Check out the Impossible Objects on this site. There’s a Rubik’s Cube in a bottle with a neck far too small for it to fit through. There’s a narrow-necked glass jug full of tennis balls. There’s even a dictionary inside a glass bottle. Then there’s a metal ball bearing inside a wooden cage made of one piece of wood.
How the hell are these things made? I know all about the glass bottles with fully grown pears inside, that that pear liquor comes in - you just put the bottle over the baby pear and wait for it to grow. But that approach isn’t going to work with these inanimate objects.
I’m guessing the bottles must be cut and repaired somehow, but there certainly doesn’t seem to be a visible join. How do they do that?
I should add that the bottles can’t be specially made, as many of them are proprietary bottles - there’s a Kikkoman soy sauce bottle, an Absolut vodka bottle and so on…
On preview… no, not Photoshop. People collect and even sell these things. You can buy them on the site.
No, but these are physical objects that you can pick up and rattle around. I know of people that own them (deck of cards in a bottle, from here: http://www.mugsandmagic.com/sullivan/library/store.html) and the items are real.
Of course, much as I think they are intriguing, I don’t think they are $85 of intriguing :dubious:
The wooden ones are easy. It’s done the sdame way they make those wooden walking sticks with curved handles. Wood can be softened with steam, pushed through narrow gaps, then dried out.
A rubics cube can be dissasembled, then put back together inside the bottle. Use a long pair of tweezers to put each piece in place.
Tennis balls are flexible, they can be pushed through fairly narrow gaps. Especially if you put a little slit in it.
Baseballs, you can take off the cover, stitch it up most of the way, push it through the neck of the bottle, stuff with cotton wool, then do up the stitching.
UncaCecil did a column on this sort of stuff, but I can’t seem to find it in the Archives.
The basic trick is that the objects come apart for insertion into the bottle, and are re-assembled inside using special tools. The wooden arrows and such are soaked or steamed until soft, then inserted and allowed to dry. The rest are done by cutting open the bottom and melting it closed again, or stuff like that. Just because you can’t see the join doesn’t mean it isn’t sometimes there!
I had the same thought about folding the card box and then inserting the cards once it’s inside… two problems though, firstly it would leave obvious creases in the box, and secondly there are bottles with the cards still cellophane wrapped!
Click on the bottle pic for more pictures - this guy has made some of his own. Two full match boxes side by side in a gin bottle? I guess you could somehow manipulate all the individual matches into the box… but what a job!
And would tennis balls really squish down enough to fit through the neck of a juice bottle?
Some of them seem fairly straightforward. The ball-in-wooden-cube could easily be a very neat carpentry job reassembling the wood. The Bottle of Knots probably works by soaking the fibres in oil or something to make them squash and slide through, then risning them thoroughly. And I think Peter Morris is correct that a Rubik Cube could be reassembled inside the jar.
It’s the packs of cards I can’t figure out - jdc’s suggestion doesn’t work if they’re a sealed pack.
Tennis balls are made of rubber, so they’re pretty flexible (especially when dead, although those balls look pretty fresh). Like Peter Morris says, if you just made a hole or cut a slit in the ball with a razor, it probably wouldn’t be that hard to fit them through the neck of the bottle. They’d re-expand when you got them through and if you positioned them correctly the slit might be invisible.
The bottles are original and they do remain intact throughout the process. Obviously, none of them require violating the laws of physics.
Here’s a link (in plain text; copy and paste if you want) to instructions on making several impossible objects, including a few found on the site Colophon linked to:
To add a little bit: the five balls in the jug look very fresh, the one in the juice bottle looks moderately used, and the one in the Karo Syrup bottle looks the most used. The more a ball is used, the more the air pressure in the core drops: I was taught to test the freshness of a ball by squeezing it. If it gives too much, the ball is dead (meaning it won’t bounce as high) and should be replaced.
Apparently it is very difficult to do the sealed pack of cards one. It must be done by a different method than usual, or it could be that the pack of cards is inserted first, then re-wrapped with cellophane. The type of padlock made of stacked plates of metal is easy enough to figure out (well, once you know the secret, anyway), but I can’t figure out the brass one.
I have no special knowledge of this but as a child I used to save my bucks for those wonderful effects shown in the magic catalog.
I felt like a fool each time I got a new effect, they were so stupid, no one could believe that item or that effect would fool anyone. But guess what, when I did the tricks at organizations around town, or for my friends and family, most all of them had that “how the hell did he do that” expression. And some tried to guess the secret and they always made proposterous or overly complex guesses.
If the bottle wasn’t tampers with, then the items have been.
