someone once described the vanishing elephant trick as "3 stage hands wheeled on an empty box, 2 stage hands led the elephant on stage and into the box. The box was closed, Houdini gestured, the box was opened and the elephant had vanished! Then 20 stage hands wheeled the box off stage"
Watching Siegfried and Roy make an elephant disappear when I was sitting less than 100 feet away at their show in Las Vegas was the most impressive stage illusion I’ve ever personally seen. I would imagine in Houdini’s time, when likely no one in the audience had ever even heard of such a grand illusion must have made people question their sanity or, at very least, their eyesight.
I like the way your comment was tempered and grounded, especially as you were talking about fantastic magic tricks. Too much hyperbole in the RU-vid comment section.
That is so cool! I would love to have seen them live! As described by Steinmeyer, most people weren’t too blown away because while the mechanism was revolutionary, the angles where not appropriate for the large theater, and most people couldn’t see clearly. For those who did see clearly, I’m sure it was amazing, but I think a lot of the audience would be more familiar with seeing magic live than the average person today. It certainly would have been wonderful, but they understood that they were at an illusion show.
I know the 'All has been discovered, flee immediately' tale. Part of me wishes it was true, but I think it's an urban myth. If it were true I would delight in a spy/thief panicking. Then again, it would be awful if the poor bloke who fled was gay. Hilarious, but savage - #UK and Irish default humour.
Harry Houdini did believe in spiritualism at first, and he did believe there were probably real psychics and mediums and such. He wasn't really on a mission to go debunking charlatans; he actually was searching for legitimate practitioners. Unsurprisingly, he never found any. It wasn't until near the end of his life that he became steadfastly and vocally opposed to psychics and mediums in general.
Supposedly it was when a medium passed on the message, "Merry Christmas," in English that Houdini lost faith in most of the breed. His Jewish mother who didn't speak English would never have sent such a message.
"Unsurprisingly, he never found any." The assumption that mediumship is impossible requires faith in metaphysical materialism, i.e., the unproven (and perhaps unprovable) view that matter is primary and consciousness somehow emerges from it. How this happens has never been explained. Unsurprisingly, there are still those like Stephen who insist they _know_ materialism to be correct when in fact they don't, thus revealing themselves as not truly scientifically minded at all.
@@halfacanuck Unsurprisingly, you have that exactly backwards. Belief in an afterlife requires completely unfounded faith not only in a non-physical component of the world, but also in the survival of thoughts. memories and personality after death. There's plenty of evidence that these things require (at the very least) a physical substratum to exist (see Oliver Sacks or any work on brain science). Unsurprisingly, there are still those who, like yourself, natter on about "non-physical consciousness" despite a total lack of evidence in support of such a view.
@@TheloniousCube Are you suggesting thoughts are physical? What does "physical" mean, to you? I suggest there's no evidence a physical substratum is _required_ for thoughts, only for the _reporting_ of thoughts. They're called neural _correlates_ of consciousness for a reason, after all.
The description of the mirror is a little off, its more complicated and subtle; it’s described in Steinmeyer’s excellent book “Hiding the Elephant.” I’m a little skeptical about picking up pins with his eyes, both he could do it and that it would be helpful in lock picking. The description of spiritualism was predictably shallow. One interesting thing to note is that catalogs that catered to fraudulent mediums, also sold lectures and kits to wannabe exposers; they were both rackets. To say that all magicians don’t believe in spiritualism or psychic phenomenon is incorrect, and while I don’t know enough about Houdini to comment on his sincerity, James Randi was a cynical self-promoter who was not at all interested in genuine research. He certainly exposed some frauds, but that was just convenient to his exposer persona and aligns more with Harry Frankfurt’s theory of bullshit than a search for truth.
what an amazing amount of twaddle you passed off about Houdini. there’s not enough space in a RU-vid comment to cover *all* of them, but the real corker was ‘pick up pins with his eyelashes’. really? sure, he wore stage makeup, but there was no Maybelline Extra Stiffie. even if he _could_ manage to pick one up, how the fuck could he get it to his hands from there? smh 🙄
