A To Z Of Well-Known Magicians

There are many well-known, skilled magicians that you might not know about because even though they're well known, they haven't reached magician cult status. Most people know about the magician David Copperfield, but there are many more magicians equally skilled. So, take a moment to learn about other wizards of magic and expand your knowledge about magicians.

Curtis Adams: A magician who appeared at the age of 16 in the Young Magicians Showcase featured on Fox Television. He was born on October 12, 1984 and was one of the youngest magicians to perform in Reno, Nevada casinos.

Criss Angel: The only three-time magician winner of the Merlin Award from the International Society of Magicians. Angel is a skilled magician who did stunts like lying on a bed of nails while a Hummer drove over him.

Ed Balducci: A street magician who died in 1988 at the age of 82. He is a magician known for his gimmick-free trick of visibly rising several inches from the ground with his back turned to his audience.

Derren Brown: A British magician who practiced traditional close-up magic in the 1990s. Brown's claim as a magician is his "mind-reading" act. Brown claims aliens abducted him.

Cardini: Richard "Cardini" Pitchford was a magician with almost 50 years of performing tricks and illusions. He's one of the world's most imitated magicians, but no one to date has ever been able to completely duplicate his tricks. He was a magician known for his sleight of hand. Items were forever appearing and disappearing from his hands. He died in 1973.

Tommy Cooper: A magician and comedian known who was a member of the Magic Circle until his death in 1984. He collapsed while doing a live magician act that became his last.

Paul Daniels: A currently retired British magician who in 1983 became the first magician to ever receive the prestigious Magician of the Year Award by the Hollywood Academy of Magical Arts.

S.W. Erndase: A magician and author whose real identity has never been figured out. Erndase is a magician who wrote a book in 1902 about card playing tricks.

Ching Ling Foo: The first Asian magician to achieve fame. He was a magician who did tricks like breathing fire and pulling a fifteen-foot pole from his mouth. He died in 1922.

Lennart Green: A magician known for his close-up card tricks. In 1991 this magician became the world champion of in close-up card magic.

Paul Harris: A magician known for pulling coins from mirrors. Many claim he is a magician with skills like a combination of Copperfield and Henning.

Scott Interrante: An American magician specializing in escape-artist tricks. He won awards from the International Brotherhood of Magicians.

Ricky Jay: A magician listed in the Guinness Book of Records as throwing a playing card 190 feet at 90 miles per hour.

Fred Kaps: A Dutch magician who died in 1980. He is a magician known for making a saltshaker create an endless supply of salt.

Juan Tamariz: A Spanish magician who in 1971 founded a school that has trained generations of Spanish magicians.

Dia Vernon: This Canadian magician was born in 1894 as David Frederick Wingfield Verner. This magician, who died in 1992, is known for fooling Houdini with one of his card tricks.

Paul Zenon: A British street magician who also performed in the bars and pubs in the U.K. This magician has written three books about magic, the most recent published in 2005.

3 Secrets Of Magicians

3 Secrets Of Magicians

Magicians have their secrets but they won’t tell. It’s a sworn oath for magicians not to tell the audience how a trick is done. There are 3 secrets though that they’ve shared all throughout the years. Here are their 3 secrets.

The first secret is that some tricks are done through sleight of hand. These are ways with which they skillfully hide an object and make it reappear on another hand. New magicians hide things up their sleeves. Those are old tricks and very few used t.

Magicians have their secrets but they won’t tell. It’s a sworn oath for magicians not to tell the audience how a trick is done. There are 3 secrets though that they’ve shared all throughout the years. Here are their 3 secrets.

The first secret is that some tricks are done through sleight of hand. These are ways with which they skillfully hide an object and make it reappear on another hand. New magicians hide things up their sleeves. Those are old tricks and very few used them now. 

Sleights of hand require a lot of practice to master. Beginners of magic use specially created gimmicks to create the illusion. Professional magicians make use of their impressive sleight of hand. It requires a lot of time, patience and hand coordination to fully understand and do.

Another secret is the art of misdirection. See this blank paper? And as audience looks at the blank paper, he is carefully getting another piece with his other hand. This is misdirection. Another type of misdirection is the kind that doesn’t let the audience see what’s really causing the tricks. You might have seen that a magician has a lot of assistants who also do incredible stuff, but what you didn’t know is that they are helping the magician perform the magic just with their presence.

Another kind of misdirection is the appropriate use of words. For example, a magician will tell you to look at the ‘empty’ box. We tend to look at the box as empty just because he said it. This causes our mind to wonder when the magician gets a rabbit out of it.

Misdirection takes a lot of practice and lots of time in planning. It requires body coordination (one body doing something while the other is doing another thing) and quick thinking. Misdirection is an art and magicians are proud of it.

Another secret is their patter or a magician’s constant talk. Misdirection is achieved mostly because of patter. The magician will ask you to look at his right hand and as you are looking, you won’t notice what his left hand is doing. This is a really clever way to achieve the illusion that what happens next becomes so magical with the wink of an eye.

Patter usually takes the form of a story, where a magician will tell you of something that happened to him someday. Sometimes it’s so funny that we actually forget to look at what their hands are doing or what their assistants are giving them. 

3 Secrets Of Magicians