A Wonderful Pin.
Take a piece of cord elastic, and through it thrust a pin bent by twisting the ends of the elastic, held vertically between the thumb and finger of each hand, and then drawing the hands apart, so as to stretch the cord, you can communicate to this latter a movement so rapid that the revolutions of the pin shall produce the shape of a glass cup. The illusion will be the more complete if the pin is itself brilliantly illuminated, while having a dark background behind it, the operator should be in a darkened room, and a single ray of sunlight from without, should fall through a hole in the shutters, upon the pin. With a little skill in manipulation one can produce, using pins bent in different ways, the semblance of the most diverse objects—say, a cheese-dish, and aquarium, a bouquet-holder, or a goblet.
Should the form of the pin tend, by reason of centrifugal force, to make it assume a horizontal position, this can be cured by securing one end of it, by means of fine white silk, to the elastic. This will usually be invisible when the pin is made to revolve as above described, and, in any case, will not affect the appearance of the figure.