The Magician's Own Book, or, the Whole Art of Conjuring / Being a complete hand-book of parlor magic, and containing over one thousand optical, chemical, mechanical, magnetical, and magical experiments, amusing transmutations, astonishing sleights and subtleties, celebrated card deceptions, ingenious tricks with numbers, curious and entertaining puzzles, together with all the most noted tricks of modern performers.

by George Arnold; Frank Cahill

The branch of the physical sciences which relates to the air and its various phenomena is called Pneumatics. By it we learn many curious particulars. By it we find that the air has weight and pressure, color, density, elasticity, compressibility, and some other properties with which we shall endeavor to make the young reader acquainted by many pleasing experiments, earnestly impressing upon him to lose no opportunity of making physical science his study.

To show that the air has weight and pressure, the common leather sucker by which boys raise stones will show the pressure of the atmosphere. It consists of a piece of soft but firm leather, having a piece of string drawn through its center. The leather is made quite wet and pliable, and then its under part is placed on the stone and stamped down by the foot. This pressing of the leather excludes the air from between the leather and the stone, and by pulling the string a vacuum is left underneath its center; consequently the weight of the air about the edges of the leather, not being counterbalanced by any air between it and the stone, enables the boy to lift it.

WEIGHT OF THE AIR PROVED BY A PAIR OF BELLOWS.

Shut the nozzle and valve-hole of a pair of bellows, and after having squeezed the air out of them, if they are perfectly air-tight, we shall find that a very great force, even some hundreds of pounds, is necessary for separating the boards. They are kept together by the weight of the heavy air which surrounds them in the same manner as if they were surrounded by water.

THE PRESSURE OF THE AIR SHOWN BY A WINE-GLASS.

Place a card on a wine-glass filled with water, then invert the glass, the water will not escape, the pressure of the atmosphere on the outside of the card being sufficient to support the water.

ANOTHER.

Invert a tall glass jar in a dish of water, and place a lighted taper under it; as the taper consumes the air in the jar, the water from the pressure without rises up to supply the place of the air removed by the combustion. In the operation of cupping, the operator holds the flame of a lamp under a bell-shaped glass. The air within this being rarefied and expanded, a considerable portion is given off. In this state the glass is placed upon the flesh, and as the air within it cools, it contracts, and the glass adheres to the flesh by the difference of the pressure of the internal and external air.