Paul Philidor
[5] From Catherine the Great and her court members he reportedly received 1.000 rubels, a gold tobacco box and a brilliant ring as appreciation for his performance of physics experiments in January 1787.
[10] Although perceived as a charlatan and a very mediocre magician by enlightened Berliners in 1789, in the eyes of others he gained the reputation of an extraordinary man with special powers.
He reportedly left his widow and three children unprovided for, so an appeal was made in the local newspaper to collect funds that would enable the family to move to Hull and get Mrs. Philipsthal established at a school over there.
[19][20] A benefit exhibition for the widow and children of Philipsthal's "Royal Mechanical & Optical Museum" was shown in the Wakefield Theatre.
[17] Much of Phylidor's early shows and stage persona was based on the works of famous magician Joseph Pinetti.
[22] In the early 1770s Johann Georg Schröpfer had performed Masonic necromantic rituals and experiments, raising ghosts that were probably created with many hidden techniques including magic lantern projections on smoke.
In the beginning Phylidor's shows were presented as "black art" or "natural magic" and included conjuring tricks and automata.
"Moved by the lively appreciation and polite manner of several distinguished gentlemen who engaged him" he would be back on 28 and 30 March for other "amusing experiments", including a trick which involved shooting away a ring that would be returned by Phyllidoor's dove and made to be found inside an orange.
The flyer promised "sehenswürdige Magische oder sogenannte Schwarzkunst nachahmende Kunststücke" (great magic tricks that imitate the so-called "black arts").
Phylidor was dressed in black and led the visitors into a small darkened room with dazzling white walls, in which a rectangular area was fenced off with a construction of slats with a metal hand on each end.
It included some incantations in a dull but commanding voice with the words "Helion, Melion, Tetragrammaton" (as reportedly used by Cagliostro), some French sentences like "Parois.
), a streak of light appeared on the wall that gradually transformed into the (almost) life-size figure of Voltaire, dressed in white and hovering a foot above the floor.
When some visitors complained that the facial features weren't very clear, Phylidor replied that he was surprised that they expected to see more details in a ghost.
Von der Eck and other audience members then demanded to see Phylidor raise the devil, if he would still insist that he really had supernatural powers.
Phylidor proposed to make King Heinrich IV appear, but couldn't calm his audience and accepted his defeat.
[1][3] The morning after Phylidor's failed séance, he was told by the police not to perform his magic again, because it went "against religion and good manners", and he was ordered to leave Berlin.
After Phylidor had left, Von der Eck examined the room and found some evidence that the apparitions were created by rear projection on a transparent screen in the wall.
He also found traces of a metal wire that had been attached to the walls, which he thought was intended to ignite some combustible materials to create the illusion of the complete room being on fire.
[22] Spectators would first gather and wait silently in an anteroom, until the physicist ordered them to enter a black-curtained room decorated with skeletons, two candles and a white circle on the ground.
After a very fierce storm a summoned, lifelike ghost of a person known to the audience would eventually rise from the floor to slowly sink back into the abyss in the ground.
Ghosts would appear in various ways; one would suddenly be there, another would slowly shape itself from a grey cloud and yet another would approach from far away and come so close that one could touch it.
[31] However, with tensions running high and Philidor's shows increasingly making political references it was not long until he found himself in trouble with the authorities.
Philidor made references to well-known revolutionaries of the day, making Maximilien Robespierre, Georges Danton, and Jean-Paul Marat appear as if they were the devil.
[32] According to the memoirs of Madame Tussaud, a "Monsieur Phillipstal" was arrested after the audience of a phantasmagoria show protested at what they interpreted as a depiction of the rise of Louis XVI to heaven, caused by a mistake by an assistant who was removing the slide during projection.
[34][35] In Rotterdam during the summer of 1799 Phylidor advertised his cabinet to have considerably increased since the year before and especially mentions his peacock automaton, which ate and drank as if it were real.
Between May 1811 and April 1813 Philipsthal was joined by a mister Maillardet to exhibit the Royal Mechanical and Optical Museum in theatres in England.
