Important safety tip for aspiring conjurers: magic wands should only be used for making rabbits disappear. The sharp-end buckshot was fatal for Buck. Along with a bullet, which was a blank, the volunteer dropped some nails into the barrel, then fired. Unfortunately, in Buck's case, he picked one such troublemaker as a volunteer to load a bullet into a gun. Arnold Buck (died 1840)Īs long as there have been magicians, there have been skeptical audience members who hope to screw up their tricks. Her husband was eventually driven mad from the shock of the accident. Adding to the tragedy, she was pregnant and lost her unborn child. When the bullet hit Madame DeLinsky in the abdomen, several audience members fainted. But in the fatal performance, in Germany before a royal court, one of the riflemen apparently got nervous being on stage, and reverted to his usual way of loading the gun. In the DeLinsky version of the trick, the soldiers were shills, paid and secretly instructed to bite away the whole bullet and load in a blank. The wife/assistant of a Polish magician had a routine where she faced a firing squad of six soldiers.īack in the early 19th century, rifles were loaded by biting open a cartridge, pouring the gunpowder in the barrel, then jamming the rest of the cartridge down the barrel with a ramrod. With that setup, let's meet six magicians who became unfortunate targets in the bullet catch. In modern versions of the trick (see Penn & Teller or David Blaine), there is often a plate of glass between the gun and the magician, to confirm that live ammunition is being fired. He then presents the exploded shell of the marked bullet to the audience for verification. The magician catches it with his teeth, or in a cup that's been placed inside his mouth. The gun is fired by an assistant or a volunteer, directly at the magician's mouth. A bullet is offered to an audience member to examine, then marked for identification and loaded into a gun.
The presentation of the catch usually goes like this. Since its introduction in the late 1500s, many magicians have perished on stage doing the trick, as detailed in Ben Robinson's 1986 book Twelve Have Died: Bullet Catching-The Story & Secrets. Whether the bullet catch is an illusion or the result of lightning-fast reflexes, it definitely comes with a fatal risk. Is it possible for a human being to catch a speeding bullet in his mouth? For centuries, magicians have been convincing audiences that it is.
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