section duly covered by cloth faces. Another mechanical trick, popular with Torrini, Houdin, Philippe, and Robin, and worked in a similar way, was a little harlequin figure which rose out of a box set upon the table, put his legs over the front of the box and sat on the edge, nodded his head, smoked a pipe, blew out a candle, and whistled a one-note obbligato to an orchestra. Robert-Houdin employed, instead of the table levers, vertical rods each arranged to rise and fall in a tube, according as it was drawn down by a spiral spring or pulled up by whip-cord which passed over a pulley at the top of the tube and so down the table leg to the hiding- place of the confederate. In his centre table he had ten of these " pistons," and the ten cords passing under the floor of the stage terminated at a keyboard. Various ingenious automata were actuated by this means of trans mitting motion ; but the most elaborate piece of mechanical apparatus constructed by Houdin was his orange tree. The oranges, with one exception, were real, stuck upon small spikes, and concealed by hemispherical screens which were covered with foliage ; and the screens, when released by the upward pressure of a piston, made half a turn, and disclosed the fruit. The flowers were hidden behind foliage until raised above the leaves by the action of another piston. Near the top of the tree an artificial orange opened into four portions; while two butterflies attached to two light arms of brass rose up behind the tree, appeared on each side by the spreading of the arms, and drew out of the opened orange a handkerchief which had been borrowed and vanished away. It is remarkable how many of the illusions regarded as the original inventions of eminent conjurors have been really improvements of older tricks. Hocus Poms Junior, The Anatomy of Legerdemain (4th edition, 1654), gives an explanatory cut of a method of drawing different liquors out of a single tap in a barrel, the barrel being divided into compartments, each having an air-hole at the top, by means of which the liquid in any of the compartments was withheld or permitted to flow. Robert-Houdin applied the principle to a wine-bottle held in his hand from which he could pour four different liquids regulated by the un stopping of any of the four tiny air-holes which were covered by his fingers: A large number of very small

XV. 27