What Happened at the Meeting on Friday 16th November

The host for this meeting was Steve Irwin, and the theme was “Coins”.  Steve loves magic with coins, and he demonstrated a really puzzling effect – he placed two coins inside a silk, folded it up, and without any suspicious moves, opened the silk out and the coins had vanished. We spectators were completely baffled.

Al Hirschel spoke about the Physics of Heat as he displayed a brass coin box on his hand.  Using his warm breath to expand the coin in the box a little, he caused the coin to pass right through the box and his hand and fall on to the table !  He explained that he adores coin boxes, both the Okito, which he was using tonight, and a similar box of different design - the Boston Box.

Wearing a baseball hat, David Whitson presented a striking figure.  He removed the baseball hat from his head, and from it produced several magic props – including a coin slide.  This very old prop was worth another demonstration, reminding us of the magic tricks we used to do in our youth!  Then David showed Number Tables, and asked Graham Holstein to choose a number, and tell him which of the tables it was on.  This enabled David to divine what the mentally chosen number was.

Joel Howlett showed us a purse frame – just the frame, it had no cloth attached.  From the purse frame he produced a coin. He then vanished the coin, produced a pen, vanished the pen and made it reappear, made the pen change back into the coin and turned the coin into a teaspoon. Quite bewildering and very smoothly done!

The Mental Photography Deck was the item shown by John Ferguson.  He had been shown this by the magician at DeLarno’s Magic many years ago.  He spread the deck of cards, and every one of them was blank on both sides.  He “mentally concentrated” and then a card face appeared.  He cut the deck at that point, and riffled through the deck, and now all the faces and all the backs of the cards had appeared.

Graham Holstein had brought some items to give away.  One was the Coin Tray, which can make a coin appear.  He also had round glass discs, that could be dropped into water to help one vanish a coin in a glass of water.  Also, he had a paper fan which could cause a coin to appear on the end of the closed fan.

By popular request, Steve Irwin was asked if he would explain how his earlier marvellous trick with the coin and silk worked.  He kindly agreed to do so, and we were all further stunned !

Later, the Annual General Meeting was held, and the current Office bearers were re-elected for 2019.  The 2019 syllabus was discussed, and a draft syllabus agreed to.