Magic, Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, Including Trick Photography

by Albert A. Hopkins

A certain number of spectators usually think that the performer produces an illusion through the aid of some trick, and that it is impossible to swallow a sword blade. But this is a mistake, for sword swallowers who employ artifices are few in number and their experiments but slightly varied, while the majority really do introduce into their mouths and food passages the blades that they cause to disappear. They attain this result as follows:

The back parts of the mouth, despite their sensitiveness and their rebellion against contact with solid bodies, are capable of becoming so changed through habit that they gradually get used to abnormal contacts. This fact is taken advantage of in medicine. It daily happens that persons afflicted with disorders of the throat or stomach can no longer swallow or take nourishment, and would die of exhaustion were they not fed artificially by means of the œsophageal tube. This latter is a vulcanized rubber tube which the patient swallows, after the manner of sword swallowers, and through the extremity of which milk or bouillon is introduced. But the patient, before being able to make daily use of this apparatus, must serve a genuine apprenticeship. The first introduction of the end of the tube into the pharynx is extremely painful, the second is a little less so, and it is only after a large number of trials, more or less prolonged, that the patient succeeds in swallowing ten or twelve inches of the tubing without a disagreeable sensation.

The washing out of the stomach, performed by means of a long, flexible tube which the patient partially swallows, and with which he injects into and removes from his stomach a quantity of tepid water by raising the tube or letting it hang down to form a siphon, likewise necessitates an apprenticeship of some days; but the patient succeeds in accustoming his organs to contact with the tube, and is finally able, after a short time, to swallow the latter with indifference, at least.

With these sword swallowers it is absolutely the same; for with them it is only as a consequence of repeated trials that the pharynx becomes sufficiently accustomed to it to permit them to finally swallow objects as large and rigid as swords, sabers, canes, and even billiard cues.

Swallowers of forks and spoons serve an analogous apprenticeship. As known, the talent of these consists in their ability to introduce into the throat a long spoon or fork while holding it suspended by its extremity between two fingers. This trick is extremely dangerous, since the œsophagus exerts a sort of suction on all bodies that are introduced into it. The spoon or fork is, then, strongly attracted, and if the individual cannot hold it, it will drop into his stomach, whence it can only be extracted by a very dangerous surgical operation—gastrotomy. It was accidents of this kind that made the “forkman” and the “knifeman” celebrated, and, more recently, the “spoonman” who died from the effects of the extraction from his stomach of a sirup spoon.

All sword swallowers do not proceed in the same way. Some swallow the blade directly, without any intermediate apparatus; but in this case, their sabers are provided at the extremity, near the point, with a small bayonet-shaped appendage over which they slip a gutta-percha tip without the spectators perceiving it ([F and G]). Others do not even take such a precaution, but swallow the saber or sword just as it is.

This is the mode of procedure of an old zouave, especially, who has become a poor juggler, and who, in his experiments, allows the spectators to touch, below his sternum, the projection that the point of the saber in his stomach makes on his skin.

But the majority of sword swallowers who exhibit upon the stage employ a guiding tube which they have previously swallowed, so that the experiments they are enabled to perform become less dangerous and can be varied more. This tube, which is from forty-five to fifty centimeters long, is made of very thin metal. Its width is twenty-five millimeters, and its thickness fifteen ([B]). These dimensions permit of the easy introduction of flat-bladed sabers, among other things, and of the performance of the four-sabers experiment, and of the introduction of sabers and swords of all kinds.

To explain the latter from a physiological standpoint, the saber swallowed by the performer enters the mouth and pharynx first, then the œsophagus, traverses the cardiac opening of the stomach, and enters the latter as far as the antrum of the pylorus—the small cul-de-sac of the stomach. In their normal state these organs are not in a straight line, but are placed so by the passage of the sword. In the first place, the head is thrown back so that the mouth is in the direction of the œsophagus, the curves of which disappear or become less; the angle that the œsophagus makes with the stomach becomes null; and, finally, the last-named organ distends in a vertical direction and its internal curve disappears, thus permitting the blade to traverse the stomach through its greater diameter; that is to say, to reach the small cul-de-sac. It should be understood that before such a result can be attained the stomach must have been emptied through fasting on the part of the operator.

The depth of fifty-five to sixty centimeters to which these men cause their instruments to penetrate, and which seems extraordinary to spectators, is explained by the dimensions of the organs traversed. Such lengths may be divided thus: