Mentalists:Smoke and Mirrors at the Wellcome Collection.

"Oh, ho, ho, it's magic you know. Never believe it's not so" - Magic, Pilot.

You're gonna like this blog. Not a lot. But you'll like it. I hope so anyway. If not I'll have failed to convey just how enjoyable and informative the Wellcome Collection's recent Smoke and Mirrors:The Psychology of Magic exhibition was. Split into three sections (The Medium, Misdirection, and Mentalism) it sought to tell the story of how tricksters have entertained us, fooled us, ripped us off, and exposed each other over the last century and a half, and why, despite most us knowing we're being tricked, we keep coming back for more.

It was a show that would take in exhibits as disparate as Tommy Cooper's fez, Houdini's handcuffs, and a Paul Daniels magic set and when I attended on its very last day it was certainly pulling in the crowds as easy as Daniels would pull hankies from his sleeve. For a free show it was a whole lot better than some I've paid to visit very recently.

The late 19th and early 20th century saw huge loss of life to disease and war and that goes some way towards explaining why spiritualism  gained such popularity. Grieving people are often ripe for exploitation and the promise of direct contact with the dead was simply too tempting for some to turn down.

Arthur Boyd Houghton - 'Witchcraft in 1871' an exciting seance held by Frank Herne and Charles Williams at Katherfelto Row, Hamburg Square, London, from The Graphic (1871)

At the same time, modern science was evolving rapidly and it was difficult for many to ascertain what was scientifically accurate and what was bunk. On top of that attending seances was exciting, they were fun events. As you can see in the drawing above you could put on a posh frock or a nice suit and watch as an ornate chair seemingly levitates in the parlour.

The Modern Spiritualist movement can be traced to the house below, in Hydesville, New York, where two young sisters, Megan and Kate Fox, tricked their mum into believing they'd been communicating with spirits via a series of knocks on their bedroom walls and furniture. They even admitted it was a hoax but it was too late. The belief had legs, it had got its boots on, and it had started running round the world.

The Old Fox Cottage, Hydesville (Early 20th century)

The Davenport Brothers' Public Cabinet Seance (1865)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one very high profile convert to spiritualism and there's a short film in which we can hear him deliciously rolling his rs (as may befit a man born in Edinburgh) and claiming he'd not only spent forty years studying spiritualism but had, personally, been visited by spirits.

Less a case of "no shit, Sherlock" and more one of "bullshit, Sherlock". Presumably less discerning spiritualists could marvel at the Davenport Brothers' stage show and possibly come away convinced of the truth of spiritualism. The brothers were bound hand and foot inside a cabinet. Once the doors were closed the audience would hear the sound of musical instruments and bells while other objects would mysteriously fly out of a middle door. When the two side doors were opened they revealed the brothers had remained fettered throughout.

When the 'magician investigator' John Nevil Maskelyne attended a Davenport Brothers' performance in 1865 in Cheltenham Town Hall he witnessed Ira Davenport lobbing musical instruments out of the cabinet by hand. Both outraged and inspired by this, Maskelyne and his stage partner George Alfred Cooke launched an 'anti-spiritualist' show in which roughly the same tricks were performed. But Maskelyne and Cook were open about them being just that, tricks, from the onset. 

They weren't the only ones and soon there were two competing types of magic show in town. Ones that claimed they were magical (often employing faux Orientalist tropes) and ones that admitted it was all trickery, sleight of hand, and misdirection. Both promoted their shows with garish posters and grandiose claims. But only the spiritualists had special trumpets (for amplifying spirit voices) and slates (for 'mysterious' chalk messages) made for their shows. Or seances.

Carter the Great promotional poster (Around 1926)

Stock poster American Beauty (around 1920)

Alexander The Man Who Knows (1920)

Spirit trumpet and box (1925-31)

Homemade ouija borad (20th century)

There were also clocks, bells, wands, locks, and 'rapping hands' and you can see examples of all of these at the Wellcome as well as a ouija board. Ouija boards were once sold in toy shops and marketed as "never failing amusement and recreation for the entire family"! Wheatstone's portable ABC telegraph looks more like a piece of kit for the more scientifically minded and indeed it was. People were so flabbergasted by the invention of the telegraph and the telephone that the idea of contacting the dead didn't seem as ridiculous as it may do now. If you could speak to people miles, or hundreds of miles, away, it's not so much of a stretch to suggest you could speak to people in another dimension. Or in heaven. If you believed that heaven exists.Which most people did.

Wheatstone's portable ABC telegraph (1858)

Haunting and poltergeist investigation toolkit (1920s-60s)

New developments in science and technology gave scope for con artists to part gullible punters and their money but fortunately there were plenty in Victorian society who had a sense of fairness and duty and soon a band of 'psychical researchers' sprung up. Applying rigorous investigative methods, and working with 'magicians', to detect deception, they also asked if natural explanations could be found for seemingly inexplicable events or if we were witnessing aspects of human consciousness that were still unknown to science. 

The 'toolkit' above belonged to Eric Dingwall, an anthropologist and member of the Society for Psychical Research who travelled widely in both Europe and the United States with his compass, bulbs, notebooks, and pins. John Nevil Maskelyne was another member of the Society for Psychical Research and, during a performance by the Italian medium Eusapia Palladino in Cambridge, Maskelyne caught her fraudulently freeing her hands from restraints so she could trick the audience into believing she had psychic powers.

Photograph from the investigation of Eusapia Palladino (1895)

Chinese dress worn by Margery Crandon (before 1923)

Poster for Houdini's Water-Filled-Torture-Act (1912 (possibly))

Handcuffs and key from a Houdini escape set (20th century)



Loving cup (1925)

The greatest, and most famous, debunker of them all was, of course, Harry Houdini and there's a large section of Smoke & Mirrors devoted to his 1924 run in with Mina 'Margery' Crandon. Scientific American magazine had offered $25,000 to any medium who could demonstrate their powers under scientific controls. Crandon accepted the challenge and Houdini was on the panel of judges.

Crandon was the most famous medium of the era, Houdini the most celebrated magician. The public were gripped. Houdini's knowledge of escapology helped him to debunk Crandon and the prize money was never awarded. In fact, the exposure so delighted Houdini that he later incorporated the story of it into his own stage show.

The curators of this show obviously purchased a job lot of Crandon memorabilia as we can see the chair she used alongside copies of the Boston Herald reporting on the case, photographs from the time, and even Crandon's admittedly rather fetching Chinese dress. There's even a set of Houdini's handcuffs and a 'loving cup' presented to Crandon and her husband by Conan Doyle 'in recognition of their heroic struggle for truth'! There's a lot to look at.

Crandon's undoing came when it was discovered that a thumbprint she had alleged was that of her dead brother, Winston, was actually that of her dentist. Said dentist confirmed that he had given a piece of dental wax impressed with his thumbprint to Crandon after teaching her the casting method.

Some mediums didn't wait to be exposed by Houdini. They simply outed themselves. Leonara Piper's celebrity was so grand that she'd frequently make front page news so when she announced via the New York Herald, in 1901, that she didn't really believe that the spirits of the dead spoke through her it was a big story. Boston billboards carried the poster below for weeks. Disappointingly, Piper recanted her confession five days later in the Boston Advertiser. It must have seemed like bizarre behaviour but it was great publicity for Piper.

Leonora Piper confession poster (1901)

Photographs from the study False Memories of Fabricated Political Events (2013)

Which of Piper's statements people believed would most likely have come down to their own confirmation biases. If you really want to believe she can converse with the dead, you will. If you're convinced she's a fraud, you'll believe her confession and ignore the following retraction. Memory, too, can affect belief and this is something that psychologists have been studying since the end of the nineteenth century.

In 1887 Richard Hodgson and S J Davey invited people to attend a fake seance and to make written accounts of what they'd witnessed. When Hodgson and Davey reviewed these accounts they found that people had misremembered key details of the event. This study is now widely believed to be the first one to uncover the unreliability of both memory and eye witness testimony.

In 2013 psychologist Steven Frenda showed participants doctored photos of Barack Obama shaking hands with president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and of George W Bush visiting the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with an unnamed baseball star. Neither of these events ever happened but around 50% of those tested claimed to recall them and 27% said they even remembered seeing these events on the news. Depressingly, conservatives were more inclined to believe Obama had shook Ahmadinejad's hand and liberals were more likely to believe the lies about Dubya.

Suggesting that, as W. B. Yeats so memorably wrote in his 1919 poem The Second Coming, "the centre cannot hold". The coming age of deep fakes seems only likely to exacerbate this division and if we don't learn to analyse, and criticise, our own side as well as others we seem doomed to repeat some of history's worst ever mistakes.

Magic wands (1925-50)

Arthur Manfredi - The cigarette trrick, from The Best of Slydini publication (1976)

Which is a depressing, and terrifying, thought. I've found, in recent years, that attendance of Skeptical events have helped me navigate the choppy waters we're currently being buffeted by and see light at the end of the tunnel so it was a comfort to stop and watch a brief film of Professor Chris French (curator and host of Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub and head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in Goldsmiths) talking in clear, precise language about 'the complex psychological factors that underpin paranormal experiences and beliefs'.

There was even yet another chance to watch the now infamous Gorillas in the Midst video. It fooled me first time and it was still good to watch first timers being wrong footed by it. It's a perfect example of misdirection where our focus is so firmly on one thing we may miss something that we would assume to be glaringly obvious. As Professor French explained, study of misdirection in stage magic is useful in helping us to understand how we process information in our day to day life.

That's not to say that magic can't be in and of itself interesting, and fun too. At the turn of the twentieth century magic had become a popular hobby and soon books, games, and magic sets were available for children of all ages. Stage magicians like Paul Daniels, Ali Bongo, and David Nixon appeared. Soon to be followed by the likes of Derren Brown and Dynamo. Tommy Cooper pretended to be a crap magician to misdirect people away from the fact that he was a very accomplished magician. Not only could you marvel at his fez in the Wellcome but could you also watch a video of him performing the 'egg bag' trick!

Fez belonging to Tommy Cooper (20th century)

Paul Daniels TV Magic Tricks (1980s)

Dynamo Magic Kit (2015)

Book from the Amusements for the Home series (1913-25)

Book from the Amusements for the Home series (1913-25)

Sawing through a woman, cabinet used by Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee (20th century)

If that's not enough excitement for you they've got the cabinet that Paul Daniels used to use for sawing Debbie McGee in half and the head of a gorilla suit that Derren Brown sported for his 2007-08 show Mind Reader:An Evening of Wonders. I saw that show in Basingstoke and it was an absolutely fantastic evening. At one point of the show he managed to correctly identify that a complete stranger had a sachet of Paco Rabanne aftershave in the back pocket of his trousers. 

Brown combined misdirection with 'mentalism'. Mentalism's another field that's divided between those who claim they can genuinely read the minds of others and those who admit to employing trickery to give the illusion they can do so. No matter how much I've read about suggestion and cold reading I'm not sure I'll ever work out how Brown pulled off that Paco Rabanne trick but that doesn't mean I think he's a genuine mind reader. He doesn't claim to be one. It's a trick. It's a bloody good trick that I could neither replicate nor expose but it's a trick all the same.

In 1952, the Hypnotism Act was passed allowing for the licensing of public shows of hypnosis. I attended one of these once (also in Basingstoke, in the bar of the ice rink - Blades) and, as with Brown, I was very impressed and didn't doubt at all the veracity of the participants invited on to the stage. At one point the hypnotist (whose name, alas, escapes me) told one of the men he'd hypnotised he had x-ray vision and could see through people's clothes. The guy walked straight to an attractive woman in the audience and stared at her.

Head of a gorilla suit, worn by Derren Brown in his stage show Mind Reader:An Evening of Wonders (2007-08)

 

Derren Brown Mind Reader (2007-08)

Dunninger, The Master Mind of Stage and Radio poster (20th century)

Uncomfortable for all, eh? Though, in terms of lasting damage, not as worrying as the case of eighteen year old Diana Grace Rains-Bath who successfully sued American stage hypnotist Ralph Slater for causing her mental damage at the Brighton Hippodrome. There's no way of knowing, at this distance, who the wronged party really was there but as some mentalists employed elaborate verbal codes and mechanical devices to give their tricks what seemed like veracity others, like The Amazing Dunninger, relied more on hype and the creation of an alter ego that was powerful enough for people to buy in to. Dunninger used to rouse his audience by saying "I cannot invade your minds against oppposition. You must want me to get into your thoughts before I can. Do you want me in there?".

The final couple of rooms in the show are given over to ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance, the power of suggestion, and James Randi's 1985 exposure of televangelist and con man Peter Popoff (caught wearing an earpiece into which his wife was relaying messages to him during his 'healing' sessions). There are brief diversions into how the US military explored ESP's potential for warfare and Suzanne Treister's HEXEN 2039 which sees her alter ego, Rosalind Brodsky, travel through time researching histories of mind control and advances in neuroscience

It was, perhaps, the only part of the show that lost its direction. But it's much more difficult to know where we're going than it is to see where we've come from so that's understandable and that's why magic, trickery, mind reading, and mentalism remain so appealing. Nobody can accurately foretell the future. We're all just guessing. Sometimes we come close. Sometimes we call it horrendously wrong. That's why those who claim they have some kind of ability to see what's ahead of us or conduct conversations with the dead or those from other dimensions exert such a strong pull on us regardless or not as to whether we believe  in their integrity.

I loved this show and I'm so glad I made it to it before it closed. The Wellcome Collection had managed to pull yet another rabbit out of the hat and with that I retreated to the cafe where I made a lemon drizzle cake and a cappuccino disappear quicker than David Copperfield did the Statue of Liberty. Hey presto!