MANKIND has always been fascinated by anything that appears supernatural and magical. This fascination has made people in every age and culture strive hard and resort to all kinds of ways to attain the ability to perform miracles and magic. And when they have failed, they have resorted to using tricks to create illusions and fool people into believing in their magic.

There are many persons in history who are believed to have possessed magical powers and because it is difficult to tell apart fact from fiction in their tales, we will not be looking at the feats of these ancient sorcerers. We will explore the more recent illusionists, enchanters and magicians, who had a spellbinding effect on their audience in the last 100 years or more, and also attempt to decipher their tricks, illusions and ‘magic’.

But mind you, there really isn’t anything like magic — it all exists in our mind. If we so desire, we can see the magic in all things, especially all things natural — for there is nothing so fascinating and magical than nature. Isn’t it?

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THIS British young man has a great knack for giving his fans and media something to be fascinated about, and his critics much to criticise and slam.

He as ‘walked’ across the Thames, calmly ‘strolled’ down a skyscraper, ‘floated’ across Westminster Bridge while ‘levitating’ from the side of a double-decker bus, levitated celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan, James Corden and Matt Lucas, pulled a necklace out of his stomach, turned Austrian snow into diamonds, made cardboard butterflies come alive, turned Fanta into Coke, and somehow ‘converted’ lottery tickets into banknotes on live television! Phew, but this is not the end of the list....

This 33-year-old, whose real name is Steven Frayne, turned to magic tricks to escape bullies at school who targeted him for his small size — he is just five feet and six inches and lean because of a digestive disorder. His great-grandfather, who raised him because his father spent most of his time behind bars, was an amateur magician and advised young Steven to learn magic tricks to protect himself.

The first trick the young lad learnt was to make himself too heavy to lift and “The next time the bullies tried to pick me up, they couldn’t. They gave up and ran away. I never had any trouble again. Word got round the school that I had super-powers, so I got a lot of respect,” Steven once explained.

He then focused on learning more tricks and started performing card and coin tricks in local clubs. He adopted the stage name ‘Dynamo’ when he heard someone in the audience shout ‘The kid’s a dynamo!’

Steven made a demo DVD of his ‘street’ magic and sent it to TV channels, with the satellite channel Watch, commissioning the first series of the Magician Impossible series, turning Dynamo into a global sensation.

What sets Dynamo apart from other magicians and illusionists is that his acts are all solo, with no assistants or elaborate stages that are typical of traditional magic shows. What he does defied reason and his acts take place surrounded by audience and cameras that can easily spot the cleverest of tricks, but have failed to discover the secret to his tricks. However, critics have come up with many explanations of how he creates the illusion of doing such mind-boggling feats, so let’s look at some of them.

Walking across the River Thames: Dynamo casually hopped over a gate beside Westminster Bridge one summer in 2011, and began ‘walking’ across the Thames.

After a hundred yards, a police boat intercepted him took him away.

It is presumed that there was probably an invisible platform just below the water surface and Dynamo easily walked on it without sinking. And two flat-bottomed canoes, which passed between the magician and the shore mid-way through the trick, appeared to accidentally strike a hidden object. And some say that the police dinghy was a fake, filled with actors.

Levitating from a double-decker bus: About 15ft above the road, Dynamo rested the palm of his right hand on the roof of a double-decker bus and floated serenely through Central London one weekend.

He most likely did this with the help of a support beam that ran along his outstretched right arm (the bottom of which is concealed by shadow), to a brace in between his shoulder blades.

Strolling down a skyscraper: One dark night Dynamo appeared on top of the art deco LA Times headquarters in Downtown Los Angeles. Amazed passers-by saw him dive from its roof, only for his fall to suddenly stop when his body had reached a horizontal position. After that, he walked calmly down the side of the landmark building, at a 90-degree angle to vertical, before hopping to the pavement and wandering off into the night. The magician simply created this illusion by concealing reality — of being suspended by support harness.

Harry August Jansen — Dante

HARRY August Jansen, with his stage name Dante the magician, is considered the greatest magician of the 20th Century. He gave crowd-pulling performances around the world with his group of 25 to 40 people, and his stage trademark was to utter three nonsense words, “Sim Sala Bim” (taken from the lyrics of a Danish children’s song), during his performances to acknowledge applause.

Dante worked in vaudeville, burlesque, legitimate theatre, films and, in later years, television. Born on October 3, 1883 in Copenhagen, Denmark, Jansen moved with his family to America as a child. He made his stage debut at the age of 16 and then toured the world. In 1925, he established Dante the Magician Inc., and his shows were so popular that he and his troupe made several global trips and appeared in many US theatres.

When television became common in homes around the US, theatre somewhat suffered and Dante swiftly moved to TV and performed in shows such as You Asked For It and films, including Bunco Squad, and Racket Busters.

Dante retired in the late 1940s and died at the age of 71. And thus came to an end the ‘Golden Age of Magic’ when large magic production toured the world and presented larger-than-life shows.

David Blaine

David Blaine is a magician and endurance artist, whose tricks include being buried for a week, frozen in an ice block for 63 hours, standing on a 100ft pillar (without attaches) for 35 hours, survived in a glass box without any food and water for 44 hours and hung upside down for 60 hours!

This American magician likes to give street performances, taking any ordinary object, or borrowing any personal belonging from a passer-by, and whipping up an unforgettable magical happening. His signature street illusion is the ability to defy the laws of gravity and levitate himself before baffled onlookers.

He has broken several world records and he has held his breath for 17 minutes and 4.4 seconds to set the world record, according to Guinness World Records.

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JUST as Dante is associated with the golden age of magic, Harry Houdini is considered to be one of the pioneers, or even the father, of modern-age magic.

Born Erik Weisz, on March 24, 1874, in Budapest, Hungary, Harry Houdini possessed the uncanny ability to escape from any restraints or traps known to man, be it handcuffs, straitjackets, prison cells and other perils, often in combination. His signature acts were the Chinese water torture cell and Metamorphosis.

His family migrated to the US and when he was 13, Harry became interested in trapeze arts and billed himself as “Ehrich, the Prince of the Air”. At 17, Erich launched his career as a professional magician and renamed himself Harry Houdini, the last name was homage to the great French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin.

In 1894, he married singer, dancer Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, aka Bess, who went on to be his Houdini’s lifelong stage assistant. They joined a circus where they performed the famous “Metamorphosis” illusion. But it was his feats of escape using handcuffs that drew more attention than his magic. Houdini would let the local police strip search him, place him in shackles, and lock him in jail, but he skilfully managed to escape each time.

In 1912, his act reached its pinnacle with the Chinese Water Torture Cell, which would be the hallmark of his career. The illusion consisted of three parts: first, the magician’s feet are locked in stocks; next, he was suspended in mid-air from his ankles with a restraint brace; finally, he was lowered into a glass tank overflowing with water and the restraint was locked to the top of the cell.

Houdini ventured into movies by starring in a successful silent film serial called The Master Mystery but his other films flopped.

While on tour in 1926, Houdini chatted with a few students of McGill University in his dressing room. One of the students, an amateur boxer, asked if it was true that Houdini could withstand any blow to the torso area above the waist. Houdini replied in the affirmative but before he could tighten his abdomen muscles, the student punched him in the stomach. Houdini was hurt, very hurt, but be continued to perform shows and by the time he sought medical help, it was too late — he had ruptured his appendix and the infection resulted in his death a week later, on October, 31, 1926.

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DAVID Copperfield is hailed as the greatest magician of our time, who can manipulate, materialise, dematerialise and transport living and non-living objects of any size — or so he makes us believe!

He has made the Statue of Liberty vanish in front of a live audience; walked through the Great Wall of China, levitated over the Grand Canyon; and in his shows, taken a member of the audience and transported him/her instantaneously to another part of the world.

Born David Kotkin on September 16, 1956, he originally wanted to be a ventriloquist but soon diverted to magic. He began taking magic lessons, and at the age of 12 he was performing professionally in his hometown of Metuchen, New Jersey. David was the youngest person ever to be admitted to the Society of American Magicians and by 16, he was teaching magic at New York University.

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Copperfield’s passion for preserving the history of the art of magic has led him to establish the International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts, housed in Nevada, which is the world’s premiere collection of historical documentation and artefacts regarding or pertaining to magic, illusion and the allied arts.

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FROM 1990 till 2003, Siegfried Fishbacher, a magician, and Roy Horn, an outlandish animal trainer, had a unique magic show at the Mirage in Las Vegas, with white tigers and lions. It was considered as the most visited show of Vegas until it ended in 2003, when Roy was bitten by his own tiger and lost much of his blood. Later the group retired in 2010.

The show involved about 80 human performers in addition to 15 animals (a snow leopard, two male lions, three lionesses, one white tiger without stripes, four white tigers; white tiger cubs, an elephant and a Burmese python). During the show these animals were used in illusions where they were seemingly made to appear and disappear. It was believed that all the cats in the acts had their claws removed to make them safer. But that didn’t help Roy when, on October 3, 2003, a seven-year-old male white tiger named Mantecore, suddenly bit Roy on the neck, leaving his severely injured and lose a lot of blood.

This accident led the show to close down and in February 2009, the duo staged a final appearance with Mantecore as a benefit for a charity, and on March 19, 2014, Mantecore died at the age of 17 after a short illness.