Https://books.google.com/books?id=AVlQAQ......&f=false

Google search turned up a journal on Photography with reference to the "indian rope trick" origins. From a real paper with how many such articles by how many such authors? (Chicago Tribune December 14, 1890) ... linked source "Photography" Volume III 1891 page 55 as retrieved by google 8/12/18 -JT

Anyone here up for some creative revisionism using old data online? "... the end may justify the means." indeed.

The Chicago Tribune hoax article gets a lot of attention in Peter Lamont's book The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick. But I've been looking at data which is older than 1890, and which seems to show that the Chicago Tribune hoax is NOT the origin of anything very much. Accounts of the trick in languages other than English go back to the ninth century. Medieval and early-modern authors are mentioned in the Wikipedia entry about the trick — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_rope_trick#The_accounts Maybe you think none of those accounts are truthful, but where did they get the idea of a spectacle like that?

The Chicago Tribune story was based on the idea that the Rope Trick was a sort of group hallucination, produced by means of hypnosis. But I found out that Chicago Tribune wasn't first with that theory either. Helena Blavatsky put forward the hallucination idea in 1877, in her book Isis Unveiled. The following year, the illusionist John Nevil Maskelyne wrote an article in the magazine Leisure Hour, in which he mentioned the most seemingly-impossible effect in accounts of the rope trick, namely the mid-air vanish. Maskelyne wrote that the effect was "doubtless" accomplished by means of concave mirrors. An explanation I'm inclined to take more seriously than either the hypnotism theory or the all-a-hoax theory...

The OP has a link to the data cited, how the "story" was interpreted and challenged at the time.

Where can anyone who's interested read the data you cite?

Glad you're interested.

I've already given a link for the names of medieval and early modern authors. Happy to provide further links if you'd like.

For Helena Blavatsky's hallucination idea, go to https://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/isis/iu1-13.htm and scroll down to pages 473 to 474

John Nevil Maskelyne's 1878 article in Leisure Hour is cited here:
https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/bitstream......llowed=y and go to page 30.

Details of the article itself...
John Nevil Maskelyne (1878); “Oriental Jugglery”; in The Leisure Hour. London, (Apr 20, 1878): pages 250–253. In order to access it, I had to join the State Library of NSW, which didn't cost anything but required a little messing about.

For Peter Lamont's book
https://books.google.com.au/books/about/......ir_esc=y

Hope this information is of use.
Colin

Thank you Colin. Those sources bring the notion into western magicians available literature. Interesting how the Melton stories of China took generations to migrate into the magic club.

The use of a fake author for that Chicago Tribune story about India got me wondering how many more such authors could be found in the paper.