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The Indian Rope Trick

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Mighty_Emperor

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A recent book goes into the details of this trick and shows how it was actually made up to sell papers and span out of control from there. There is a great review in today's Guardian but they don't seem to put a lot of the weekend stuff online, however, I did find the earlier Obsever review while looking for it:

Give 'em enough rope

Peter Lamont has conjured up a magical read in his history of an unstoppable hoax, The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick

Michael Holland
Sunday December 28, 2003
The Observer


The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick
by Peter Lamont

In shape and symmetry, there is something of Dava Sobel about Peter Lamont's engagingly idiosyncratic book. But unlike Ms Sobel, who used all too corporeal men and women to refract her version of historical reality, Dr Lamont, as befits a practising magician, uses illusion, or rather the illusion of an illusion, to refract his.

In essence, Lamont entertains us with lessons in how history can be invented. Using the example of the fabled Indian rope trick, Lamont aims to show, and largely succeeds, how people will believe a thing is true, despite all rational evidence to the contrary, indeed despite outright denials of its existence, if it is repeated that it is true often enough.

Peter Lamont is a research fellow at Edinburgh University looking into the history, theory and performance of magic, so the choice of his subject is not so surprising. For the purposes of his book, all his premises are derived from the description of the Indian rope trick given in an article published on 8 August 1890 in the Chicago Daily Tribune.

It goes like this: 'The fakir drew from under his knee a ball of grey twine. Taking the loose end between his teeth, he, with a quick upward motion, tossed the ball into the air. Instead of coming back to him, it kept on going up and up until out of sight and there remained only the long swaying end... [A] boy about six-years-old... walked over to the twine and began climbing up it... the boy disappeared when he had reached a point 30 or 40ft from the ground... a moment later, the twine disappeared.'

This purported to be an eye-witness account of the trick given by a couple of American travellers returning from the mysterious Orient. Within a few months, however, the editor of the Tribune was forced to come clean and admit that not only was the account bogus but that the travellers did not even exist.

Too late. By then, the account had been reprinted in newspapers and journals around the world and the denial scarcely caused a ripple. Over the next half century, the story of the rope trick gathered momentum and, more to the point, wonderful embellishments. By the mid-1930s, other 'eye-witnesses' reported seeing the 'fakir' pick up a knife and scramble up the 'rope' after the boy. After a while, bloody limbs, a torso and, finally, a head would drop to the ground, followed by the fakir who would reassemble the pieces and the original boy would spring smiling back to life.

With each new account receiving graphic treatment in the popular (and more arcane) prints, millions believed in the trick, while thousands more tried to explain it. But they were all completely and absolutely wrong. The trick was not even an illusion; it simply did not and had never existed.

Such mass credulity is rarely created in a vacuum and the real joy of Lamont's book lies in his scholarship of the flamboyant music-hall magic acts which flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their popularity sprung, inter alia, from a visceral reaction to the brutish rationalism of the Industrial Revolution and from the opening up of insular Britain to the arts and artefacts of its increasingly large empire.

Before dismissing another age as irredeemably gullible, Lamont reminds us of the continuing fascination with the East. From yogis to yoga and new-age crystals, it still colours our thoughts, often with as little basis as belief in the Indian rope trick.

There's very little wrong with this beguiling book apart from a few small solecisms, such as this one about a Magic Circle challenge to perform the trick: 'By the end of 1934... [e]ven the BBC had taken an interest in the Karachi challenge, though they had not regarded it as good television. Instead, it was featured on a popular radio programme.' BBC TV began its service from Alexandra Palace in 1936.

Slightly frustrating was the absence of explanations for much of the magicianship mentioned in the text, but perhaps one shouldn't be mystified. Dr Lamont is a past president of the Edinburgh Magic Circle. No surprise, then, that he has conjured a rather magical read.
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http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/history/0,6121,1112976,00.html

Get it from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0316724300/

Basically (from the Guardian review) Elbert Wilkie (who was a reporter for the Chicago Herald) wrote the piece in 1890 under the pen name Fred S. Ellmore (the cunning play on words showing what he was aiming for). Four months later he owned up to the fakery in the paper but by then the Indian Rope Trick had already got a life of its own and has continued into the present day. I think this is the interesting aspect. I suppose the Indian fakirs had to give the visitors what they want and have done various variations on the theme - there was a documentary (or two) on this and they saw some very impressive tricks performed. One that really stuck with me is that the investigators watched the complete classic IRT performed (compelte with boy being chased up rope and cut to pieces) but when they examined the tape afterwards nothing like that actually happened (anyone know the name of that doc - pos. shown on Channel 4 around 4-5 years ago)?

Anyway links:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/020111.html

http://skepdic.com/indianrope.html

http://www.100megsfree4.com/farshores/nropey.htm

It also came up at the 1997 UnConvention:

http://www.blather.net/archives/uncon97/97rope.html

How to do the IRT yourself:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s155947.htm

Emps
 
I read about the IRT years ago in a 'Fifty True Stories Stranger Than Fiction' type book, published in about the 40s or 50s. By then the trick had become much more elaborate, with boys climbing the rope and disappearing, and sabres being waved and limbs severed and magically re-attached.:eek!!!!:
 
The "original" may have been hyped up but I saw a pretty good modern version of it filmed on TV "greatest tricks" with magician John Lenahan in India. Rope emerges from basket by itself like a snake and rises . Rope stiffens like a rod. Small boy climbs up. Then down. I'm thinking there are ways that it might be done. But then What impresses is that the rope goes from rigid to soft in an instant and falls to the ground. Maybe something very string and thin is pushed through from below (something or someone would have to be buried underground where the basket is set down) , and then withdrawn very fast but it was impressive.
 
I was reading through a book this morning, The Weird 100 by Stephen Spegnisi (spelling?) and my eye caught on the Levitation article. ...

Anyone have some information about the Indian Rope Trick?

The book says it was all a hoax, but I'd still like to see a page or two about how it was supposedly done.

Nick

P.S. The book was a pretty good read, and covers a portion of my reference shelf. I reccomend purchasing it if you've got twenty bucks burning a hole in your pocket.
 
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IRT

Here's how the Indian Rope Trick COULD be performed:

Take a six-foot length of sturdy bamboo and cut it into four or five inch pieces. Notch and hinge each piece so that all six feet can be coiled like a rope but then locked into place as a pole by simply running the fingers down it as the "rope" is uncoiled.

Cover the bamboo with dyed burlap or hemp to disguise it as a rope.

A very light-weight boy (or girl) with a superb sense of balace should be able to briefly ascend this pole, since his weight will be straight down.
 
Good explanation, OldTimeRadio.
I was myself thinking along the lines of a metal chain that had been specially constructed to lock rigid once it had been straightened out.
 
Chains

Mythopoeika said:
"I was myself thinking along the lines of a metal chain that had been specially constructed to lock rigid once it had been straightened out."
Click to expand...

Don't folding canes work on this principle - a chain or cord which is screwed taught once the cane is unfolded?
 
Re: Chains

OldTimeRadio said:
Mythopoeika said:
"I was myself thinking along the lines of a metal chain that had been specially constructed to lock rigid once it had been straightened out."
Click to expand...

Don't folding canes work on this principle - a chain or cord which is screwed taught once the cane is unfolded?
Click to expand...

They do indeed and I immediately thought of my mother's folding walking stick when I saw your post.

link to an example
 
lordmongrove said:
Indian rope trick, wolf children, snake charmers and more
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I like B.Premanand's skewer through the tongue trick at the end of the vid, it's similar to Tom Savini's machete in the head trick, all misdirection and prep ..
 
This item concerning research into the Indian Rope Trick appeared in Fortean Times, issue #95.
The Indian Rope Trick

New work by two psychologists at the University of Hertfordshire has cast doubt upon the reliability of eyewitness accounts of one of the most famous examples of 'real magic', the Indian rope trick. In the classic version of the trick, an Indian fakir throws a rope into the air. Before it can fall, the rope apparently becomes solid. A small boy is sent up the rope and disappears when he reaches the top. The fakir follows with a knife, vanishes, and a shower of what are supposed to be the boy's dismembered limbs fall to the ground. Finally, the fakir descends the rope, places the bloody remains in a basket and returns the boy to life.

Various versions of this amazing feat were reported many times in the press during British rule in India, but most performances were seen by passers-by in open-air street shows. Despite large sums of money being offered, the trick was never observed under more rigorous conditions. This has led sceptics to claim that the many eyewitness reports are the result of exaggeration, hallucination or mesmerism.

Richard Wiseman and Peter Lamont, writing in Nature, have presented the results of an investigation into the 'exaggeration effect'. Thanks to the extensive press coverage of the Indian rope trick during the 19th and early 20th centuries, they were able to come up with 22 detailed and firmly dated first-hand accounts. They then asked a committee of magicians to categorise the accounts according to the 'impressiveness' of the trick: whether the boy just climbs up and down the rope, whether he also disappears at the top and so on. The 'impressiveness' category was then in each case compared with the amount of time that had elapsed between the performance of the trick and the subsequent setting-down of the witness's account.

The results strongly indicate that the longer an eyewitness waits before setting down in writing or otherwise publicising his/her account, the more impressive that account is likely to be. The shortest time lapse in the sample was two years, in the case of F.W. Holmes's report in The Strand Magazine of April 1919. Even this brief an interval seems enough for the 'exaggeration effect' to do its work: one witness claimed to have seen and photographed the Indian rope trick, but had to admit that on closer examination the photograph in fact showed a child balancing on the end of a long bamboo pole.

The survey clearly has consequences for the investigation and proof or disproof of all phenomena that ultimately rely on the testimony of eyewitnesses. If, as many have suggested and as this study indicates, we all have a (probably involuntary) tendency to tell increasingly tall stories as time passes, then the value of witnesses's evidence is called into question not just in the case of the Indian rope trick but also in the fields of magic and the paranormal generally, ufology and cryptozoology. It underlines, once again, the healthy scepticism with which eyewitness accounts should be met and the need for concrete evidence.
Click to expand...
SALVAGED FROM THE WAYBACK MACHINE: https://web.archive.org/web/19980216123528/http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/95/rope.html
 
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