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

exactly the traits for which Houdini was infamous. Most analyses of The Unmasking easily confront the arguments of dates, names, or inventions but are helpless in attempting to explain the blindness and double standards of its author.

The Maskelyne mechanical cash box was no more popular. Probably his most popular commercial invention was a coin-operated lock that was especially simple and durable; it was used for decades on pay toilets in London.

His novel presentation focused on the thousand people in the audience who did not step up onstage, calculating that by quietly exposing the trick to a few, he was creating a miracle for everyone else.

Harry Kellar was also badly fooled when he saw it in the summer of 1901. He was America's greatest magician, a rough-and-tumble showman. He'd been born Heinrich Keller in 1848 in Erie, Pennsylvania. As a boy, Harry worked as a drugstore clerk, a newsboy, and custodian for the Erie Railroad before he ended up in Buffalo, New York and responded to a

romantic, adventurous autobiography of jean Robert-Houdin, the Parisian magician of the mid-1800s. The Memoirs of Robert-Houdin so influenced him that he took a stage name derived from Robert-Houdin's as an homage.

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Mark Schantz, a touring East Coast magician, was probably the originator of the Back Palm. Maurer might have thought Schantz was Mexican because he had a habit of speaking Spanish and manipulating Mexican coins; he liked their size and weight in his hands.Although Thurston didn't originate the Back Palm, he was probably one of the first to perform

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