Did you ever wonder what the most dangerous effect in magic is? There was that guy out in Vegas who got mauled by a tiger, and my friend in school once cut himself on a sponge ball, but when they say "Don't try this at home" are they serious or are magic tricks so safe that no one could ever really get hurt if they just knew the secret.

Hello, and welcome to Wunders. I'm Paul Nielsen from Wunderground Magic, Inc. in beautiful Clawson, Michigan, just outside of Detroit (the testing range for all manner of exotic ammunitions.) I'll be wearing safety glasses and a bulletproof vest as we explore the history of the bullet catch, the most dangerous effect in magic in terms of actual body counts.

As you remember from our last exciting installment of Wunders, Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin performed the bullet catch in Algeria to convince the Marabouts that their weapons would be powerless against the vastly superior magic of the French Emperor. What you don't know, because I conveniently neglected to mention it, is that Robert-Houdin claims that his mentor, Torrini, supposedly killed his own son, Giovanni de Grisy, while performing this effect. I have to add "supposedly" because skeptics claim that there is no record of Giovanni de Grisy or Torrini having actually existed outside of the Memoirs of Robert-Houdin. Some hard core skeptics might even claim there's no record of Robert-Houdin, but I have his Greatest Hits Vol. I.

Robert-Houdin may have believed he was risking his life to support France, but even if the story is true, Torrini was not the first to perform the bullet catch. The basic effect probably goes back thousands of years, before there even were bullets, to when Steve Martin first began his career with an arrow through his head. (For those of you too young to remember Steve Martin is that guy who used to stick arrows through his head.)

The effect of the bullet catch is that someone (usually a spectator) fires a bullet out of a gun and the performer catches it, either in their hand or teeth or on a plate or in a critical body organ, such as the heart. In some versions of the effect, the bullet is marked to confirm that the bullet caught is the same as the one loaded into the gun. In other versions, the performer's heart is surgically removed to keep it from being harmed.

There are a number of explanations for this effect floating around on the Internet that involve wax bullets or reduced charges to accomplish this effect. All of these explanations have the unfortunate side effect of getting you killed should you actually be naive enough to try them, but then if you get your magic secrets off the Internet I have no sympathy for you so go for it.

In the book Wise Guy, Harry Anderson (Judge Harry Stone in Night Court and Dave Barry in Dave's World) talks about planning to perform the bullet catch using a "harmless" wax bullet, and a routine he had gotten off a cereal box (which for those of you too young to remember was the precursor of the Internet.) Fortunately, he decided to test the idea first by firing it toward a fence post and was stunned to see a massive hole, about the size of a head, blasted right through the fence. (Little did he know that he'd merely uncovered a severe termite infestation, and the slightest breeze was all it took to make the whole thing come down, leaving you as the sole beneficiary of this carefully guarded, perfectly safe method of performing this amazing effect that you can only find here on the Internet.)

Ben Robinson wrote the definitive book on the subject, Twelve Have Died in 1986. Unfortunately, two years later Fernando Tejada tried to exploit the sensationalism of the effect, and ended up throwing off the body count by getting himself killed performing the bullet catch in Columbia. The book is now out of print and highly sought after by magic collectors, so if you have one on your shelves, send it to me here at Wunderground Magic in Clawson, Michigan, just outside of Detroit, and I'll send you a brand new copy of the Clown Magic Coloring Book in return. (Ed. Note - That Clown Magic Coloring Book is awesome! - J.S.)

In any case there are now seventeen names that have been associated with death by Bullet Catch as follows:

1. Coullew of Lorraine (also called Coulen) was one of the earliest documented performers of the bullet catch. He would demonstrate loading bullets into a pistol, having an assistant fire it, and then catching the bullets with his bare hands. Unfortunately his assistant beat him to death with the pistol after hearing the same chicken joke repeated over a thousand times. I know this hardly qualifies as a death by the "bullet catch" any more than it counts as a death by the "chicken joke," but since it was with the same pistol he used to perform, Robinson counted it, and who am I to argue? (R.I.P. 1631)

2. Kia Khan Khruse was an Indian magician who was shot by a spectator. The reports of his death onstage may have been false, so Robinson didn't count this as one of the "twelve," but when has authenticity ever stood in the way of a good story? (R.I.P. 1818)

3. Madame DeLinsky was the wife of a Polish magician. The DeLinskys' routine had her face a firing squad of six gunmen. At the time rifles were loaded by biting off the end of a charge to open it, but for this performance the gunmen were told to secretly bite away the whole bullet. Unfortunately for Madame DeLinsky, at least one of the gunmen either misunderstood or just reverted to his usual loading routine with fatal results. The moral here is to spend a little extra and hire professionals. (R.I.P. 1820)

4. We already discussed Giovanni de Grisy, who was the son of Torrini, who was supposedly Robert-Houdin's mentor. According to the Robert-Houdin, Torrini was performing the bullet catch with his son and accidentally fired the gun that killed him. Skeptics claim there is no record of Giovanni de Grisy or Torrini, but if you'd just killed your kid while playing catch, wouldn't you change your name, go into hiding, and try to eek out a living by teaching your trade to wealthy watchmakers who will probably never do anything with it anyway? (R.I.P. 1826)

5. Arnold Buck died when a volunteer secretly added nails to the gun barrel before firing at him. Apparently back then spectators either weren't very clear on the concept of a trick or Buck wasn't very clear on the importance of not claiming supernatural powers. (R.I.P. 1840)

6. Professor Adam S. Epstein used to use his magician's wand to ram home the balls in the rifle barrel, but when it broke inside the gun he was killed by wand shards. (R.I.P. 1869)

7. Raoul Curran was killed by a member of the audience who jumped up out of his seat and shot him without warning. I have the same problem with audience members who try to perform card tricks without warning, but after writing this article I've decided to resolve it by shooting them. (R.I.P. 1880)

8. De Line Jr. was killed when his magician father, De Line, accidentally shot him onstage. (R.I.P. 1890)

9. Michael Hatal, "The Hungarian Hermann," was shot onstage at an Odd Fellows benefit in Manhattan. Some say he was shot by an audience member, but he lived just barely long enough to absolve his shooter of any responsibility. Apparently he used the well known "wax bullet" method that he'd read about on the Internet, with the shocking result of actually killing himself. (R.I.P. 1899)

10. Edvin Lindberg was killed onstage. (R.I.P. 1905)

11. Professor Otto "Bosco" Blumenfeld had a bullet marked and dropped into a pistol, then handed the pistol to a spectator and told them to fire at him. No one knows what was actually supposed to happen, but the result was one less Blumenfeld. (R.I.P. 1906)

12. Chung Ling Soo was a fascinating man whose story I'll have to share with you sometime soon. In the meantime pick up a copy of The Glorious Deception by Jim Steinmeyer. Better yet, put down this article, head out to your local bookstore, and buy every book you can by Steinmeyer. And if you are Jim Steinmeyer, and you're reading this article, and you notice a surge in sales, send me a check for whatever you think is right. (R.I.P. 1918 - Chung Ling Soo, not Jim Steinmeyer)

13. H. T. Sartell died on a stage in Lynn, Massachusetts. He apparently failed to switch the real bullets for some wax ones he'd purchased off the Internet that would have ended up killing him anyway. (R.I.P. 1922)

14. "The Black Wizard of the West" was killed in Deadwood, South Dakota when his wife purposely fired live bullets at him. The moral here is to hire an assistant you can trust. (R.I.P. 1922)

15. Ralf Bialla performed the bullet catch wearing bulletproof glasses, strong gloves that he used to cover his face, and a steel mouth guard. The bullet had to travel through three panes of glass before Bialla caught it with his teeth. He was seriously wounded nine times, but survived only to die from falling off a cliff because of dizziness caused by the injuries of repeatedly performing the stunt. (R.I.P. 1975)

16. Doc Conrad was killed while practicing the Russian Roulette trick, a version of the bullet catch that involves loading a single bullet into a revolver, spinning it, then firing the gun at your head, and hoping the hammer falls on an empty cartridge. This is why a great performer once told me "I never practice my most dangerous tricks, because if they go wrong, who will know?" (R.I.P. 1977)

17. Fernando Tejada was killed onstage during a performance in Columbia (R.I.P. 1988)

Shortly following the death of Chung Ling Soo, there was a span of almost fifty years when magicians were afraid to touch the bullet catch. Harry Houdini, who defied death by being buried alive, suffocated, and tortured underwater, was rumored to be considering adding the Bullet Catch to his act when he received the following urgent letter from Harry Kellar

As a result Houdini went on to have a long and successful career, slaying his audiences in show after show, until he was done in by being impersonated in a movie by Tony Curtis.

That's not to say it wasn't performed during these fifty years, mentalist Theo Annemann performed it throughout the 1930's. Maurice Rooklyn survived being hit in the shoulder in the 1950's. After that he started wearing a chain mail vest for safety, but when a bullet grazed his scalp, he decided to drop it altogether.

On the other hand, there are a number of notable magicians who have been associated with the effect and either lived or not died as a direct result of it. Both Carl Skenes and Dorothy Dietrich were mentioned in Ripley's Believe It or Not for their performances of the bullet catch. Carl Skenes was the only person ever to be verified by slow motion photography to actually catch a bullet, until David Blaine repeated the effect for his "Dive of Death" special.

Many of today's top magical performers have performed the effect including Penn and Teller, Criss Angel, David Blaine, Derren Brown, even Val Valentino as the "Masked Magician."

In 2006 the television show MythBusters devoted an episode to investigate the bullet catch and whether a jaw really could withstand the impact of a bullet. There were a few flaws with their approach: for example, they used an animal jaw rather than a human, there was no soft tissue to help absorb the impact, the jaw was clamped which would not allow it to move any distance for the bullet to slow down, and the jaw performing the effect wasn't from a real magician. As might be expected the pig died. Then again, the pig was already dead when they performed their tests, so I'm not sure what it proved.

Remember kids, next time you're looking for something really cool to add to your act, get an old rusty gun that looks like it might still work, push a broken wand down the barrel to make sure there are no obstructions, melt down some wax bullets, and remember, you read it here on the Internet.