![]() ![]() Goldin didn’t just take that trick on tour: He patented it, licensed it to other magicians and sued anyone who performed it without his permission, or who revealed its workings.īut within a few years, the trick had become a cliché, and magicians began applying their own spin. (His first public performance used a hotel bellboy, not a woman.) Once Goldin had finished sawing his assistant in half, he would pull the boxes briefly apart, before miraculously reassembling them. ![]() Goldin’s version was more like the one we know today, with the assistant’s head, hands and feet peeking out of the box. Photo Illustration by The New York Times United States Patent and Trademark Office (Horace Goldin patent images) He licensed it to other magicians and sued anyone who performed it without his permission. Horace Goldin, a stage magician, patented one version of the trick in 1923. He claimed to have invented the trick entirely, years earlier, and his New York Times’ obituary, from 1939, gives him the credit. Within weeks, Horace Goldin - a magician based in the United States - started performing his own take. The imitations and innovations on Selbit’s trick began almost as soon as he was offstage. (If you believe in magic, don’t worry - I won’t give too much away.) Including that would be like “doing a history of Santa Claus, then writing at the end, ‘He doesn’t exist,’” Caveney said. Most magicians really don’t want those revealed, as I found out while researching this article. As much as everyone thinks they know how it works, “There might be 20 different methods in popular use,” Flom said. “Magicians say a good trick is one that can be described in a few words, and ‘sawing a lady in half’ is very few words,” he added.īut the secrecy around how the trick is done obviously adds to its appeal, too. “It’s just the simplicity of it,” said Mike Caveney, a magician who’s writing a history of the trick. Why has this trick survived, when so many others haven’t? If you ask magicians - I spoke with six - they eventually land on one answer. In 2017, Justin Flom, a hugely popular magician with 7 million Facebook followers, created an online storm when a video went viral of him performing the trick on his four-month-old daughter, using two books instead of a saw. ![]() Magicians - male and female - have sawed men in half, too.Įven a baby has been sliced up. Yes, it is normally a woman who gets divided in two, but not always. Other have chopped two people in half, then swapped the legs around. Some magicians have sawed their assistants head to toe, instead of through the waist. On YouTube today, you can watch dozens of illusionists sawing people in half, in all sorts of ways. Selbit knew he’d created a stir, but he couldn’t have known he’d created a trick that magicians would spend the next 100 years reinventing. Before each show, stagehands would pour a bucket of fake blood outside the theater, as if a terrible accident had occurred. Soon, Selbit was performing the illusion around Britain, using some marketing abracadabra to fuel interest. Selbit’s show was, according to magic experts, the first time a performer ever sawed someone in half - a trick that has become an icon of magic, only rivaled by pulling a rabbit out of a hat. ![]()
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