By Gary R. Brown for American Heritage Magazine, this interesting piece on Horace Goldin and his attempt to keep his "sawing a lady in half" illusion secret. Mr. Brown discusses the limitations of using a patent to keep a magic trick secret. Mr. Brown is a lawyer/magician. He says in part,
Is it possible to own a miracle? Horace Goldin, a vaudeville-era stage magician, tried to do just that. He developed a technique for sawing an assistant in half—an illusion as closely associated with magicians as pulling a rabbit out of a hat—and then embarked on an extensive and costly legal campaign to protect his invention from competitors and anyone else who tried to exploit it. Yet the very measure that afforded Goldin’s illusion the most powerful legal protection—a patent—also turned out to be his undoing.
I also discuss Mr. Goldin and his problems with patenting his famous illusion in a prior post here.
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