Mr. Falck opened at the Queen’s Bazaar, Oxford Street, London, November 8th, 1835. Before opening, however, he gave a private performance for the press, and received quite a number of notices. A half-column clipping in my collection, dated November 4th, 1835, which I think is cut from The Chronicle or The Globe, mentions the trick among other effects like “Flora’s Gift,” “The Card in the Pocket,” etc., and adds that the “exchange of wine was so that if once in Mr. Falck’s company, we should not wish to exchange it, for he poured three sorts of wine, Port, Sherry, and Champagne, out of one bottle. Then he put them together, and from such a mixture produced sherry in one glass, and port in another.”
From this notice it will be seen that Falck had “The Inexhaustible Bottle,” and had some method of returning all the liquors not drunk back into the bottle and then pouring out two different kinds of liquor.
Perhaps he resorted to chemicals, but one thing is evident—the bottle was used for six different kinds of liquors at one and the same time.
Phillippe from 1836 to 1838 featured “An Infernal Bottle” trick, also “The Inexhaustible Bottle” trick. The trick also was seen on programmes used by John Henry Anderson, the Wizard of the North, in the same years. According to these programmes Phillippe and Anderson showed the bottle empty, filled it with water, and then served five different liquors.
On April 30th, 1838, Anderson thus announced the trick on a programme used at Victoria Rooms, Hull:
“Handkerchiefs will be borrowed from three gentlemen; the magician will load his mystic gun, in which he will place the handkerchiefs; he will fire a bottle containing wine, the bottle will be broken and the handkerchiefs will appear.”
Programmes in my collection show that Anderson presented the trick, serving various sorts of liquors, when he played London in 1840, but little attention was drawn to the wonderful bottle. In 1842 Ludwig Döbler, Germany’s best-beloved magician, came to London and featured what he termed “The Travelling Bottle.”