In an article on David Blaine’s performance on TV comes this comment:
Supposedly claimed? I thought this stunt was all trickery and not dangerous in the least. So is this hint on previous magicians dying just part of the hype or is there some truth to it? What’s the SD on this?
Yes, usually there is an actual trick although I wouldn’t be surprised if somewhen in history some chucklehead actually tried to catch a real bullet and got hurt or killed.
The thing is, even blanks and various other not-actual-bullets can be hazardous if mishandled, and injure or even kill someone. When a trick relies on misdirection, or perfect aim, and involves firearms yeah, you can get killed.
There is a long history of stupid people, some of whom call themselves “magicians”, doing a less than half-assed job of recreating some trick they saw without any real information about how things work. I can almost guarantee that numbers of people have killed themselves trying it.
The Wiki articleis not cited, but being a trick and being dangerous is not mutually exclusive. And saying that it is dangerous is part of the hype, but could also be true.
It depends on how the trick is performed. As mentioned in the Wiki, early versions of the trick involve having the person firing the gun (who is a shill) missing the performer. The danger there is, he might not. Likewise a trick gun could malfunction, etc.
Regards,
Shodan
I saw this stunt on a show called That’s Incredible."
Two normal guys did this stunt with a 22 short. The catcher has a receptacle in his mouth and the shooter has the 22 on a tripod. His aim was slightly off that it hit the catcher in the lip and he bled.
That was pretty much the real deal.
Possible, but unlikely. I suspect that was another variant of the trick with some blood (real or fake) added for drama.
No offense, but how do you know it was real, and not an illusion?
Regards,
Shodan
The wikipedia article Shodan refers to mentions the case of Chung Ling Soo (real name: William Ellsworth Robinson), a magician of the early 1900s who was killed when this trick went wrong. His own wikipedia article gives the details of his death.
Basically, the gun he used was rigged so that although the powder went off, the bullet in the chamber would not actually be shot. Due to improper cleaning, enough unburned powder had built up that on that night, the bullet did fire, and he was hit in the chest. (See the article for more details–I don’t know that much about guns).
I saw this story on some History Channel show–Mysteries at the Museum, I think, or something similar.
If you’re asking about the “That’s Incredible” version, they had slow motion film of the bullet passing through a target the catcher had in his mouth as the bullet went into the box had there. You can find the video on you tube. That being said I don’t think it has much to do with the trick magicians do and was pretty much just firing a fancy BB gun into a target the guy was holding in his mouth.
It’s an out and out trick. No bullet is actually fired from the gun, at least in modern versions of the trick. What performer is going to brave real gunfire? A large part of the trick is that the performer wants you to believe that it’s somehow possible, and thus very dangerous. But guns can bring down large game animals from greater distances. What would a bullet do to someone’s mouth from a few feet away?
The “dangers” all appear to arise from people working around the pyrotechnics used to make the trick look good. They presumably are the same sort of dangers faced by anyone working with pyrotechnics - that is, not very dangerous at all if the people know what they are doing and scrupulously follow safety procedures. But you are after all working with stuff that goes “bang” and if you don’t do it right, it’s a problem.
The one death unambiguously attributed to this trick is “Chung Ling Soo”, as described upthread. He died basically because the trick gun used wasn’t properly cleaned between performances, allowing a dangerous unexploded powder build-up.
Even if you could catch a bullet in your teeth, what do you think would happen to your teeth when they connected?
If there’s a gun that actually could fire a projectile involved then it’s dangerous. More than one case of injury and fatality from mistakes and intentional sabotage has been reported, but looking into the details of those cases produces a murky picture. But as long as there is a real weapon involved then something can go wrong. Even in movie making there have been cases where prop guns were loaded with live ammo instead of blanks, or people foolishly not understanding that even a gun firing a blank is dangerous.
Penn Jillette has spoken about the trick. They do a version of it in their show. As with many other tricks different performers through the years have reversed engineered the trick to come up with their own versions. I don’t remember the exact circumstances but he explained some of the old versions and how they went horribly wrong. He didn’t give away how they do their version but was clear that they both have families and wouldn’t do anything that would purposely put their lives at risk.
I saw the Penn and Teller show on the bullet catch and tried to show that their version was real. They even used a video camera to tape the bullet in motion. But that is one give away in itself. If you can capture the bullet in frame by frame on what appeared to be an ordinary consumer video camera, it is very slow.
Dennis
Busted. At least, if you’re using a no-kidding firearm with a no-kidding bullet. The timing required to make the catch is too fine for the human nervous system, and even if you made the catch your teeth would explode and contribute more high-speed fragments to the damage your skull and neck would suffer from the mostly unimpeded bullet.
If you see it, it’s a stage illusion.
If you catch it with your teeth then you know it’s an illusion.
These two guys are not stuntmen nor magicians. Just two guys off the streets with a stunt to show That’s Incredible. The catcher put a cube with a big round hole in his mouth and sat on a stool. I saw the impact and he reacted from it.
it’s not fake and I’ll bet that the TV people decided not to show dangerous stuff like that anymore.
Back in the musket days, the magician would use a steel ball instead of a normal lead ball, and would have a magnet on the end of the ramrod. After ramming the ball down, the magnet would actually lift it back out of the barrel, and the magician would sneakily palm the steel ball off of the end of the ramrod before replacing the ramrod under the gun’s barrel. A member of the audience would then fire the rifle, which at that point would be firing a blank round.
Magicians have also used wax bullets, which have enough force to break a pane of glass placed between the gun and the magician, but the glass takes most of the force from the spraying wax and the magician behind it isn’t harmed.
A similar technique is to use a fake gun that doesn’t fire anything but then use a squib to break something in between the gun and the bullet catcher. Either way, having something break in the middle is “proof” that the bullet actually was fired, even though in both cases a real bullet wasn’t actually fired.
I imagine the guys on That’s Incredible were using custom bullet loads that were a bit light on the powder charge. Still, that’s a pretty dangerous way of doing the trick. It probably won’t be fatal if the shooter misses the catcher’s mouth (and the box) but even a slow bullet would still likely do a fair amount of damage to the catcher’s face.
Regarding Chun Ling Soo: The reason I heard for his death was slightly different than improper cleaning.
The rifle he used was, of course, a trick one, with a fake powder charge that produced the flash and smoke. The powder charge he loaded into the rifle during the performance was held in a separate chamber, which did not ignite when the trigger was pulled. Improper maintenance meant that the separation between the chambers wore down after many, many performances, and on the fateful night, the fake powder charge ignited the real charge behind the bullet, leading to the fatal kablammo.
It looked to me like the bullet catcher on That’s Incredible was catching a pellet/BB fired from an air rifle. Not sure about that, though.