Need your help here guys. About 2 years ago I bought a book called Dunninger's Encylopedia of Magic.

In this book Dunninger mentions a certain professor Hargrave numerous times in relation to different illusions explained in the book. He bills him as the inventor of numerous wonderful things and even some modern used principles like the Stripper Deck, Coin Catching Wand, and he bills him as a top magican of his era.

In his book he is mentioned in narrative texts— example: "It was mid-summer's eve when I went to Long Island to visit my old trusted friend Prof Hargrave. As soon as I rang the doorbell his usual butler came and showed me in, where in the study I found the professor himself sitting in a chair. He said to me how are you old timer and next thing I know was that he picked a foulard and after showing it empty he produced from under it a bowl of fire with the flames reaching 4 ft. high. [etc.]" This is usually followed by the explanation of the trick and diagrams of the gimmicks involved.

Now my question is this:
Who is this Professor Hargrave?
1) A fictitous character invented by Dunninger?
2) A real live person who lived in our world but left no traces of himself apart from his ingenius principles and tricks?

What I know is only his name and that he lived on Long Island. On the Internet I could not find anything about him, so if you have any information regarding this person, publications, living relatives, etc. please feel free to enlighten my mind.

In paragraph three of the introduction to this book, Joe Dunninger states "...much of the material in this book has been originated by me..."

I've spoken with a few people about "Prof. Hargrave" and most think that he's a fictitous character invented by JD to give a kind of scientific flavour to the material in the encyclopedia, much of which originally appeared in three earlier books entitled "Dunningers Popular Magic".

Regards

Riley

Thanks a lot for your help because this thing was really baking my noodle...