Magic and Magicians

 By Bruce Shawkey

I have been a fan of magic ever since I was a kid of 11 or 12. I did tricks like the old cup and ball, the mysterious floating ball, escape from the chain and lock round the wrists, etc. I even made myself disappeared in Times Square one time into a magic shop, much to the chagrin of my parents.

I'm also a fan of the big-name magicians of today ... David Copperfield, Chris Angel, David Blaine, Penn & Teller, Shin Lim (from America's Got Talent) and more.

Of course, the magician everyone thinks of is Harry Houdini (left), who performed daring escapes in the early 1900s to huge audiences He was born Erik Weisz in Hungary and spent part of his childhood in Appleton, Wis. before moving to New York. But long before Houdini, there was a magician by the name of Hyman Saunders, a traveling magician who performed in the U.S. in the mid to late 1700s. His signature routine was to fry German pancakes in borrowed hats. But he did other amazing tricks, including invisibly transporting a card forty paces, cutting the head off a hen, rooster or other living fowl and restoring it without harm to the bird (I assume some poor bird was sacrificed every time this trick was performed). I found a reference to one of his engagements in New York City in a book contained in the Internet Archives titled "Quicker than the Eye: The Magic and Magicians of the World." Admission to one of his shows was 50 cents. Mr. Saunders was also available for private showings, for a fee, of course. There are no images of Mr. Saunders, because cameras had not yet been invented. His name is all but lost to history, but it's important to remember that magic goes as far back as ancient Egypt; in fact one of first tricks documented is the cups and balls. (above, right). Images of magicians performing magic are seen

on hieroglyphs written on papyrus and carved in stone on tomb and temple walls.