Pepper Magic Trick: Creating Illusions To Entertain Your Audience
The pepper magic trick is one of the most widely used tricks in theaters. A ghost floating on stage is one of the most popular pepper magic tricks in the middle of the 1880s. By using a plate glass and special lightings to make an object appear and disappear on stage, this pepper magic trick also known as Pepper’s ghost have entertained and scarred people in the theaters for several years. Up until now, many theaters and even magicians used this trick to create an illusion of appearance and disappearance of people and objects on stage.
How The Pepper magic Trick started
Although the pepper magic trick is widely attributed to John Pepper, a professor of the Royal Polytechnic, it was not really Pepper who actually discovered this trick. Henry Dircks developed the Dircksian Phantasmogoria, a technique which made ghost appear on stage, way back in 1862. Dircks tried to market his idea to theater owners at that time but since the technology developed by Dircks would require some extensive renovations in the lay-out of the theaters, many theater owners at that time did not really made use of the technology. For most of these theater owners, the renovations required is too much for them to handle and they would rather not spend so much money just to produce an illusion of a ghost in the theater. According them, there are far cheaper ways of producing a ghost in a play that using the Dircksian Phantasmogoria.
When John Pepper later on saw the invention of Dircks at the Royal Polytechnic, he told Dircks that the Dircksian Phantasmogoria can be modified to fit into theaters without necessitating extensive renovations on the lay-out of the theaters. The two of them started to work on creating a prototype of the Dircksian Phantasmogoria and used this prototype during a scene of Charles Dickens’s The Haunted Man. The initial success of the Dircksian Phantasmogoria encouraged the theater owners to use this technology more extensively. More theatrical products that require a ghost illusion employed this technology to create a more believable illusion of a ghost floating on stage. The technology worked perfectly on a number of plays that people started to refer to the Dircksian Phantasmogoria as the machine that produced Pepper’s Ghost. Soon enough, the pepper magic trick of making people and objects appear and disappear became known just as the pepper magic trick or the Pepper’s Ghost among theater goers. Even though John Pepper tried to credit the discovery of the technology to its original creator, Henry Dircks, the technology still earned the household name of Pepper’s Ghost.
