MagicGizmo

HOW does he do it? That is the usual question I hear asked about my work in the theater.

No, dear reader, it is not my purpose to tell you how I open locks, how I escape from a prison cell into which I have been locked, having previously been stripped naked and manacled with heavy irons. I do not intend to tell you in this book how I escape from the trunk or the tightly corded and nailed-up box in which I have been confined, or how I unlock any regulation handcuff that can be produced—not yet.

The oldest trick in the world is known to conjurers as the "Cups and Balls." The conjurer has three small cups, usually made of brass, and three small cork balls, about the size of a filbert. All sorts of things happen with these simple articles. The conjurer can make a ball pass invisibly through the top of each cup, or he can make all three balls go invisibly from one cup to another, and so on.

I want you to go with me into far away lands and into the long ago to get a glimpse of the beginnings of the Mystic Art. This Art has been practiced from time immemorial, and from the faint echoes of the ages comes here and there an intimation that with Magic are bound up the very lives of the ancients. In one remote corner of the globe we see how Magic played a vital part in religion; in another distant spat we find that Magic was a part of the daily lives of the people; and in other lands we see the family and the social relationships of the people under the powerful influence of Magic.

If you're under the age of thirty, here's someone you've probably never heard of. But that's about to change. Del Ray was born Delbert Raymond Petrosky in 1925 in the quiet little town of Hubbard, Ohio. At the age of three, he entered an orphanage in the nearby city of Warren. It was there, long before thoughts of puberty ever entered his mind, that he saw a professional magician for the first time ever. And he was hooked.