Horace Goldin (17 December 1873[1] – 21 August 1939) was a stage magician who was noted for his rapid presentation style and who achieved international fame with his versions of the sawing a woman in half illusion.

[2] Goldin was of Polish Jewish[3] descent and was born Hyman Elias Goldstein in Vilnius, which was then part of Russia but is now the capital of Lithuania.

After he received poor reviews from newspapers he tried again with a new act, for which he hired assistants and adopted a rapid presentation style said to have been inspired by seeing German-born magician Imro Fox (1862–1910).

There remains a debate about the origin of the idea, with some sources saying a magician named Torrini may have performed the first version in front of Pope Pius VII in 1809.

[4] There seems to be broad agreement that Selbit was the first to present the illusion on stage and that Goldin achieved a place in history through subsequent technical development and promotion.

Promotional stunts employed for the shows included ambulances outside the theatres and performers dressed as medics to give the impression there was a real risk of serious injury.

In Goldin v. Clarion Photoplays in New York in 1922 he initially lost because the judge said he had not proved he was the original inventor of the sawing illusion and the trick possibly dated back to ancient Egypt.

However Goldin appealed and won with a ruling that stated he had "satisfactorily established that he is the originator of the illusion in question, which has achieved a great success under the title devised by him of Sawing a Woman in Half...and that his creation of the illusion has been so universally recognized that the title thereof is in the public mind associated with his own name" [4][10] Some of Goldin's legal tactics resulted in problems even though they were technically successful.

In the 1930s this brought Goldin into confrontation with the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, the maker of Camel cigarettes, which was running an advertising campaign aimed at debunking the publicity for a competing brand.

He performed for King Edward VII of Britain on four occasions, earning the billing "Royal Illusionist", and also appeared before American presidents Harding and Wilson.

[2] Twenty-one years earlier at that venue, a magician named Chung Ling Soo had been killed while performing the bullet catch illusion.