These apparatus were formerly much employed by magicians—Robert-Houdin, for instance. The following is an example of one of the scenes that may occur with them:
When the curtain rises, there is seen in the center of the stage a large, dark-colored cabinet, ornamented with mouldings, and mounted upon legs that are a little longer than those of ordinary cabinets, the object being to remove all possibility of a communication with the stage beneath. These legs are provided with casters. The showman turns this cabinet around and shows that there is nothing abnormal about it externally. He then asks some of the spectators to come up close to it, and lets them examine its interior, which is entirely empty. There is no double bottom, nor any hiding-place. When the witnesses have made themselves certain of this fact, they station themselves around the stage, and a certain number of them even consent to remain behind the cabinet and see nothing of the experiment. The cabinet being thus surrounded on all sides, and every one being able to look under it, fraud would seem to be an impossibility.
A young woman dressed as a danseuse then comes on the stage and enters the cabinet, and the doors are closed upon her. In a few moments the doors are opened again, when, lo and behold! the closet is empty, the young woman having disappeared. Then the doors are closed again, and then opened, and the danseuse makes her appearance; and so on. At the end of the experiment the witnesses examine the cabinet again, and finding nothing changed therein, are justly stupefied.
In another style of cabinet there is no bar in the center, as shown in our [engraving], but there is observed on one of the sides in the interior a bracket a few centimeters in length, and, back and above this, a shelf. This arrangement permits of performing a few experiments more than does the one just described. Thus, when the woman has disappeared, the showman allows a young man to enter, and he also disappears, while the young woman is found in his place. This is a very surprising substitution.
The box into which the harlequin takes refuge, and which appears to be empty when Pierrot or Cassandra lifts the curtain that shields its entrance, is also a sort of magic cabinet.
In a series of lectures delivered a few years ago at the London Polytechnic Institution, a professor of physics unmasked the secret of some of the tricks employed on the stage for producing illusions, and notably that of the magic cabinet. The lecturer, after showing the cabinet, and causing the disappearance therein of an individual while the doors were closed, repeated the same experiment with the latter open. But, in the latter case, so quick was the disappearance that the spectators could not even then see how it was done. The illusion produced by the apparatus is the result of a play of mirrors.
MAGIC CABINET.
In the first cabinet described, when the exhibitor has closed the doors upon the young woman, the latter pulls toward her two mirrors that are represented in our [plan] of the cabinet by the lines, G G. These mirrors are hinged at O O, and, when swung outward, rest by their external edges against the bar, P, and then occupy the position shown by the dotted lines, G′ G′. When the cabinet is again opened, the woman placed at A is hidden by the two mirrors; but the appearance of the interior of the cabinet is not changed, since the spectators see the image of each side reflected from the corresponding mirror, and this looks to them like the back of the cabinet.