pages: practicalmagicia00harr.pdf, 50
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practicalmagicia00harr.pdf | 50 | 40 THE PRACTICAL MAGICIAN. one hundred lamps at once. This has proved successful very on some occasions; but on others, notwithstanding the most care- ful preparation and the greatest precaution, it has been found that the apparatus would not act, and the impatient spectators have visited the disappointing failure with their indignant mur- murs. Other conjurors have become so attached to electric ex- periments, that they have proposed to regulate all the clocks of a large district by electricity, or have amused themselves by turning electric or galvanic currents to the door-handles of their houses, so that unsuspecting strangers, on touching them, were startled with electric shocks. There is also a trick for rendering one portion of a portrait electric by a metal plate concealed un- derit, and the spectators being invited to touch some part of the pieture, have, on touching the spots that were charged with electricity, received a shock or powerful blow, as if the portrait resented their touching it. Having briefly given the character of this class of tricks, and stated that they not only require expensive apparatus, but are attended with danger to the inexperienced, there still remains another serious objection, viz., that, like the experiments per- formed by automaton figures or complicated machinery, they are liable to fail, through any trifling disarrangement, just at the mo- ment when the performer is hoping that his audience will be de- lighted with his surprising exhibition. For these reasons I shall not stay to describe the more elabo- rate of these tricks, as, however interesting they may be to the scientific, they would not, in a youthful amateur's hands, be sure to produco the amusement which it is my primary object to sup- ply. The simpler experiments of magnetism and chemistry may well be regarded as recreations of science, interesting curiosi- ties, suitable enough to be exhibited by a professor of chemistry for amusement and instruction but even these can hardly be considered as belonging to "conjuring proper." Young people do not care, at festive parties, to watch red liquids turning into green, blue, and yellow or the mixture of different chemical ingredients producing strange conversions into varied substances; |