November 25, 2022 • 14 mins
Holly and Tracy talk about why Robert-Houdin has been lauded as the father of modern magic. They also discuss dangerous aspects of his work, and the lack of nuance in stories about his Algerian performances.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And we talked about
Jean Hugeen all week we did. He's one that I
(00:23):
feel like people who are not into magic go, who again,
People that like magic at all, go, oh, really you're
reading a book about him. Um, So that's been fun
for the last couple of weeks. Hopefully any magic fishonautos
in the audience were not chagrined by our coverage. We
(00:43):
didn't miss any big so there are a lot of
his his tricks that are famous that we didn't get
to because there's just a lot of them. Um. One
thing I did want to mention, though, He used to
do a trick called the obedient clock, where he would
like command the clock to do things. Not the same
as the magic clock, just in case anybody looks it
(01:03):
up and gets confused. Magic clock, small actual clock sounds
really cool and they are. They're beautiful and actually um
in the I think it was the nineteen eighties. I'm
pulling this out of memory, so take with grain of
salt any years that I quote, But I think it's
nineteen eighties, Cartier did a series like they made a
(01:26):
series of magic clocks, and they were very, very similar
in design to the ones Roberry had done, And like
I remember reading newspaper articles about how does this clockwork
and being like, it's actually a very old invention. But yeah,
I mean, if you you can still, if you have
deep pockets, occasionally find a Roberto Damn magic clock available
(01:49):
at auction. They're going to go for tens of thousands
of dollars um and possibly more, but they're so cool.
One of the things that I want to talk about
because we mentioned one of his inspirations Monsieur Comte, who
was a performer in Paris, and his ventriloquism, which was
(02:12):
not like a ventriloquist act like with a doll like
we would think about today. It was more like his
He would make like the walls talk or voices come
from nowhere. But this also kind of speaks to the
idea of the shift that Roberto dn wanted to make
in terms of not being pranky in his act but
(02:33):
being like more presentational, because like Compton had this act
called the Lame Devil, and basically it was this voice
disembodied voice that would be flung around the theater, and
it would ask really pointed and embarrassing questions about people
(02:55):
in the theater, like as though he had gleaned some
sort of information about them somehow. It would also, like,
you know, just sometimes blab weird allegedly relatively innocuous secrets
about people. Which makes me think then about his brilliance
(03:15):
as a business manager, because you remember we talked about
his little cafe that would let you bypass the line,
And I'm like, how much were his like wait staff
and bartenders reporting on conversations they overheard to be, Like,
by the way, that guy with the green handkerchief, I
(03:39):
don't know stole something I heard him tell his friends,
or really loves the color pink. I don't know anything. Um,
I wonder about that. We don't. I don't know where
how that flow of information happened, but he clearly was
getting information about people. That makes me one it's a
little sneaky, but too, I'm like, he really was quite
(04:00):
an astute business man. He had a whole system set up. Um.
When I look at the career of Roberto and how
much people have lauded him for a long time as
like the father of modern magic. And then I look
at you know Houdini, being like, no, he wasn't. I
have to think some of it was just the fortune
of time and place right like, Um, he was building
(04:24):
on all that had come before, but because he was
living in an age where more information was recorded and
shared than ever before, his is the prevalent version of
any of those tricks, etcetera that we would have found,
unless you're a Houdini who devotes your life to digging
(04:45):
through weird archives in small towns across Europe. Fascinating. Um.
I do highly encourage people to go just set aside
a half an hour or an hour of your life
while you're having a coffee or a cordial or whatever
you enjoy, and go looking for people doing some of
(05:05):
his tricks today, because they are quite charming. The orange
tree is really beautiful. Yeah, it's just I mean, no
part of me thinks it's magic, but I sure do
like seeing how exquisite that clockwork is. I mean, it's
very very pretty. Um. There is another story that he
(05:26):
told that I did not put in the episode because
it's a little long. Ish didn't quite go but was like, oh,
I hadn't thought about that being part of the job,
and might be part of why he was like, after
eight years, I don't want to do this anymore, which
is that even though he never he was very adamant,
(05:47):
he would never claim to have special powers or to
be a sorcerer, other people sure thought he did, and
this sometimes led people to make very uncomfortable requests of him,
and he mentions in his memoirs that at one point,
the first time it happened, a young woman had come
(06:07):
to him and said that she had given her heart
to another, had received it in return, but had since
found out that there was infidelity of some sort, and
she really, really really wanted Robert den two conjure some
sort of spell, either for revenge or to make this
(06:33):
man in her life be faithful. And Robert and is like,
I'm so sorry, you don't really understand the nature of
my work. I am a performer. I'm not actually a sorcerer.
And she was not having it, and eventually um revealed
that she had a knife and was going to stab
him if he did not perform a love spell for her.
(06:54):
He was like, I suddenly changed my tune. It was like, oh,
of course, I have been lying to you and I
have a love spell ready here. Um. But he talked
about that being so jarring, but also that that was
not the only time it happened. That kind of thing
would continue to happen to him. I don't think it
was always at knife point, but like, because he had
this whole act based on illusion, a lot of people
(07:17):
thought that he could do things for them, and desperate
people would come to him for help, and sometimes he
would just go along with it because otherwise he was
never going to get out of the moment. This is
a very interesting thing. That's your stage play right there. Yeah.
(07:38):
I could see where I wouldn't want to do that
job for very Yeah. Yeah, yeah, sorry, I'm going back
to blab. I want to sit in the countryside and
hang out with my family and yeah. So Algeria. Yeah,
(08:02):
it's like the secret. We say it all the time.
We talked about it constantly. How every delightful story then
has this like surprise gross races. Yeah, there it was,
and it really is interesting because I mean, that's a
story that's written about a lot. Like I actually found
an article that was written for The New York Times
(08:23):
in by teller of Penn and teller relaying the whole thing,
and it really doesn't have the level of appreciation for
nuance that one would have thought would be going on,
which is interesting to me. And there are a lot
of listicles you will stumble across where it's like Roberto, Dad,
(08:44):
stop to war, and none of them really seemed to
take into account that, like he shouldn't have. I mean,
I certainly don't want nobody wants bloodshed, but like those
people had every to feel like they needed to take
their country back, right, that never seems to come into play,
(09:06):
And I'm like, hello, there are various historical stories about
somebody using magic or the prediction of an eclipse or
whatever to further the subjugation of people who are being
colonized or invaded or whatever, and like some of them
(09:30):
are fairly well documented. Seems like this, okay, this did
really happen, but like the presumption that it is based
on always strikes me as as racist, like yeah, and
and so and all of every time I find one
of these stories, now it bothers me. Even if it's
(09:51):
like and here's the documentation of what really happened, and
this really did play out really that way, and I
was like, the fact that that's how they approached it
at the beginning is racist, right, well, and most of
the time that documentation is usually only from one side, right,
it does not take into account the perception from the
other side of the conflict, which is weird. That does
(10:15):
kind of leading back to I really the moment that
I was like, I think I want to make this
a two parter was that P. T. Barnum right up
about was was not was really quite generous with his
competitors and colleagues, and not this wheedling, you know, very
(10:35):
cutthroat man the Houdini kind of portrays him as. And
that of course makes me think a lot about Houdini's
perception of him. And I guess I mean he he
brings the receipts, He's like, no, no, here are all
the times that these things happen. And this performer claimed
that those were his original tricks. I feel like that's
(10:56):
not that great as sin. But you know, it's not
like he was link from like other people working at
the time, although there are some people do think he
may have been pulling tricks from other people, but there
were certainly other people pulling tricks from him. As well,
so I'm but it seems almost more like that is
to some degree. And again, I mean, who do any
(11:18):
weigh into his research and a man that that um
was very careful about documentation in particular. I mean we've
talked about that in the Rose Mackenburg episode also. But
it does make me think, like, how much of this
book is driven by the fact that it broke your
heart to find out that your hero was not who
you imagined him to be when you were a kid.
(11:41):
And I don't know that's pure speculation on my part.
I don't I'm literally asking the question. I don't know
that that's what's involved there. But he seems so vehemently
ready to take him down, although even he in some
phrasing is like, well, but he was the first person
to put all of this together this way, and that
was really what made him good at it, Like that's
(12:03):
what made that's what cemented him as an important part
of the history of magic, which I think is a
not inconsequential thing. Right to be the first person who goes, no,
I'm gonna do this trick, but I'm doing it this way,
getting rid of this weird extraneous fluff. I'm not dressing
as a wizard. I'm going to make this so much
a much classier affair. I'm going to custom build a
(12:26):
theater to do it in. I mean, his was not
the only one that had ever been made, for sure,
but uh, it does seem like he just he was
able to um mary and integrate a lot of different
things that were good in other acts and make something
special out of those pieces with his own personality and charm.
(12:51):
It's just a I was very happy to discover that
he was not a weasel. He could have literally said,
I have thirty more automota here at the booth. You
can I for X amount, but instead he said, hey,
let me show you the other people working in this field. Right.
It really did shift my perception of what was going
on a lot. And then there are a lot of
(13:11):
accounts that in his retirement as well, he was very
generous and kind to people. And he may have been
a weasel, but he seems like most people liked him.
That's my Roberdan thing. Um magic is very very fun
and I love the history of magic. Uh. And I
know I've been a little Hoodini obsessed lately, so uh,
(13:34):
maybe not for a minute. Although we're going to talk
about that revolutionary calendar. We you and I have had
discussions about that behind behind the behind the scenes. Yes, yeah,
you can expect that episode in some form um because
I literally was reading it and going, oh my gracious,
(13:55):
no wonder people didn't know when their kid's birthday was.
I wouldn't be able to figure that out either, So
look forward to that. If this is your weekend coming up,
we hope you have lots of things to look forward
to there as well. Uh. If it's not your weekend
and you don't have time off, we hope that everything
you do have goes really, really well and as smoothly
(14:15):
as possible, and that you find some joy in your downtime.
We all need it, I know. Uh. You can find
us right back here again tomorrow with a classic, and
then on Monday, we'll have another new episode. Stuff You
Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I
(14:36):
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class A production
of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly
Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And we talked about
Jean Hugeen all week we did. He's one that I
(00:23):
feel like people who are not into magic go, who again,
People that like magic at all, go, oh, really you're
reading a book about him. Um, So that's been fun
for the last couple of weeks. Hopefully any magic fishonautos
in the audience were not chagrined by our coverage. We
(00:43):
didn't miss any big so there are a lot of
his his tricks that are famous that we didn't get
to because there's just a lot of them. Um. One
thing I did want to mention, though, He used to
do a trick called the obedient clock, where he would
like command the clock to do things. Not the same
as the magic clock, just in case anybody looks it
(01:03):
up and gets confused. Magic clock, small actual clock sounds
really cool and they are. They're beautiful and actually um
in the I think it was the nineteen eighties. I'm
pulling this out of memory, so take with grain of
salt any years that I quote, But I think it's
nineteen eighties, Cartier did a series like they made a
(01:26):
series of magic clocks, and they were very, very similar
in design to the ones Roberry had done, And like
I remember reading newspaper articles about how does this clockwork
and being like, it's actually a very old invention. But yeah,
I mean, if you you can still, if you have
deep pockets, occasionally find a Roberto Damn magic clock available
(01:49):
at auction. They're going to go for tens of thousands
of dollars um and possibly more, but they're so cool.
One of the things that I want to talk about
because we mentioned one of his inspirations Monsieur Comte, who
was a performer in Paris, and his ventriloquism, which was
(02:12):
not like a ventriloquist act like with a doll like
we would think about today. It was more like his
He would make like the walls talk or voices come
from nowhere. But this also kind of speaks to the
idea of the shift that Roberto dn wanted to make
in terms of not being pranky in his act but
(02:33):
being like more presentational, because like Compton had this act
called the Lame Devil, and basically it was this voice
disembodied voice that would be flung around the theater, and
it would ask really pointed and embarrassing questions about people
(02:55):
in the theater, like as though he had gleaned some
sort of information about them somehow. It would also, like,
you know, just sometimes blab weird allegedly relatively innocuous secrets
about people. Which makes me think then about his brilliance
(03:15):
as a business manager, because you remember we talked about
his little cafe that would let you bypass the line,
And I'm like, how much were his like wait staff
and bartenders reporting on conversations they overheard to be, Like,
by the way, that guy with the green handkerchief, I
(03:39):
don't know stole something I heard him tell his friends,
or really loves the color pink. I don't know anything. Um,
I wonder about that. We don't. I don't know where
how that flow of information happened, but he clearly was
getting information about people. That makes me one it's a
little sneaky, but too, I'm like, he really was quite
(04:00):
an astute business man. He had a whole system set up. Um.
When I look at the career of Roberto and how
much people have lauded him for a long time as
like the father of modern magic. And then I look
at you know Houdini, being like, no, he wasn't. I
have to think some of it was just the fortune
of time and place right like, Um, he was building
(04:24):
on all that had come before, but because he was
living in an age where more information was recorded and
shared than ever before, his is the prevalent version of
any of those tricks, etcetera that we would have found,
unless you're a Houdini who devotes your life to digging
(04:45):
through weird archives in small towns across Europe. Fascinating. Um.
I do highly encourage people to go just set aside
a half an hour or an hour of your life
while you're having a coffee or a cordial or whatever
you enjoy, and go looking for people doing some of
(05:05):
his tricks today, because they are quite charming. The orange
tree is really beautiful. Yeah, it's just I mean, no
part of me thinks it's magic, but I sure do
like seeing how exquisite that clockwork is. I mean, it's
very very pretty. Um. There is another story that he
(05:26):
told that I did not put in the episode because
it's a little long. Ish didn't quite go but was like, oh,
I hadn't thought about that being part of the job,
and might be part of why he was like, after
eight years, I don't want to do this anymore, which
is that even though he never he was very adamant,
(05:47):
he would never claim to have special powers or to
be a sorcerer, other people sure thought he did, and
this sometimes led people to make very uncomfortable requests of him,
and he mentions in his memoirs that at one point,
the first time it happened, a young woman had come
(06:07):
to him and said that she had given her heart
to another, had received it in return, but had since
found out that there was infidelity of some sort, and
she really, really really wanted Robert den two conjure some
sort of spell, either for revenge or to make this
(06:33):
man in her life be faithful. And Robert and is like,
I'm so sorry, you don't really understand the nature of
my work. I am a performer. I'm not actually a sorcerer.
And she was not having it, and eventually um revealed
that she had a knife and was going to stab
him if he did not perform a love spell for her.
(06:54):
He was like, I suddenly changed my tune. It was like, oh,
of course, I have been lying to you and I
have a love spell ready here. Um. But he talked
about that being so jarring, but also that that was
not the only time it happened. That kind of thing
would continue to happen to him. I don't think it
was always at knife point, but like, because he had
this whole act based on illusion, a lot of people
(07:17):
thought that he could do things for them, and desperate
people would come to him for help, and sometimes he
would just go along with it because otherwise he was
never going to get out of the moment. This is
a very interesting thing. That's your stage play right there. Yeah.
(07:38):
I could see where I wouldn't want to do that
job for very Yeah. Yeah, yeah, sorry, I'm going back
to blab. I want to sit in the countryside and
hang out with my family and yeah. So Algeria. Yeah,
(08:02):
it's like the secret. We say it all the time.
We talked about it constantly. How every delightful story then
has this like surprise gross races. Yeah, there it was,
and it really is interesting because I mean, that's a
story that's written about a lot. Like I actually found
an article that was written for The New York Times
(08:23):
in by teller of Penn and teller relaying the whole thing,
and it really doesn't have the level of appreciation for
nuance that one would have thought would be going on,
which is interesting to me. And there are a lot
of listicles you will stumble across where it's like Roberto, Dad,
(08:44):
stop to war, and none of them really seemed to
take into account that, like he shouldn't have. I mean,
I certainly don't want nobody wants bloodshed, but like those
people had every to feel like they needed to take
their country back, right, that never seems to come into play,
(09:06):
And I'm like, hello, there are various historical stories about
somebody using magic or the prediction of an eclipse or
whatever to further the subjugation of people who are being
colonized or invaded or whatever, and like some of them
(09:30):
are fairly well documented. Seems like this, okay, this did
really happen, but like the presumption that it is based
on always strikes me as as racist, like yeah, and
and so and all of every time I find one
of these stories, now it bothers me. Even if it's
(09:51):
like and here's the documentation of what really happened, and
this really did play out really that way, and I
was like, the fact that that's how they approached it
at the beginning is racist, right, well, and most of
the time that documentation is usually only from one side, right,
it does not take into account the perception from the
other side of the conflict, which is weird. That does
(10:15):
kind of leading back to I really the moment that
I was like, I think I want to make this
a two parter was that P. T. Barnum right up
about was was not was really quite generous with his
competitors and colleagues, and not this wheedling, you know, very
(10:35):
cutthroat man the Houdini kind of portrays him as. And
that of course makes me think a lot about Houdini's
perception of him. And I guess I mean he he
brings the receipts, He's like, no, no, here are all
the times that these things happen. And this performer claimed
that those were his original tricks. I feel like that's
(10:56):
not that great as sin. But you know, it's not
like he was link from like other people working at
the time, although there are some people do think he
may have been pulling tricks from other people, but there
were certainly other people pulling tricks from him. As well,
so I'm but it seems almost more like that is
to some degree. And again, I mean, who do any
(11:18):
weigh into his research and a man that that um
was very careful about documentation in particular. I mean we've
talked about that in the Rose Mackenburg episode also. But
it does make me think, like, how much of this
book is driven by the fact that it broke your
heart to find out that your hero was not who
you imagined him to be when you were a kid.
(11:41):
And I don't know that's pure speculation on my part.
I don't I'm literally asking the question. I don't know
that that's what's involved there. But he seems so vehemently
ready to take him down, although even he in some
phrasing is like, well, but he was the first person
to put all of this together this way, and that
was really what made him good at it, Like that's
(12:03):
what made that's what cemented him as an important part
of the history of magic, which I think is a
not inconsequential thing. Right to be the first person who goes, no,
I'm gonna do this trick, but I'm doing it this way,
getting rid of this weird extraneous fluff. I'm not dressing
as a wizard. I'm going to make this so much
a much classier affair. I'm going to custom build a
(12:26):
theater to do it in. I mean, his was not
the only one that had ever been made, for sure,
but uh, it does seem like he just he was
able to um mary and integrate a lot of different
things that were good in other acts and make something
special out of those pieces with his own personality and charm.
(12:51):
It's just a I was very happy to discover that
he was not a weasel. He could have literally said,
I have thirty more automota here at the booth. You
can I for X amount, but instead he said, hey,
let me show you the other people working in this field. Right.
It really did shift my perception of what was going
on a lot. And then there are a lot of
(13:11):
accounts that in his retirement as well, he was very
generous and kind to people. And he may have been
a weasel, but he seems like most people liked him.
That's my Roberdan thing. Um magic is very very fun
and I love the history of magic. Uh. And I
know I've been a little Hoodini obsessed lately, so uh,
(13:34):
maybe not for a minute. Although we're going to talk
about that revolutionary calendar. We you and I have had
discussions about that behind behind the behind the scenes. Yes, yeah,
you can expect that episode in some form um because
I literally was reading it and going, oh my gracious,
(13:55):
no wonder people didn't know when their kid's birthday was.
I wouldn't be able to figure that out either, So
look forward to that. If this is your weekend coming up,
we hope you have lots of things to look forward
to there as well. Uh. If it's not your weekend
and you don't have time off, we hope that everything
you do have goes really, really well and as smoothly
(14:15):
as possible, and that you find some joy in your downtime.
We all need it, I know. Uh. You can find
us right back here again tomorrow with a classic, and
then on Monday, we'll have another new episode. Stuff You
Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart Radio.
For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I
(14:36):
heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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