P. T. Selbit (1881–1938) was an English magician, inventor and writer who is credited with being the first person to perform the illusion of sawing a woman in half.

The spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle who attended the séance was unaware of the trickery and declared the clairvoyance manifestations to be genuine.

Selbit is generally recognised as the first magician to perform such a trick on a public stage, which he did at the Finsbury Park Empire theatre in London on 17 January 1921.

The impression given to the audience was that, because of the restraints and limited room in the box, the assistant's waist must have been in the path of the saw and she would surely have been cut through.

The sawing illusion was pivotal in creating the cliché of the pretty female assistant subjected to torture and mutilation by magicians.

Within months, American magician Horace Goldin presented a version in which the assistant's head, hands and feet were seen in full view throughout the trick.

When Selbit arrived in America to tour with his sawing illusion he found that Goldin had registered many possible titles for the act with the Vaudeville Managers' Protective Agency.

However Selbit retains his place in history as the first to present a sawing trick, and thus as a figure who shaped popular perceptions of stage illusions for decades.

Describing the origins of the trick, Daniels performs the sawing a woman in half illusion in its original form, in the style of Selbit, also including Selbit's development of using panes of glass, giving the effect that the woman also has her head and legs cut off and her body cut in half vertically.

Following his court battles in America, which effectively prevented him achieving the same level of success there as he had in Britain, Selbit returned home in 1922.

He is credited with devising Girl/Man without a Middle (1924), Through the Eye of a Needle (1924), The Million Dollar Mystery, Stretching a Girl, and Avoiding the Crush, Selbit's Blocks and possibly also the Siberian Chain Escape.

[2][3] Although some effects were highly ingenious and several were sufficiently successful that they continued to be performed by subsequent generations of magicians, none achieved the fame of sawing.

Morritt had been arrested and charged with "obtaining money under false pretences" as the result of a misunderstanding over the way he was scraping a living from an act titled "Man in a Trance".