Abstract
In October 1847, the conjurer Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–1871), owner of the famous theater bearing his name, proudly introduced his audience to a brand-new magic trick he called suspension étherienne (ethereal suspension). Inspired by the latest developments in anesthesia and the use of ether during surgery, Robert-Houdin had conceived of an act—or “an experiment,” as he called it—he felt certain would impress his audience. He began by inviting his youngest son to join him on the stage. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I have just discovered a new and marvelous application of ether. If this liquid [fluid] is inhaled by a living being when it is at its highest degree of concentration, the body of the patient will rapidly become as light as a balloon.” The conjurer then placed three stools on top of a long wooden bench. He asked his son to climb the structure and stand on top of the middle stool with his arms spread out so as to be supported by two canes, each resting on one of the side stools. After supposedly providing some ether for his young assistant to inhale, Robert-Houdin slowly removed the middle stool and delicately took away the two canes. To the pleasure of the audience, the child now appeared to be floating.1
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Notes
Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Confidencesde Robert-Houdin. UneVied’artiste, tome 2 (Paris: Librairie Nouvelle, 1861), 303.
On spectator attitude toward stage magic during the nineteenth century and skepticism and visual entertainment more generally, see James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973), 67–89; Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004); and Simone Natale, “Spiritualism Exposed: Scepticism, Credulity and Spectatorship in End-of-the-Century America,” European Journal of American Culture 29, 2 (2010): 131–144.
Accounts of magic in early modern science include Valerie Flint, The Rise of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from the Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971); Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science during the First Thirteen Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). On the place of wonder in the history of early modern science, see Lorraine J. Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
On the history of modern magic, see Michael R. Booth, Victorian Spectacular Theatre, 1850–1910 (Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1981); Cook, The Arts of Deception; Francesca Coppa, Lawrence Hass, and James Peck (eds.), Performing Magic on the Western Stage. From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Geoffrey Frederick Lamb, Victorian Magic (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1976); and Fred Nadis, Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic & Religion in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005). For a history of conjuring written by magicians themselves see, for example, Milbourne Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973); Max Dif, Histoire illustrée de la prestidigitation (Paris: Maloine, 1986); and Jim Steinmeyer, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003).
On the importance of optical illusions in both science and culture during this period, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); and Iwan R. Morus, “Seeing and Believing Science,” Isis 97 (2006): 101–110. On eighteenth- and nineteenth-century optical attractions, instruments, and toys, see also Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001). On end of the nineteenth-century urban visual culture, see Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).
On Paris as a site of amusement and consumption during this period, see Hazel H. Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988); Robert Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Michael B. Miller, The Bon Marché: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store, 1869–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Époque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Schwartz, Spectacular Realities; Jennifer Terni, “A Genre for Early Mass Culture: French Vaudeville and the City, 1830–1848,” Theatre Journal 58 (2006): 221–248; Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001); Weber, Eugen, France: Fin-de-Siècle (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986); and Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late Nineteenth-Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
On the popularization of science and consumer culture in the nineteenth century, see Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (eds), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). On popular science and popularizers more generally, see Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), particularly 5–17 for a historiographical presentation of the topic. On the history of the popularization of science in France more specifically, see Bruno Béguet (ed.), La Science pour tous: sur la vulgarisation scientifique en France de 1850 à 1914 (Paris: Bibliothèque du Conservatoire des arts et métiers, 1990); Bruno Belhoste, Paris savant: parcours et rencontres au temps des Lumières (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011); Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, La Science populaire dans la presse et l’édition, XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: CNRS, 1997); Michael R. Lynn, Popular Science and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Susan Sheets-Pyenson, “Popular Science Periodicals in Paris and London: The Emergence of a Low Scientific Culture, 1820–1875,” Annals of Science, xlii (1985): 549–572; and Laurence Talairach-Vielmas (ed.), Science in the Nursery: The Popularization of Science in Britain and France, 1761–1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). On science as performance, see Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Christine Blondel (eds), Science and Spectacle in the European Enlightenment (London: Ashgate, 2008); and Iwan R. Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
Recently, a number of historians have argued that the interest in and the success of magic shows were part of a much broader cultural interest in illusion and deception associated with the development of modernity. See, for instance, Cook, The Arts of Deception; During, Modern Enchantments; Nadis, Wonder Shows; and Michael Pettit, The Science of Deception: Psychology and Commerce in America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013). More broadly, on illusions related to power since the Renaissance, see Norman M. Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects (New York: The New Press, 2004).
On de Vere, see Christian Fechner, Bibliographie de la prestidigitation française et des arts connexes (Boulogne: Éditions F.C.F. 1994), 558–559; and “C. de Vere. Pré s ident d’honneur de l’Association syndicale des Artistes Prestidigitateurs,” Journal de la Prestidigitation, 1 (1895): 4–5.
Jacques Deslandes, Le Boulevard du cinéma à l’époque de Georges Méliès (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1963), 97–98.
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Lachapelle, S. (2015). Introduction. In: Conjuring Science. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137492975_1
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