Indian Rope Trick - Skepticism

Skepticism

There had long been scepticism regarding the trick. Once The Magic Circle, convinced the trick did not exist, offered a hundred guineas to anyone who could perform it. A man named Karachi, also spelled Kirachi (real name Arthur Claud Darby), a British performer based in Plymouth, endeavoured to perform the trick with his son, Kyder, on 7 January 1935 on a field in Wheathampstead, north of Hatfield in Hertfordshire, after being granted four days to prepare the site. The presentation was filmed by Gaumont British Films. His son could climb the rope but did not disappear, and Karachi was not paid.

In 1935, Karachi sent a challenge to the sceptics, for 200 guineas to be deposited with a neutral party who would decide if the rope trick was performed satisfactorily. His terms were that the rope shall rise up through his hands while in a sitting posture, to a height of ten feet, his son Kyder would then climb the rope and remain at the top for a minimum of 30 seconds and be photographed. The rope shall be an ordinary rope supplied by a well known manufacturer and shall be examined. The place could be any open area chosen by the neutral party and agreed to by the conjurers and the spectators could be anywhere in front of the carpet Karachi would be seated on. However the conjurers refused to accept Karachi's challenge.

In 1996, Nature published "Unraveling the Indian rope trick", by Richard Wiseman and Peter Lamont.

Wiseman found at least 50 eyewitness accounts of the trick performed during late late 19th/early 20th centuries, and variations included:

• The magician's assistant climbs the rope and the magic ends.
• The assistant climbs the rope, vanishes, and then again appears.
• The assistant vanishes, and appears from some other place.
• The assistant vanishes, and reappears from a place which had remained in full view of the audience.
• The boy vanishes, and does not return.

Accounts collected by Wiseman did not have any single account describing severing of the limbs of the magician's assistant. Perhaps more important, he found the more spectacular accounts were only given when the incident lay decades in the past. It is conceivable that in the witnesses' memory the rope trick merged with the basket trick.

Citing their work, historian Mike Dash wrote in 2000:

Ranking their cases in order of impressiveness, Wiseman and Lamont discovered that the average lapse of time between the event and witness's report of the event was a mere four years in the least notable examples, but a remarkable forty-one years in the case of the most complex and striking accounts. This suggests that the witnesses embroidered their stories over the years, perhaps in telling and retelling their experiences. After several decades, what might have originally been a simple trick had become a highly elaborate performance in their minds ... How, though, did these witnesses come to elaborate their tales in such a consistent way? One answer would be that they already knew, or subsequently discovered, how the full-blown Indian rope trick was supposed to look, and drew on this knowledge when embroidering their accounts. (Dash, 321)