Note 18 — Chapter II · A CONJUROR’S STAGE ARRANGEMENTS.

For a detailed description of conjuring tables, and the various mechanical arrangements connected therewith, see “Modern Magic,” pp. 437 et seq. An improved table, not there noticed, is known as the “Lynn” table, after the well known professor who first used it in public, and claims to divide with a certain noble amateur the honour of its invention. Its speciality is that, by an ingenious mechanical arrangement, both back and front may be shown without suggesting the presence of a servante, and that to further prove its innocence of mechanism, a drawer, apparently occupying the whole body of the table, may be taken completely out, shown empty, and replaced, though the interior of the table is, in fact, fully “loaded” with the requirements of the performance. The table in question has been further improved, in certain details of construction, by Mr. Bland, of New Oxford Street, a leading manufacturer of magical apparatus, and in its final shape forms as perfect a conjuring table as any performer could desire.

We are indebted to Mr. Bland, above named, for the opportunity of examining a “magic chair,” which possesses many of the advantages of a mechanical table, in addition to sundry special faculties of its own. In appearance it is a handsome drawing-room chair, with a figured cloth seat and open back. In the first place, the upright centre rail of the back revolves, and so discloses a borrowed watch, after the manner of the Watch Target (see “Modern Magic,” p. 200). At the back of the top rail is a cunningly-devised apparatus for instantaneously producing three cards, which, by an ingenious arrangement, are made to fold down behind the back till wanted (in which condition they are quite invisible). At the word of the performer, they spring up above the top rail, at the same time spreading fanwise, the marvel being where they could possibly have been concealed.

The production of the cards and watch, as above, is effected by a single string, pulled by the assistant behind the scenes, and which may, at the pleasure of the performer, be made to produce either the cards only, the watch only, or both together. The seat of the chair contains a piston for working mechanical pieces, the same string already mentioned being made by an instantaneously effected alteration, to perform this duty also. Two other strings serve to actuate an elaborate mechanical trap in the seat, producing a succession of startling changes: while the hinder part of the seat, which is open on the side remote from the spectators, serves at need as a receptacle for a bowl of gold-fish, or any other article the performer may desire to produce or get rid of.—Ed.