TRICKS for the Kiddies Party

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20995, 23 December 1939, Page 18 (Supplement)

TRICKS for the Kiddies Party

The entertainer wishing to mystify children at a party must observe two rules unless he wishes to fail. He must first of all perform tricks which the children think they themselves could do, and he must never perform complicated tricks which they cannot follow. Here are two tricks with wine glasses which tickle children tremendously. An ordinary wine glass is nearly filled with water, and across the top is placed an ordinary cross cut from a post card, with all the arms the same length and the end of each arm bent over to prevent the cross slipping off. Then the finger is moistened slightly and rubbed on the glass not directly underneath any of the arms. The cross will then move until one of the arms is above the place rubbed, and will follow the finger round as it moves. The other trick is to three-quarter fill a wine glass with water, and lay a piece of thick blotting-paper over the mouth and a small sheet of glass over the blotting paper. Holding with both hands, the glass and paper and plate glass are all turned over, and the blotting paper will absorb some of the water leaving a partial vacuum, which will enable the wine glass to be held by the stem without any water being lost.

A trick with an egg and a water bottle depends also on a scientific principle. The water bottle has a neck too small to allow the passage of an egg, but if a piece of lighted paper is dropped in and a hard boiled egg without shell is pressed into the neck, the fire creates a vacuum and most mysteriously the egg legthens itself and finally slips into the bottle with a pop. Card tricks are numberless, but children are impatient of anything which involves manipulation. The simplest and yet one of the most puzzling of card tricks for children is the conjuror’s ability to find a chosen card without anyone telling him what it was. A pack of cards is divided into ten or more heaps and one of the children invited to pick a card from the top of any heap, show it to the others and then replace it. The conjuror then gathers up all the cards and then deals them out fact up-

wards on to the table stopping at the chosen card and naming it. The secret of the trick is that the conjurer in dividing the pack into heaps remembered the card at the bottom of one of them. Suppose it was the eight of diamonds, then on picking up the cards he took care to pick up the heap containing the eight of diamonds before picking up the pack the top card of which had been chosen. This brought the chosen card next to the eight of diamonds and when dealing the conjuror know that the card following the eight of diamonds was the one.

An improvement of the trick is to deal out the cards face upwards until reaching the known card, in this case the eight of diamonds. The next card is the chosen one, but as if in disgust the conjuror picks up all the cards, placing them at the bottom of the pack and holds the whole pack between his finger and thumb. He asks a child to strike the pack smartly with one fingers, this jerks all the cards except the top one from his grasp and this proves to be the chosen card.

A trick needing an accomplice is never failing. Each child is asked to write a word on a slip of paper and to fold the paper into a spill and place it in a hat. The performer then takes a slip of paper from that hat, holds it against his forehead and slowly spells out a word. He does this with all the slips and correctly reads out each word when the children are convinced he has had no chance of reading what was written. The secret is this, that an accomplice, one of the children writes a pre-arranged word, say "kitchen” and rolls his slip of paper into a ball. When feeling in the hat for a paper the performer avoids the ball, but takes out a spill holds it to his forehead and spells out “kitchen” and then asks who wrote that. The accomplice confesses, and the preformer glances at the slip of paper and makes a comment about the nice writing, and then repeating with another slip of paper he spells out the word he had read on the first slip, and this is claimed he again looks at the slip to confirm it and so knows another word. When he comes to the ball of paper he announces this as the word written on the last but one slip, and so earns an entirely undeserved reputation as a thought reader.