Not so long ago some of the things which are common and magic acts or are scientific realities were considered the work of the devil. You wouldn’t have wanted to be the one a crowd focused on accusing you of witchcraft, because many of the witchcraft trials only proved you were innocent by your death. An example of one of these trials was throwing a suspected witch in the water with a weight on her. If she floated to the top she was guilty of being a witch, but if she drowned she was innocent. It is almost like saying today if a person dies during an execution they are innocent, but if they survive it is because of the devil. It is hard to understand the rationale for how these people thought. Maybe it was the fact we were dealing with uneducated people who really didn’t care about one another.

In medieval times and right through the Renaissance most people believed there were no such thing as meteors falling from the sky. The French Academy of sciences stated “rocks don’t fall from the sky.” Nobody believed anyone when they said they saw a fireball or meteor hitting the ground. Saying you saw a meteor falling was a very good way to be ridiculed in those times. This all changed in 1794, because three hundred people saw meteors falling at the same time. I guess it just couldn’t be ignored any longer with such large groups of people seeing it happen.

One of the things which surely would have gotten you tried for witchcraft would have been the development of a material which would make you invisible. I am certain that would’ve been considered the devil’s work. Today there is such a material and there is more than one way to make something invisible. We have a material which bends light around an object and we also can use screens and cameras to show what is behind an object and project it in front of it, making it invisible.

One of the differences between past ages and our enlightened times is the fact we don’t consider things we don’t understand as black magic, we consider them processes which are yet to be discovered. This is a big jump from how humans used to think and probably this jump will be responsible for huge leaps in technology. We no longer think the way our ancestors did. Sometimes scientific theory is created to fit a certain situation and it could be very compelling, but the situation we are fitting it to may not turn out to be what we thought it was. The Black Plague was thought to be caused by bad air and many of the treating physicians of the day wore something over their nose and mouth which looked like a bird’s beak and was stuffed with different things to act as a sort of filter. It would’ve made no difference whether they wore these or not.

Can you imagine the effect a magician would have had on a crowd thousands of years ago or even later if he made an elephant disappear, which is not that uncommon today? He either would’ve been put to death or declared a God. Have you ever wondered when some of the famous tricks were first performed? What trick could be more famous than a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat? It is said the act was first performed in 1831 by John Henry Anderson. Anderson was a Scottish magician. He became famous and was soon known as Professor Anderson, the Wizard of the North. He also performed a trick where he seemed to catch a bullet which was fired from a gun. He became so famous he performed before Queen Victoria. Not everything was hunky-dory for this magician however and when he performed one of his tricks he burned down the entire theater and yet became even more famous.

In ancient times many people confused magic tricks with the paranormal. This continued for quite a long time and there came a time when it was found that electricity could activate muscles in a dead animal or even a person and make them move. Around two hundred years ago it was quite popular to have a corpse in a sideshow and use electrical batteries to make its muscles contract which made it move to the delight and horror of the audience. Some of these corpses were carried around for quite a long time.

This brings us to a period in time when mediums became very popular. The medium was a person who supposedly could assist you in contacting the dead. They are still around today, but they had reached their popularity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These mediums could have been classified as magicians, because everything they did was just an act meant to fool the public, but the difference between them and a magician was they were usually out to get as much money from their clients as they possibly could by preying on their loss.

Today magic has reached the pinnacle where magicians can make almost anything disappear regardless of size, but as we know it is all a trick. One of the greatest tricks ever performed happened during World War II. The British were very worried the Germans would bomb the Suez Canal, cutting off one of the most important shortcuts. They hired Jasper Maskelyne a famous magician to see if he could somehow make the Germans believe the Suez Canal was in a different area than it really was. Maskelyne had joined the Royal Engineers and studied camouflage, but it is said it was not too good at hiding pillboxes. The magician had all the lights turned off at the Suez Canal and set up the exact same lights many miles away. When the Germans came to bomb the canal they dropped their ordinance in the wrong place. The Suez Canal actually looked like it was at least 10 miles in another direction.

Magic will only get more sophisticated as technology advances and magicians are able to incorporate technological devices into their acts. A magician from a hundred years in the future could look like a god to us today.