the magic of the tiny plunger
I found that watching Penn&Teller during my daily exercise is quite helpful. So I watched a lot of magic tricks in recent months and of course I try to come up with explanations. In case of the tiny plunger I actually have two different ideas, but I don't know if they are correct.
But how would you explain the trick?
Btw the trick begins at 1:45 if you want to save time and fast forward ...
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8 comments:
I think there are a bunch of deck, and each time one is presented, it's a different one with every card the same (the audience only sees one card each time). I have no idea how the plunger itself works.
As far as I know there is only one deck.
The video is 2 years old and meanwhile this became a trick other magicians perform as well and from what I have seen there is no deck switch.
You are correct - I've since read a bit more.
Maybe just cohesion? The cards will keep on sticking together by cohesion once they are pressed against each other by the plunger. If one or a group of them is not pressed against the other group (e.g because of the natural curvature of the deck), the deck will split at that exact point. However this does not explain how he managed to split the first 15 cards from the rest. Anyway, nice trick
My first idea was that a permanent magnet is hidden in the tiny plunger and that there is a special card with an embedded metal strip. Wherever the magician places the special card the tiny plunger would cut the deck. However, this explanation assumes quite a bit of sleight of hand and it does not match with the explanation Penn&Teller are hinting at ...
The second idea assumes that the magician took a fresh deck of cards and drilled a tiny hole through the deck, somewhat off center.
If the magician wants the tiny plunger to pick up e.g. the top five cards, he would only have to rotate the 5th card. The ascii drawing depicts the deck of cards from the side for this:
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So when Penn selected a card, the magician only needed to rotate his cards and the
tiny plunger would cut to Penn's selected card.
Most of the time we only see the dark back side of the cards, which makes it much harder
to notice a tiny hole.
And this explanation matches with what Penn&Teller said at the end ...
there aren't holes in the cards. this video explains the trick:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF3HUzYhOqg
dino,
yes, I guess this is how the trick was really done.
Thank you!
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