Sawing someone in half: The magic trick that never gets old, even at 100

Just over 100 years ago in London, Percy Tibbles cut a woman in half in public for the first time and today magicians agree, the trick survives because the idea is so simple.

The day was 17 January 1921 when Tibbles – stage name “PT Selbit” – walked out at the Finsbury Park Empire with Betty Barker, his assistant, whom he ushered into an upright wooden box.

Selbit tied ropes around her wrists, ankles and neck, and pushed the ropes through holes in the box. Then he called members of the audience to the stage and asked them to pull the ropes tight, so Betty couldn’t move an inch.

He sealed the box and laid it flat with the help of assistants, then got down to business.

First, he pushed thick sheets of glass through slits, until they appeared to poke through her and out the other side. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, he picked up a saw, and cut through the middle of the box, spraying sawdust everywhere.

Selbit’s show was, according to experts, the first time a performer ever sawed someone in half – a trick that has become an icon of magic, only rivalled by pulling a rabbit out of a hat. It caused a sensation. Soon, Selbit was performing the illusion around Britain, using some marketing abracadabra to fuel interest. Before each show, stagehands would pour a bucket of fake blood outside the theatre, as if a terrible accident had occurred.

Selbit knew he’d created a stir but he couldn’t have known he’d created a trick that magicians would spend the next 100 years reinventing.

Dozens of illusionists saw people in half in internet videos, in all sorts of ways. Some have sawed their assistants head to toe, instead of through the waist. Others have chopped two people in half, then swapped the legs.

Yes, it is usually a woman divided in two, but not always. Magicians – male and female – have sawed men in half, too.

Even a baby has been sliced up. In 2017, Justin Flom, a hugely popular magician with 7 million Facebook followers, created an online storm when a video went viral of him performing the trick on his 4-month-old daughter, using two books instead of a saw.

Why has this trick survived, when so many others haven’t? If you ask magicians they eventually land on one answer: “It’s just the simplicity of it.”

Mike Caveney, a magician who’s also writing a history of the trick, adds: “Magicians say a good trick is one that can be described in a few words, and ‘Sawing a lady in half’ is very few words.”

But the secrecy around how the trick is done obviously adds to its appeal, too. As much as everyone thinks they know how it works: “There might be 20 different methods in popular use,” baby slicer Flom says.

Most magicians really don’t want them revealed. Caveney says that would be like, “doing a history of Santa Claus, then writing at the end, ‘He doesn’t exist’.”

open image in gallery

The imitations and innovations in Selbit’s trick began almost as soon as he was offstage. Within weeks, Horace Goldin – a magician in the US – started performing his own take. He claimed to have invented the trick entirely, years earlier, and his 1939 obituary in The New York Times gives him the credit.

Goldin’s version was more like the one we know today, with the assistant’s head, hands and feet peeking out of the box. Once Goldin had finished sawing his assistant in half, he would pull the boxes briefly apart, before miraculously reassembling them. His first public performance used a hotel bellboy, not a woman.

Goldin didn’t just take that trick on tour – he patented it, licensed it to other magicians and sued anyone who performed it without his permission, or who revealed its workings.

But within a few years, the trick had become a cliché and magicians began applying their own spin. They slimmed down the box. They got rid of the box entirely. They used buzz saws and chain saws. Online, you can see utterly confounding versions that sometimes look like genuine murders.

“Sawing a person in half is not one trick,” says Raymond Teller of duo Penn & Teller. “There are lots of different things that you can express with the same fundamentals.”

Penn & Teller’s variations on the trick usually involve telling the audience how it’s done, then undermining the explanation. In one, Georgia Bernasek, one of their assistants, gets into a box, and Penn & Teller perform a classic sawing-in-two.

But then, they explain how it’s done: The table the box sits on is hollow, Teller says, so Ms Bernasek can sink her waist out of the saw’s reach. Just when the audience thinks it’s all been explained and the trick is over, Penn & Teller accidentally slice through her, leaving the crowd guessing once more.

The message is obvious, Teller says: “You think you know how magic tricks are done. Well, maybe you do, and maybe you don’t.”

Of all the performers who’ve done the trick, David Copperfield is seen by many as the master thanks to his 1986 version, known as “Death Saw”, which reimagined the illusion as a Las Vegas spectacle involving a huge, descending rotary blade.

Once the falling buzz saw has cut Copperfield in half, two assistants pull the sections apart and he wiggles his detached feet, before, magically, turning back time and putting himself back together.

It took two years to develop, Copperfield says, involving, “lots of cardboard and foam and tape in hotel rooms”.

Copperfield’s take on the classic stands out, partly because it is the magician himself who gets sawed in half. Because most others involve a man cutting a woman in two, the trick has been regarded by some as a symbol of misogyny.

open image in gallery

Selbit’s first performance took place at a time of immense change for women in Britain. They had won the right to vote in 1918 and even then it was restricted to women over 30. In 1921, activists were still pushing.

Naomi Paxton, an academic who researches the suffragist movement and who is also a magician, says that even though the trick emerged from this climate, she doesn’t believe it was motivated by a hatred of women.

“We don’t know what was in Selbit’s head but I don’t think it was misogyny,” Paxton says. “It’s all about context. If the woman’s not got any agency, is hypnotised or restrained, that becomes problematic.”

She says she has played the role of the assistant who gets sawed in half many times, so knows what she is talking about. “When you’re doing it, you’re not a passive person,” she says. “It’s claustrophobic, and quite noisy, but such fun.”

Really, it doesn’t matter who is being cut up – woman, or man, even animal – the trick can still shock and surprise, just as Selbit’s did. After Flom carved his daughter up and posted it on Facebook, he was deluged with messages threatening to report him to the authorities, he says, and adds: “It seems many people are unclear about the concept of magic tricks.”

Flom says the only time he’d received more complaints was when he revealed the secrets of how his tricks worked. When he posted some of his methods online, other magicians had disowned him, he says.

But for that, he was unrepentant, he says. Knowing how a trick is done doesn’t stop viewers marvelling at the illusion, in fact, he says, it makes a trick more impressive, because it shows much time and effort goes into it.

“What’s so disappointing is the public will just watch a clip of David Copperfield and say, ‘Fake legs!’” Flom says. “They’re missing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars of ingenuity and creativity.”

Flom, unusually, is happy to explain how his trick works. It cost around $15,000 (£11,000) he says, most of which went on a special mirror, and several other items (help from his grandmother was free).

Teller says he has no moral problem with a revelation such as this but he does have an artistic one: it spoils the fun of guessing. All you need to know about sawing someone in half, Teller says, is that no one gets sawed in half.

© The New York Times