Hanky Panky

Take a concave mirror of the diameter of 40 inches, and three in concavity, made by cementing pieces of looking-glass on a wooden mould. The focus will be three feet six inches or so from the mirror.

The image of a person standing before it will be so vivid and seemingly solid that it will terrify even a strong-minded experimentalist.

As a reflector of light or a burning-glass, the effects are wonderful, even with an English sun.

THE NOSTRADAMUS TRICK.

The story goes that Nostradamus, the great trickster of France in the days of Francis and the Henries, showed the Queen Dowager Marie de Medicis a throne occupied by Henry the Fourth.

Upon a throne he had a confederate, costumed and “made up” to resemble the Béarnais. In the wall of the room, at a point opposite him, an opening was made by which a plane mirror hidden in a canopy in another room should reflect the figure upon a second mirror naturally visible. As the two reflectors were set at the same angle, the picture presented by the second was an exact counterpart of the counterfeit prince.

Memoirs are but too often dull reading, but those of Robertson, the French perfector of phantasmagorian exhibitions under the Revolution, contain some valuable revelations. That of the mode of executing transformations of a human being beyond the wildest dreams of the fabulist who created Proteus, is here given.

In the partition between two rooms make a horizontal slit, and apply on one side a sliding frame containing a flint-glass prism, and a piece of ordinary white glass, which can be moved up and down by wires set in motion in the room overhead, so as to present at will one or the other of the glasses, through which may be seen the interior, or scene of the experiment. But the rays from an object entering a prism are deflected, and as a consequence, the whole apartment is reversed, so that the ceiling and floor change places. If a chair is lowered through a hole in the ceiling, it will seem to be standing on the floor.

The audience are allowed to inspect the inner room, and see that the wall and floor are solid and the chair there is without secret machinery. Then, on their withdrawal into the adjoining apartment, and looking through the plain glass, they will see the performer seat himself in the chair.

He asks—in a prearranged order—what transformation is desired, such as that he shall be capped, in Bottom’s fashion, with an ass’s head, a bear’s, lion’s, wolf’s, and so forth, and, on receiving an answer, declaims a magical formula, as:

“Aroonel intabbara, marandizala tafmaquirisolon—Zambelara!”

At the last word a pistol is fired unawares, and, as the lookers involuntarily start, the prism is substituted for the plain glass, and there is seen a duplicate chair let down from the ceiling, in which is seated a puppet dressed like the magician, but with an animal’s head.

Observation.—The slit must not permit the ends of the legs of the chair to be seen, or the vision would see the floor at the same time as the prism was showing the ceiling, which would be ruinous.

All the room must be of the same colour, and without ornaments or hangings, for the prism turns them topsy turvy.

It is to be added that the change of the plain glass for the other replaces the performer before the eye, for, indeed, he has not stirred.

In this variation of the Nostradamus Trick, a telescope-tube is mounted, instead of the false mirror, on a stand on a table. It has a plane mirror set in it at an angle of forty-five degrees over the stand, which is hollow and communicating with a drawer of the table, opening into the next room, with a second plane mirror, to reflect any person therein, up to the tube reflector.

The inner room should be dark, so that, when the light is cut off, the figure will vanish.

THE HEAD OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.

Before a concave mirror, which the spectator sees, have a little railway with a head on a dish, in wax or plaster, strongly illuminated, and concealed from him. Let a wire in the hands of an assistant, or wound on a drum by the release of a detaining spring, draw this head on its carriage into the focus of the mirror, when it will seem to start out and fly towards the beholder.

THE DAGGER OF MACBETH.

A table is shown on which is a looking-glass. The room is darkened, when a white arm and a hand brandishing a dagger is seen suddenly to appear and menace the spectator.

Explanation.—The glass of the mirror slides out of the frame at a signal. Behind it is a concave mirror set on the floor at an angle in an opening in the wall. Within the other room an arm and hand of wax, holding a dagger, are mounted so as to descend, while brilliantly illumined, towards the concave mirror.

A person can show his or her face instead of his arm or the false limb, and something rather laughable than terrifying is recommended for such experiments to a juvenile auditory.

THE GHOST ILLUSION.

In The Secret Out the explanation of “The Witch of Endor” trick showed how spectres may be made to appear by aid of the magic lantern.

In the Middle Ages phantoms were called up by that means or by reflectors, but the inability to procure apparatus in perfection seems to have delayed the complete achievement of a success.

In 1847 M. Robin, the Parisian prestidigitateur, startled Lutetia with his presentation of ghosts, almost solid forms, through which, nevertheless, swords were passed, to prove their intangibility.

Robertson had attempted the same, but with a complication of mirrors, plane and convex, which were hardly workable.

But, in seeking simplicity, the later inventor left a difficulty unavoided. In the front of a stage, below it, he places the personator of the ghost, illumined with a powerful light. A part of the stage is open, over which leans, at an angle of forty-five degree, a very smoothly polished plate of glass, as large as the stage from the “flies” to the boards, and its edges hidden from the audience by trees, &c.

The reflected figure appears on the stage as far behind the glass as its cause is before it.

The trouble is that, to counterbalance the inclination of the glass, the actor must stand vertically on an inclined platform.

Professor Pepper and Mr. Tobin place a plane mirror exactly opposite the plate-glass below it, which reflects an actor who may stand in a natural position. This suffices for a single figure; but for more than one the Robin inconvenience has to be endured.

The phantascope, spectroscope, are other names for this deception.

The Eastern jugglers are spoken of as executing a trick which seems done by this means.

A chain is seen in the air up which animals ascend; after all have disappeared, the chain is apparently pulled up by them, for it is lost to sight. This could be represented by this means, at all events.

THE SAINT’S HEAD IN A GLORY.

Mr. Panky, in showing his Gallery of Art to some friends, suddenly directs attention to a painting of a saint, upon whose head a mysterious and divinely golden light seems continuously to glow. To add to the bewilderment of the gazers, the light suddenly ceases to descend, and, in a twinkling, emanates from the saint’s head in a magnificent nimbus. There is no resemblance to electric light or any other known, and the undulating motion is incomprehensible under natural laws.

Explanation.—The painting is set in a small frame in the centre of a larger one.

At the back of the picture is a cogged wheel, of which the teeth move a series of pinions. In each of these latter is immovably inserted one end of a white glass rod, around which runs a spiral thread of gold (colours may be substituted), and its other end terminating in a point. These points work freely in sockets on the rim of the larger circle, equally distant, to which, consequently, they diverge.

When the cogwheel turns the pinions the glass cylinders revolve, and the spiral lines change their position continually to the vision, and, as the wheel turns to the left or right, the light seems to run up from or flow down to the picture.