🎭 Famous magicians, for kids

Every trick in the shop was somebody's idea first. Here are eight magicians from the history of magic, each with one true story and a trick from the shop that goes with it. The last one fooled Houdini with a card that kept coming back, and you can learn that trick too: The Card That Keeps Coming Back.

Start here: 🃏 The Card That Keeps Coming Back · Checked 31 October 2026

Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (France, 1805–1871)

Robert-Houdin trained as a clockmaker and built moving figures, including one that could write and draw. He said his magic began with a mistake: he went to a bookshop for a book about clocks, and the busy shopkeeper handed him the wrong books, full of card tricks and how to guess what somebody is thinking. He read them all.

Later he watched his two sons play a game where one, blindfolded, guessed things the other touched, and it gave him the idea for his famous mind-reading act. People still call him the father of modern magic. Try a mind-reading trick of your own: every mind-reading trick in the shop.

Harry Houdini (born in Hungary, 1874–1926)

Houdini was born Erik Weisz in Budapest and grew up in the United States. He chose his stage name to sound like Robert-Houdin's. A theatre manager told him to concentrate on escapes, and he became famous as the king of handcuffs.

In 1918, on a huge stage in New York, he made an elephant called Jenny disappear: his biggest illusion. He was also hailed as the first person to fly a plane over Australia, in 1910. In the 1920s he showed that people who claimed to talk to spirits were using tricks. He left his great library of magic books to the Library of Congress. Vanishes are on the disappearing tricks page.

John Nevil Maskelyne (England, 1839–1917)

Maskelyne was a watchmaker too, and an inventor. For about thirty years he ran a theatre of magic in London. He built a machine shaped like a little seated figure that seemed to play cards and do sums by itself.

He also invented one of the first locks for public toilets that opened when you put in a penny, and his name is on typewriters kept by the Science Museum in London. Magicians who build their own props are following him: the tricks that need only paper are a good place to start making your own.

Harry Kellar (United States, 1849–1922)

As a boy, Kellar answered a newspaper advertisement from a travelling magician who wanted a young helper. By Kellar's own account, the magician's little dog growled at every boy who came, except him, so he got the job.

He grew up to run one of the biggest magic shows in America, with a lady who floated in the air. He also wrote a book about doing sums quickly. When he retired, he handed his whole show to Howard Thurston. A trick where the arithmetic does the work: The Magic Number 1089.

Howard Thurston (United States, 1869–1936)

When Thurston was a boy in Columbus, Ohio, a famous magician pulled a big brass button from under his chin at a show, and he was hooked. He became known as the King of Cards.

His most famous trick made chosen cards rise out of the deck one by one. His show grew so big that it travelled from city to city by train. You can make a card rise too: The Rising Card.

Adelaide Herrmann (born in England, 1853–1932)

Adelaide Herrmann was a dancer and rode an early kind of bicycle in a trick-riding act before she married the magician Alexander Herrmann and became his assistant. When he died in 1896, she kept the show going.

For more than twenty-five years she toured as the Queen of Magic, one of the very few women running a big magic show of her own. One of her acts was a parade of animals in costume coming out of an ark. For a show of your own: how to put on a magic show.

Dell O'Dell (United States, 1897–1962)

Dell O'Dell grew up in her father's circus, where as a girl she juggled, balanced and walked the rope. She became known for her quick, funny patter, much of it in rhyme, and in 1951 she had her own magic show on television in Los Angeles, one of the first magicians to appear on television.

Patter is the words a magician says while doing a trick, and it is half of every trick. Magic School has a lesson on it: what you say during a trick.

Dai Vernon (Canada, 1894–1992)

When Dai Vernon was about seven, he fooled the famous Howard Thurston with a card trick from Thurston's own book. As a young man he paid his way by cutting portraits out of black paper at a seaside park in New York.

In 1922, at a dinner in Chicago, he showed Houdini a card trick in which a chosen card keeps coming back to the top of the deck. Houdini said he could work out any trick he saw three times. He watched it again and again, at least seven times, and still couldn't. Vernon became known as the man who fooled Houdini, and later as the Professor, because he taught so many younger magicians. Learn the trick that did it: The Card That Keeps Coming Back.

Where these stories come from

Every date and story above was read on the pages below on 30 October 2026. Where two sources disagree, about a birthday or how many times Houdini watched, the guide says only what they agree on. Robert-Houdin's bookshop story and Kellar's dog story are their own telling, from their own books. Alexander Herrmann's death is 1896 in his Library of Congress record, which cites a book about him printed the next year; the American Museum of Magic's page says 1895, so the guide goes with the Library of Congress.

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