Mr. Forte wasn’t a magician. He was a game protection specialist who worked with the casino industry, helping with theft prevention. And his video series had nothing to do with magic; they were educational tapes from the 1980s, produced to help educate people on the techniques used by gambling cheats.

sounds strange, but a clockmaker from France ushered in magic’s golden age. Jean Eugéne Robert-Houdin, France’s most famous magician (and from whom, in 1891, Harry Houdini sourced his stage name) used his background as an engineer to revolutionize magic not only in the ingenuity and complexity of props, but in the presentation of the craft. He saw

Robert-Houdin also revolutionized the brand of a conjuror, specifically how magicians dressed. Instead of embodying the image of a robe-clad mystic, Robert-Houdin dressed like members of his audience. He wore traditional evening clothes: coattails, starched shirts with a high collar, sometimes even a top hat or white gloves.

Max Malini, a stout Polish sleight-of-hand artist from New York City, operated with a sense that magic only existed as a moment—something that just was, with no explanation of why. He wanted his magic to blend seamlessly into everyday situations—bending, but not breaking, the objective reality so many people were quick to accept as fact.