The modern magician, as we would think of them, originated in the mid-19th century. If I asked you to describe a wizard, you would most likely say top hat, tail coat, and magic wand. Well, this notion of a magician was first demonstrated by none other than Herrmann the Great, Alexander Herrmann (1844-1896). He was a French magician who toured with his family billed as “The First Family of Magic”.
Although Herrmann was the archetypal magician, he was not the first, and magic owes much to the fantastic works of Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin (1805-1871). Trained as a watchmaker, Robert-Houdin used his talent to build mechanical contraptions that moved in such a way as to convince the audience that they were alive. Also French opened his own magic theater in the mid-1840s in the center of Paris. Here he showed mechanical figures of himself, such as an automaton performing the cup and balls trick (see our site) and songbirds. His most famous creation was a figure that could write and draw; this creation was paraded before none other than King Louis Philippe and was eventually sold to PT Barnum.
Not to be outdone, we Brits produced possibly the first magician to fully exploit the stage in the form of JN Maskelyn. He opened his own theater on Piccadilly in London in 1873, here they began using mechanical effects built into the stage to produce levitation tricks and trapdoors to create disappearances. He was also the first to realize that an audience sitting below stage height had a very different perspective of the stage and that this could be used to great effect with optical illusions.
Without a doubt the best known magician of modern times has to be the legendary Harry Houdini. Born Ehrich Weiss in 1874, he became one of the most daring escapists of modern times. Not that the word escapist was invented until after Houdini’s death in 1926. Taking his stage name in homage to the aforementioned French watchmaker, Houdini used a combination of picking locks and the ability to escape straitjackets combined with fake gear. and “plants” in the audience. Houdini’s true skill lay in his marketing skills and his knack for manipulating the media. He really became the first magical superstar and when we look at some of the self-promotions used by today’s illusionists, you can almost hear Harry looking down and laughing because he had seen it, he had done it and he got the shirt.
Houdini used to challenge the people of the city in which he performed with the slogan of more and more extreme escapes. This saw him escape not only from his famous milk churn, but also from crates full of iron thrown into a river, riveted boilers, and bags of mail. In the first example of cross-marketing by a modern artist, he, too, escaped his milk crate filled with beer by local brewers. Not unlike our modern Pepsi or Coors sponsored artists, just 100 years ahead of their time. Yes, I admit it, I’m a die-hard fan. If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend a visit to the Houdini museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania.