🎭 Famous magicians
🐰 Every trick in the shop was somebody's idea first. These eight questions are about real magicians from the history of magic, and every answer is from Flick's guide to famous magicians, checked at its sources.
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The answers, and why
Harry Houdini picked his stage name to sound like an older French magician, called the father of modern magic. Who? Robert-Houdin. Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, from France. Houdini chose his name to link himself with him.
In 1918, on a huge stage in New York, Houdini made something enormous disappear. What was it? An elephant called Jenny. Jenny the elephant, at New York's Hippodrome theatre. It was his biggest illusion.
John Nevil Maskelyne was a magician and an inventor. The Science Museum in London keeps a lock he invented. What opened it? A penny in a slot. His penny-in-the-slot lock. The Science Museum also keeps typewriters he made.
When the American magician Harry Kellar wanted to slow down, near sixty, who did he pass his show to? Howard Thurston. Kellar passed the torch to Howard Thurston, who with Houdini led American magic for years after.
Dai Vernon, from Canada, is known as the man who… Fooled Houdini. At a dinner in Chicago in 1922 he showed Houdini a card trick that Houdini couldn't work out, even after watching it again and again.
Houdini said nobody could fool him with a trick if he saw it how many times in a row? Three. Three times in a row. Dai Vernon's card trick fooled him anyway.
Before he was famous, Dai Vernon paid his way by cutting what out of black paper? People's faces, side-on. Silhouettes: a person's profile cut from black paper, at a stall on Coney Island in New York.
Dell O'Dell grew up juggling and walking the rope in her father's circus. In 1951 she got a magic show of her own. Where? On television. The Dell O'Dell Show, on television in Los Angeles.