Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear

I was trained for this job by a master. His name was Harry. He had been selling products door-to-door for thirty of his forty-five years at the time. I was working part-time, as I was in my senior year of college. Harry didn’t think much of formal education. “Why do you want to waste your time reading a bunch of dusty old books?” he’d ask me. “Ever

This in turn influences how people at home come to evaluate magic. In a way, these are the same problems magic encountered in the past—the dumbing down of a much larger artistic vision for television’s tried-and-true model.

Around this time, the popular American magician Howard Thurston hired his own secret weapon: Guy Jarrett. Jarrett worked with a range of materials and engineered complex props like the Siamese Cabinet. During the trick, Thurston would wheel out the cabinet, open all its doors to show it was empty, and then close it back up. A second later, people w

It’s a universal truth: all humans want to be amazed. And, ironically enough, deception is a useful tool to achieve this effect. Like social deception, the most important facet of magic is this: a magic trick cannot exist, even in its most basic form, without someone on which to perform it. Magic’s purpose is not initially predicated upon the execu