I wonder who currently possesses Ade Duval's working set. The highly publicized set which went up for auction a few years back was most certainly not the one Ade used throughout his Vaudeville and later career. They were the wrong color, had the wrong style phantom gimmick, and the load gimmicks did not match what was in his published book. Furthermore they did not include the all important table, phantom tube box, ladles, or silks.

Here is Ade using a white phantom tube, the color of which is confirmed by multiple sources.



And here is the set which went up for auction.



Plus we have multiple contemporaneous reports in magic magazines that Ade sold the act in its entirety to Marcel et Petite who continued to perform it for quite some time. Note that the silk patterns in their photo match the designs used by Ade (e.g. on the Sphinx cover)



The auctioned set might have been the one that Ade used in the early convention shows as those were red, the angled P&L phantom gimmick would be correct, and it would explain absence of other apparatus and silk. He used typical servante magician tables in that early version. But the auction bundle included a P&L bullet gimmick (which he would avoid because of limited capacity), a later Louis Tannen manufactured blow tube (different method than he used at conventions), and a signed photo to a magic collector that conflicted with the suggested provenance. So I am skeptical.

I also would be interested in who now has the giant butterfly silk that he removed from the act after the convention run. He listed it for sale for $25.




Now that would have been a collectible bargain!

Great research, Frank!

Here is some of the clearest film footage I've ever seen of Ade and True Duval.

It still suffers from being shot in short bursts, like most amateur 16mm cinematography of the 1930's (using wind-up clockwork spring motors with short runs) , so we're not seeing any complete routines, but it is still the best quality film footage I've seen of the Duval act.

https://youtu.be/UYZzyNHU2dE

Excellent video! This is very interesting as it absolutely confirms the white painted tubes.

I wanted to get a perspective of what this could have looked like on stage. So, I asked AI to clean up a frame and colorize it. Holy smoke!

Original Frame:


AI enhanced and colorized:

Thank you, Frank for that!!!

In a couple more years, AI should be able to do a better job of colorizing video without hallucinating so much. It is going to be fun to go back to all the old black and white performance videos and see better what they could potentially have looked like live.

Interestingly, in Duval's original IBM Convention Act, it looks like the early silks started off as more mono colored, and as the act progressed, they became more and more variegated ending with the spectacular 9-foot butterfly picture.

Original


AI Colorized


Duval was working on his silk dyeing manuscript before he passed away. It is really too bad that it wasn't completed. He was considered the best magic silk producer in the 1920s and 1930s.

Another interesting thing to note in the video is that he is doing the "stuck silk in tube" subtlety in the production. So, we know exactly which part of the routine that is. That convincer fooled a lot of magicians!

Yes, at about 21 seconds into this video, you can 'see' the tube switch (with the exposed stuck silk) and it is flawless!

AI colorizing tends to work better on clearer, higher resolution images. While the video clip is fairly good image quality compared to some of the blurry clips we've seen before of Duval , unfortunately it is not high resolution enough to provide enough information to colorize it accurately (plus there is very high contrast between the parts of the image which are in the spotlight and the parts of the image that are darker, outside of the spotlight)

Even with a cleaner image like the 1928 IBM Convention Act photo of Duval, the "hallucinations" of the AI program are very odd. The AI program is not simply colorizing the image , it is altering the image by losing Duval's facial expression , and Duval loses most of a finger on one hand and gains extra fingers on his other hand !



What is so odd about it mutilating his finger is that the original image clearly shows the positions of the fingers on the hand.
All the program needed to do was add color tone to the image , rather than altering the image with a mutilated finger.

Yes. Those artifacts have to do with how the AI I used does this type of job. There are different approaches that AI uses. The most common is that AI will take the original image and create a new one based upon it built from the bottom up. In this case, there will be artifacts such as you point out regardless of the resolution of the original image.

That said, the goal wasn't to produce a 100% accurate representation of the original. Rather it was to give a better impression of what it could have looked like live. The AI did do a good job of highlighting the three types of silk dyeing that Ade Duval used: solid color, tie dyed, and hand painted designs. So, I think it gives a pretty good job of that.

For those who don't own Duval's "A Rhapsody in Silk" book, here is how he describes what is produced. Note, this is for the last iteration of his act. It is different in a variety of ways from both his original convention act with the 9-foot butterfly silk and his expanded act with the giant silk dress production.

From the Audiences point of view:

"As the music starts, the performer punches thru the paper seal on one end of the tube and produces a gayly colored silk, one yard square, and presents it to his assistant. Another yard square is taken from the tube. Now the performer breaks thru the seal on the other end of the tube and produces in rapid succession five smaller silks, 27 inches square. This is followed by a long, vari-colored streamer, 9 inches wide by 40 feet long. Next five scarves measuring 27 by 54 inches make their appearance. A few more smaller silks are produced, and as the music accelerates, a really big silk, a yard and a half wide and 19 feet long is drawn from the tube.

Very often, the audience would think this to be the finish of the number, and would begin to applaud. But we are scarcely half way thru the routine. Following the production of the large silk comes eighteen smaller silks, produced in time with the music to heighten the effect. Then came silks of all sizes, including some that were a yard and a half square, and finally, silken streamers would stream from the tube, ending, still in time to the music, with one 45 feet long."

Style of silk coloring:

"We used three different types of silk patterns: solid color, tied and dyed, and a hand-painted process which I developed over the years and have never made known to anyone else. (There goes another "I could write a book", this time on the dyeing of silk for magical purposes, and one day maybe I will.) For the average person making use of the material in this book, an excellent range of colors, quality and size of silks can be found in the better magic stores. Such stores can also take orders for specially painted silks if they are required.

In my case, the hand painted process was reserved for those silks that got more display than others, like the one that is a yard and a half wide by 19 feet long. There would be no point in spending time and energy hand painting one of the long streamers, only to have it whipped out of the tube at top speed. For this type of silk, we used a mass production process called "tied and dyed". (Your magic shop has such streamers already made and dyed in gorgeous colors).

The triangular shaped silks used were dyed in solid colors. The 27 inch squares and the silks measuring 27 by 54 inches were dyed in two tone effects. Only the first two one-yard squares produced, the large silk measuring 1 1/2 yards by 19 feet and the three silks measuring 1 1/2 yards square were done in the hand painted style."

I want to hasten to add that I do appreciate the added color to give a better approximation of what Duval's silks may have looked like. I'm just frustrated with the AI program adding things to the image that are not there ("hallucinating" extra fingers) or taking away things that were very clear in the original photograph, such as Ade Duval's facial expression. Removing the warm, smiling expression from Ade Duval's face is probably the worst thing it did here. But the coloring of the silks looks pretty good. (although it would be amazing to turn up any actual color photos of Duval's Rhapsody in Silk act from the 1930's. Kodachrome was commercially available film stock by 1935, so it's possible ... but who knows?)

I think the best chance of finding color video of the routine would be video out of Europe of Marcel et Petite. There was speculation of TV appearances when they came back to the U.S. which I believe never happened. But it seems probable that they had some TV coverage in Europe. This is from the September 1964 Linking Ring, right when color TV had begun its explosion in popularity so an act like this would be irresistible to TV producers:

"Marcel et Petite, known to you as Mr. and Mrs. Adolfo Cerceda, formerly a knife throwing act and experts at paper folding, now do the Duval Silk Act and are currently playing the fashionable resorts in Italy and the South Coast of France. It is a pity Ade is too ill to be interested, but Adolfo does full justice to the act and is a worthy successor. Doubtless he will be seen on tv when the act returns to this country."

Various people have claimed to own the original Duval apparatus, including (and this surprised me!) Alton Sharpe (who wrote Expert Hocus Pocus). I knew Alton quite well when he was living in Beverly Hills and as a frequent visitor to Hollywood Magic. We talked about many old timers including Duval... but he never tipped to the fact that he had Duval's props. Had I only known (if in fact that was true). Alton was a mysterious guy.... even for a magician!

Anyway, Thank you Frank for your fine efforts in sussing all this out, and also to David Todd's contributions!

Fantasio told me he had a set. I know Landis Smith had a set. Ken Klosterman had a set (which I have extensive photos and drawings of) that now resides in the Copperfield collection.
Like many professionals, he had more than one set to be sure.

Like Houdini's Water Torture Cell, the Duval Tubes are like a 'Holy Grail' for the well informed magician... with duplicates and incomplete sets abounding.

Isn't it funny that with the sets which have been brought forward, not a single one included the suitcase table, tube box, loading devices, and musical score?

Yes, Frank... I agree! Those are the elements that would intrigue me the most! Especially the musical score!