About 30 years ago, when I was an apprentice, another bloke there would do a trick on demand that was brilliant. He had nothing in preparation, no special liquids and you could give him a piece of aluminium foil. In those days, foil was everywhere, around your kitkat bar was the obvious choice. He would tear a piece off about 3" by 4" but it could be any size… then wet one side of the foil. With another liquid, coke, water, even spit. He would then fold the foil in half and rub it between his fingers, then fold again and continue rubbing it, then fold again, rub, fold again, rub, etc. until it was a small nugget of folded aluminium foil. Then he would place it on your hand, back or front and wait 20 seconds.
This little metal nugget got hotter and hotter until you had to shake it off. You were left with a small burn on your hand, it even burnt the hairs on the back of your hand.
We followed him exactly, rubbed in the same direction, for the same period of time…but our nuggets of foil never got any hotter. Even 5 years later when I met him in a pub, he pulled the trick off for me and my guest.
I’ve never been able to find out how he did it. He did promise to show me in three years time, but of course I never saw him again and can’t even remember his name now.
Others have tried to explain that he obviously had some acid or solution, but I promise he never did. It was just having a wet side of foil and the friction from rubbing in a certain direction…
HOW DID HE DO THIS???
Google says the trick uses Mercury compounds, but one poster says you can use Cinnamon:
Your provided link is not worked at my browser.
Here’s another link
This fella could do the trick at a drop of a hat, with no preparation at all; he definately did not put his hands into a pocket to rub any substance onto his fingertips and I met him years later in a bar and he showed it to my guest there and then without any props. We watched him like a hawk and if his hands went into a pocket, we would have turned them inside out to catch him out!!!
It was obvious only tin foil, liquid (water, beer, spit) and rubbing were involved… There was no caustic soda or cinammon involved…
I’d really like to know the answer to this question because I remember my dad talking about a guy in a bar who did this trick to him once. IIRC the guy used a foil gum wrapper, if that makes any difference.
In his book The Magic of Uri Geller from 1975, James “the Amazing” Randi said that Geller used to perform this trick. He warned his readers that it used as dangerous chemical (but didn’t elaborate further), and said they shouldn’t try to repeat it themselves.
All you’re saying here is that he was a skilled magician.
I’ve studied and performed magic for years and you have to remember that magic works by fooling you. What you think you see isn’t what’s really going on. If you’ve seen something that looks like magic, then you’ve been hoodwinked, no other explanation is possible.
It’s also not possible to make foil get hot by rubbing water or beer on it. Not possible. He used some sort of chemical agent because no other explanation is possible.
Stick with what has to be true - the rest of it is performance.
And further to the comments about magicians: They are ALWAYS ready to do their signature trick. This guy has this one trick which has been beguiling people for years. It’s so good that you remembered it literally years later. Why, if he was going out to the bar for the evening, would he NOT have been prepared to pull it off? Even if he doesn’t get the setup of someone who had seen it before asking for a repeat, he could just work it into the conversation, “Hey, want to see something cool?”-style.
Heck, I was on a cruise with just such a fellow (indeed, several of them!), who late one night in the bar pulled a bunch of forks out of his pocket, because, as he said, it was perfectly normal to walk around with several forks on your person. Much fork-bending then ensued.