Tradition

Five classical pieces, performed in the line they came down through. What follows is where each one begins, so far as the record runs. And where the record gives out, the stories take over.

Linking Rings

Solid metal rings link, pass through one another, and join into a chain.

Everybody calls it the Chinese Rings and assumes the trick is ancient, but the real paper trail is short, and it doesn't start in China. The oldest firsthand account is Korean. On December 28, 1729, an envoy named Kim Sun-hyeop wrote about a Chinese performer who raised two iron rings, drew them together slowly until they linked as if they'd been cast as one solid piece, then tossed one so it struck the other and joined. Anyone who's seen the trick today would know those moves. What the Korean travelers never wrote down was how it worked, and that explanation came out of Japan, in Hirase Hôse's Hôkasen of 1764, the first written account of the method. It was Japanese magicians who started calling it the Chinese Rings. Oddly, no early Chinese source has ever turned up, though a troupe of Chinese jugglers did tour Britain with the rings in 1821. The trick shows up in English in Edwin Sachs' Sleight of Hand, first published in 1877 and expanded in a second edition around the mid-1880s. Its modern form owes the most to Dai Vernon, who pared the routine down to clean, direct linking instead of showy display, and that's roughly how most performers still work it today.

Egg Bag

An egg appears at the fingertips, vanishes, and is found again in a small cloth bag shown empty.

The bag and the egg go back a long way. In early 1700s London, Isaac Fawkes worked a big cloth bag, pulling eggs out of it and ending with something alive, usually a bird, flapping out onto the table. The Bamberg family ran routines a lot like it. By the Victorian era the trick had made it into the standard English manuals. You'll find it in Professor Hoffmann's Modern Magic, which came out in 1876, and in Edwin Sachs' Sleight of Hand from the year after. The little bag people use today wasn't the original, though. That was Max Malini's idea in the early 1900s, when he reshaped the effect down to the compact bag it is now. Charlie Miller, who lived from 1909 to 1989, worked out the handling most performers still study, and Johnny Thompson refined it even further from there.

Silks

Two sets of three colored silks. A spectator handles one set as they please; the performer's set is found to agree with it.

Silk is a fairly recent tool for magicians. It didn't really become working material until around the middle of the 1800s, and before that conjurers just used plain cloths. The effect behind this one is called the Sympathetic Silks. Two separate sets of silks end up matching each other no matter what the spectator freely chooses. Hatton and Plate were the first to write it down, in their 1910 book Magicians' Tricks, and it caught on fast with the silk specialists who came after them. One of those was Harold Rice, and his Encyclopedia of Silk Magic is still the book everyone turns to. The version here works a little differently. Instead of knots seeming to jump from one set to the other, it just follows whatever order the spectator picks. But it's the same idea at heart.

Cut and Restored Rope

A single length of rope is cut through the middle and made whole.

This is one of the oldest tricks anyone ever bothered to write down. It shows up in the very first English book to give conjuring away, Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft, back in 1584, where it's listed as cutting a lace in two and making it whole again. It turns up once more about fifty years later, in an anonymous little book called Hocus Pocus Junior: The Anatomie of Legerdemain, from 1634. And it's in Hoffmann's Modern Magic too, which came out in 1876.

Balls in Net

Three balls pass from hand to hand under conditions that should not allow it, travel to the pocket and back, and finally are gone.

This routine goes back to the cups and balls, which is about as old as recorded magic gets. You can see it in Hieronymus Bosch's painting The Conjurer, from around 1502, where a street performer works the cups for a curious crowd. Reginald Scot wrote it down in his Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584, and the heart of it was always the ball passages, the sleights that make the balls come and go. An early cousin of the modern version, the Chinese Marble Trick, shows up in Edwin Sachs' Sleight of Hand in 1877. The net stretched tight between two spectators is just a newer frame for that same old plot, and it's been kept alive in close-up work by people like Silent Mora and Dai Vernon.