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 apparatus,—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 transmitting 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.
Many of the illusions regarded as the original inventions of eminent conjurors have been really improvements of older tricks. Hocus Pocus Junior, The Anatomy of Legerdemain (4th ed., 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 unstopping of any of the four tiny air-holes which were covered by his fingers. A large number of very small liqueur glasses being provided on trays, and containing drops of certain flavouring essences, enabled him to supply imitations of various wines and liquors, according to the glasses into which he poured syrup from the bottle; while by a skilful substitution of a full bottle for an emptied one, or by secretly refilling in the act of wiping the bottle with a cloth, he produced the impression that the bottle was “inexhaustible.” In 1835 was first exhibited in England a trick which a Brahman had been seen to perform at Madras several years before. Ching Lau Lauro sat cross-legged upon nothing,—one of his hands only just touching some beads hung upon a genuine hollow bamboo which was set upright in a hole on the top of a wooden stool. The placing of the performer in position was done behind a screen; and the explanation of the mysterious suspension is that he passed through the bamboo a strong iron bar, to which he connected a support which, concealed by the beads, his hand and his dress, upheld his body. In 1849 Robert-Houdin reproduced the idea under the title of ethereal suspension,—professedly rendering his son’s body devoid of weight by administering vapour of ether to his nose, and then, in sight of the audience, laying him in a horizontal position in the air with one elbow resting upon a staff resembling a long walking-stick. The support was a jointed iron frame under the boy’s dress, with cushions and belts passing round and under the body. Subsequently the trick was improved upon by Sylvester—the suspended person being shown in several changes of position, while the sole supporting upright was finally removed. For the latter deception the steel upright was made with polished angular faces, apex towards the spectators, and acted in a dim light on the same principle as the mirrors of a Sphinx table. Before lowering the light, the reflector bar is covered by the wood staff set up before it.
The mysterious vanishing or appearing of a person under a large extinguisher upon the top of a table, and without the use of mirrors, was first performed by Comus, a French conjuror very expert in the cups-and-balls sleight-of-hand, who, appearing in London in 1789, announced that he would convey his wife under a cup in the same manner as he would balls. The feat was accomplished by means of a trap in a box table. Early in the 19th century Chalons, a Swiss conjuror, transformed a bird into a young lady, on the same principle. In 1836 Sutton varied the feat by causing the vanished body to reappear under the crust of a great pie. Houdin “vanished” a person standing upon a table top which was shown to be only a few inches thick; but there was a false top which was let down like the side of a bellows, this distension being hidden by a table-cloth hanging sufficiently low for the purpose, and the person, when covered by the extinguisher, entered the table through a trap-door opening upwards. Robin, in 1851, added to the wonder of the trick by vanishing two persons in succession, without any possibility of either escaping from the table,—the two persons really packing themselves into a space which, without clever arrangement and practice, could not hold more than one. The sword-and-basket trick was common in India many years ago. In one form it consisted in inverting an empty basket over a child upon the ground; after the child had secreted himself between the basket-bottom and a belt concealed by a curtain painted to look like the actual wicker bottom, a sword was thrust through both sides of the basket, the child screaming, and squeezing upon the sword and upon the ground a blood-coloured liquid from a sponge. When the performer upset the basket, the child could not be seen; but another child similarly costumed suddenly appeared among the spectators, having been up to that time supported by a pair of stirrups under the cloak of a confederate among the bystanders. In another form an oblong basket is used large at the bottom and tapering to the top, with the lid occupying only the central portion of the top, and the child is so disposed round the basket that the sword plunged downward avoids him, and the performer can step inside and stamp upon the bottom to prove that the basket is empty. In 1865 Stodare introduced the trick into England, but in a new manner. Upon light trestles he placed a large oblong basket; and after a lady attired in a profuse muslin dress had composed herself and her abundance of skirt within, and the lid had been shut and the sword plunged through the sides, the basket was tilted towards the audience to show that it was empty, and the lady reappeared in a gallery of the hall. The basket was formed with an outer shell to turn down, leaving the lady with her dress packed together lying upon the basket bottom and behind what had formed a false front side,—the principle being the same as in the clown’s box, which, when containing a man, is rolled over to display the inside empty. The reappearing lady was a double, or twin sister.
Among the most meritorious and celebrated mechanical illusions have been automaton figures secretly influenced in their movements by concealed operators. In the 17th century M. Raisin, organist of Troyes, took to the French court a harpsichord which played airs as directed by the audience; but, upon opening the instrument, Louis XIV. discovered a youthful performer inside. In 1769 Baron Kempelen, of Pressburg, in Hungary, completed his chess-player, which for a long time remained the puzzle of Europe. It was an illusion,—the merit consisting in the devices by which the confederate player was hidden in the cabinet and body of the figure, while the interior
