Sublime

Penn & Teller have never shied away from revealing the secrets behind some of their tricks, especially if divulging the method will make the audience’s experience more memorable. “If you understand a good magic trick, like if you really understand it down to the mechanics and the core of its psychology, the magic trick gets better—not worse,” T

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

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Howard Thurston became one of the great men of the American stage, a performer whose magic show became a national institution and an important franchise in the first decades of the twentieth century. He was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1869, and as a boy he became a street tough.

Morritt's Cage and deKolta's Vanishing Lady.

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

Walter had amassed a collection of hundreds of tapes, footage of wonder-workers that was otherwise impossible to find. He had clips dating back to 1896 and Georges Méliès’s vanishing act, Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin. A seven-year-old Ricky Jay changing a guinea pig into a dove on the 1955 program Time for Pets. Every magician who ever