‘Telephone Magic’
THE ILLUSION: Consider this fascinating & unexpected magic. I call a friend on the telephone and explain that I intend to do a trick over the telephone.
I ask her to shuffle and divide a deck into two piles, choose a card from one pile (now her Chosen card), note it, and place it on the bottom of the other pile.
I ask her to slowly deal and call out the cards on the top of the pile that contains her Chosen card. She calls out one card and I stop her, apologizing because I made a mistake. She puts the card back on top. I request that she cut the deck completely.
I now ask her to slowly deal the cards from the bottom of the pile that contains her Chosen card, and to call out the cards as she turns them. She deals the entire pile and I ask her to do it again.
She starts over and I suddenly ask her to stop. I tell her the identity of her Chosen card and that it is next. She deals one card, revealing her Chosen card. WOW.
HOW DO YOU THINK YOU MIGHT ACCOMPLISH THIS CHICANERY?
Does this trick excessively baffle and mystify your mind? It may help you to discover the secret if you answer the following questions:
Why did I ask her to divide the deck?
Did I really make a mistake when I asked her to deal and call out cards the first time?
Why did I ask her to cut the pile?
Why did I ask her to deal and call out the cards from the top?
How did I know the identity and location of her Chosen card?
Congratulate yourself if you generated a feasible plan to do this trickery. The wizard thanks you. I did the trick this way...
THE SECRET
I first asked her to divide the deck, so we wouldn’t have to wait while she called out all the cards in a full deck,
To do this telephone trick, I needed a way to create a Key card on the telephone. By asking her to deal and call out cards from the top, and then pretending I made a mistake after she told me the identity of the top card of her pile, I made that card my Key card and wrote it down to not forget it.
The rest of this mechanical, self-working trick played out as described above. The first time she dealt the cards from the top of the pile, I listened for my Key card, and knew her Chosen card was the next card. I wrote down her Chosen card.
Then when she dealt again, I stopped her when she called out my Key card. I then told her the identity of her Chosen card and predicted it would appear next. It did.
This great telephone trick baffles, amazes, and delights. WOW.
TELEPHONE TRICKS
In my Family Magic books, I deal with the concept of card tricks so easy to do that the magician does not have to touch the cards. Instead, he hands the cards to a spectator-volunteer and coaches him or her to do the trick. The audience is truly impressed when I point out that ‘I did not touch the cards.”
Telephone tricks take the idea of ‘the magician did not touch the cards’ one step further; the magician not only does not touch the cards, he does not do the trick in the same room, city, state, or country as the spectator-volunteer.
In some regards, I find this idea decidedly eerie. Yet it works. This magic startles, astonishes, and entertains everyone. Adapt telephone tricks like this one to your computer: communicate using email, webmail, Skype, instant messenger, etc.
I know about 10 telephone tricks like this one, all of which are in my book: “Family Magic I & II: 105 tricks for my family.” (order from my website http://www.offbeatbooks.net or from Amazon.com. Please send me questions about magic through my website: http:www.offbeatbooks.net
©2010 by Ed Glassman
Ed Glassman has been an amateur magician since his teen years, As he puts it: ‘’I wrote Family Magic I & II to bring magic into the lives of my family.
He now lives in Moore County, NC, where he wrote a column on “Creativity At Work’’ two times a week for the Citizen’s News-Record and a column on “Business Creativity” for the Triangle Business Journal in Raleigh.
A Professor Emeritus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he lived in Chapel Hill, NC for 34 years and wrote several books on creativity at work.
He founded the Program For Team Excellence and Creativity at the university.
He led problem-solving creativity meetings and creative thinking workshops-seminars for many large and small companies.
He was a ‘Guggenheim Foundation Fellow’ at Stanford University and a ‘Visiting Fellow’ at the ‘Center For Creative Leadership’ in Greensboro, NC.
