The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History [Hardcover]

Peter Lamont (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1560256613 | ISBN-13: 978-1560256618 | Publication Date: November 30, 2004 | Edition: 2nd

“A rope rises up into the air. A boy climbs up the rope and when the boy gets to the top he vanishes into thin air,” explains Peter Lamont, winner of the Jeremy Dalziel prize in British History, and author of The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, about a tall tale that found its way into legend. The rope trick is one of the most successful hoaxes of all time, created by an amateur magician and printed in the Chicago Tribune in 1890. Despite a later admission that the story was false, it continued to spread in newspapers and journals throughout the world. Some claimed to have seen the trick performed on trips to India. Others added their own spin to the tale. Using the original legend as a starting point, Lamont, who has performed as a magician and psychic, explores how easily people will believe stories that are fed to them as truth despite all logical senses and their outright impossibility.

Editorial Reviews

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–A performer pulls out a long rope and, with arcane words and gestures, coaxes it to climb high into the sky without any sign of support. The magician then calls on his young assistant, who climbs the rope until he vanishes from view. When the boy doesn't return, the magician angrily follows after him and carries him down to resounding audience applause. Impossible? Yes. Lamont's fun, informative book details the history of this myth and why so many people wanted to believe in it so deeply. The first "hard" reference came from an eyewitness report in the Chicago Tribune in 1890. Although the journalist printed a retraction a few months later, the fabrication had already captured the attention of U.S. and British readers to the extent that others claimed to have witnessed the trick themselves. Strange and frightening stories developed around the swamis and magi who supposedly performed it and the dangers experienced by those who attempted to discover its secrets. Amid the campy facts, Lamont develops interesting conclusions. The late 1800s brought a rise in science and a growing disbelief in the spiritual side of life, and the tale fulfilled a need within educated Westerners to believe in something that couldn't be explained. The faraway land of India as its origin added a level of mystique. In the end, the author shows that the stories we create about other cultures reveal volumes about ourselves.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

British historian and magician Lamont relays the strange history of the so-called Indian rope trick. According to legend, a boy clambers up a rope and disappears, followed by a knife-armed fakir, who also vanishes. Severed limbs then tumble from the heavens and reassemble into the living boy. Sound plausible? A group in 1930s Britain was skeptical, and Lamont has a lot of fun describing their inconclusive debunking campaign. Such entertaining insouciance permeates his writing, but Lamont structures his tale seriously and treats the trick as an example of the West's flawed perceptions of the East. Delving into Victorian history, Lamont discusses popular fascination with the East's "mysteries" and presents a gallery of eccentric performers who met the public's demand to be gulled by supernatural feats. Feeding this social appetite was an 1890 Chicago newspaper revelation of the rope trick, which, despite its editor's admission that the article was fabricated, only succeeded in perpetuating the myth. The various tangents related to the Indian rope trick are cleverly united in Lamont's amusing read. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 265 pages
• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press; 2nd edition (November 30, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560256613
• ISBN-13: 978-1560256618
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,042,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Illusory Illusion, February 10, 2005

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History (Hardcover)

Perhaps you have seen a magician pull a rabbit out of a demonstrably empty hat. You may have seen the classic magical trick of sawing a woman in half. And perhaps you have seen the Indian rope trick: the conjurer, standing in an open field, throws one end of a rope into the air, where defying gravity, it stays, and a boy comes to climb up the rope, reaches the top, and disappears. No, you have not seen that one, perhaps, but it is as famous as the others and has caused a century of wonder, perhaps not from audiences but from those who have tried to see the illusion and tried to learn how it was done. In _The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History_ (Thunder's Mouth Press), Peter Lamont, a magician and an academic researcher on the performance of magic, has written a hugely entertaining book about the most legendary and exotic of magic tricks. "A legend is very much like an illusion," he writes, "more interesting and invariably more attractive than reality." We need legends, and this one is so colorful and mysterious, Lamont's careful probing and deflating make it even more attractive.

The amazing truth is that there never was any Indian rope trick, and it has almost nothing to do with India. It was the invention of a loyal American, a journalist who later went on to become the head of the US Secret Service. John Elbert Wilkie was a reporter for the _Chicago Tribune_, and in 1890 he published an anonymous article describing the rope trick as seen in India, and how it was done. He made it all up. There were those who spoke up, certain that people were seeing the rope trick before 1890, but there are no accounts of the trick before that time. A few weeks later, the _Tribune_ published a confession that the story was a hoax, but newspapers across America and Europe were spreading the story, while the retraction got nowhere. As Lamont writes, "A legend does not survive on accuracy." The community of magicians, and those fascinated by their effects, became split between those who were convinced that the rope trick was a real illusion and those who thought it an illusory illusion. The efforts of those who believed the trick to be real have been extensive. A photograph was finally produced of the trick in 1919, but it turned out to be the far more prosaic trick of a boy balancing on a pole. People had seen the trick in India, but they turned out to be people who were reported as seeing it by other people, the familiar "friend of a friend" basis of countless urban legends. There were those who claim to have seen the trick themselves. Many of them took decades to speak up and say that they had actually seen the trick performed, but a psychologist has found that the memories get elaborated, with fancier versions being recalled the more distant the memory is.

One particular elaboration has outdone Wilkie's conception, and has had its own life, supporters, and detractors. This is the version in which the boy climbs the rope and the magician climbs up after him, only to chop the boy up and throw his separated pieces down, whereupon they are magically reunited and the boy brought back to life. As in the original, there are those who claim to know just how this trick is done, but of course it is never done. Throughout this book is documented the human eagerness to believe; skeptics may assure the public with factual assertions about how the trick never existed, but as Lamont writes, the people who keep Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster going are the same types that will keep the Indian rope trick in existence, even though it never had an existence to begin with. With his book, full of arcane facts and documentation presented by a humorous and entertaining guide, Lamont knows that he is only going to strengthen the legend. In fact, in a jaunty epilogue, he tells us he has, indeed, seen the trick himself, and any reader will agree, he tells a good story.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Trick That Never Was That Became a Real Trick, March 2, 2005

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John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: How a Spectacular Hoax Became History (Hardcover)

You wouldn't have thought that a magic trick that never was is the best known magical trick of all time.

Peter Lamont uses this trick as the foundation of a search into magic tricks of all kinds, but especially tricks from India. His search has taken him back into history and finally a trip to India doing research.

Extensively researched and referenced this is a very interesting trip into the explanation of magic. When I first picked it up, because of the title, I expected to put it down again quickly. Instead I found the writing style and the content to be fascinating and didn't put it down.

Every so often I get some kind of story in an e-mail describing something that just makes so much sense that it had to have happened. It's nice to know that such urban legends didn't just start with the Internet, but a long time ago.

The Indian Rope Trick - a totally made up story - in Chicago - nothing to do with India at all. Then magicians had to come up with a way to do it. Strange world.

0 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Indian rope trick really does exist, August 18, 2007

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harsh "harshrk" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick (Paperback)

Guys

I have not read this book yet, but I can't resist myself from commenting on this topic.

I don't know what kind of research the author has done and arrived at the conclusion that the Indian rope trick was a complete HOAX.

The fact is that the Indian Rope Trick does really exist. It's just that very few magicians can do it. The classic Indian rope trick (boy vanishing in thin air and then the master cutting him in to pieces) may be a myth, but the Indian rope trick is very much performed even today.

[...].

There is an excellent demonstration of the trick in BBC's program supernatural science - Secrets of Levitation where Nishamuddin, a magician from India, who has revived this trick, performs the trick for BBC.

There is a professor and a magician in Kerla (southern India) who can also perform this trick.

So I don't know what's all this fuss about?