“With your back to the audience, you can telegraph in a similar way,
using your arm and elbow to make the necessary signals. Let the right
arm, hanging down, represent No. 1; the elbow, projecting from the
side, No. 2; elbow raised, No. 3. Repeat {198} with the left arm for
Nos. 4, 5 and 6; with either hand placed naturally behind you, on the
small of the back, above the belt and over your shoulder for Nos. 7,
8 and 9, and on the back of your head or neck for the cipher (0).”
III.
It is an interesting fact to note that the Chevalier Pinetti was
the first exhibitor of the second-sight trick. Houdin revived (or
re-invented) it.
[Illustration: SECOND-SIGHT TRICK.—SIGNALING.]
On the 12th of December, 1846, he announced in his bill, “In this
programme, M. Robert-Houdin’s son, who is gifted with marvelous
second sight, after his eyes have been covered with a thick bandage,
will designate every object presented to him by the audience.” In his
memoirs he thus describes how he came to invent the trick:
“My two children were playing one day in the drawing-room at a game
they had invented for their own amusement. The younger had bandaged
his elder brother’s eyes, and made him guess at the objects he
touched, and when the latter happened to guess right, they changed
places. This simple game suggested to me the most complicated idea
that ever crossed my mind.
“Pursued by the notion, I ran and shut myself up in my workroom,
and was fortunately in that happy state when the mind {199} follows
easily the combinations traced by fancy. I rested my head in my
hands, and, in my excitement, laid down the first principles of
second sight.”
Houdin never revealed his method of working the trick.
Robert Heller’s successors in mental magic are Max Berol and wife,
and the Zancigs. Among other feats Berol is able to memorize over
two hundred words called out by the spectators and written down on a
slip of paper by some gentleman. Berol will then write these words
backwards and forwards without hesitation and name any one of them by
its number in the list. The Zancigs are marvels in the art of second
sight. They were born in Copenhagen, Denmark, but are naturalized
citizens of the United States. Clever advertisers, they lay claim to
occult powers, as the following notice in the Washington Post, April
30, 1905, will testify:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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