Electronics for Magicians

By Jon Thompson

Electronics is a world seldom visited by most magicians or mentalists, and yet top-flight performers regularly use electronics in their acts to create miracles that fool not just audiences but also others in the business. In this first volume of "Electronics for Magicians" I introduce a cast of electronic components and show that they're simple to understand. I then show you how to combine them into useful modules, and finally I present several full projects. Fascinating but above all practical, "Electronics for Magicians" will spark your magical creativity in ways and directions you never thought possible - while leaving all the dull theory behind. "I love it and you can quote me on that" - Paul Brook

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447618737

Book preview

ELECTRONICS

FOR

MAGICIANS

First Edition

Published and printed by Lulu.com

July 2009

This ebook and its contents: Copyright 2009 by Jon Thompson.

All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever

without the written permission of the author. If you didn’t pay me for this copy of my work

and I did not personally give it to you, then you have stolen it from me. You are a

loathsome parasite on creativity. I wish you nothing less than a life filled with pain, failure

and frustration, ending with the lingering, agonising death your attitude deserves.

eISBN: 978-1-44761-873-7

I love it and you can quote me on that.

– Paul Brook

Boy oh boy...be afraid, be very afraid...

– Iain Dunford

Read the last chapter first. This is going somewhere you want to be, somewhere astonishing.

– Thomas Korelin

We are on the brink of a new era. If only...

Trevor Chaplin,

'The Beiderbecke Affair'

Also by Jon Thompson

Naked Mentalism

Naked Mentalism II

The Fully Scripted Naked Book Test

The Stripper Deck

Stripped and Stacked

Just Routine

All available from stores.lulu.com/booksbytomo

1. Introduction

Welcome to this first volume of Electronics for Magicians. I’ve deliberately made this an ebook for your inner engineer. In writing it, my goal is overwhelmingly to give you a practical introduction to the possibilities of even the simplest of circuits, not a theory lecture on Ohm’s Law.

When I first mooted the idea of writing this ebook, one or two individuals said that electronic devices are too complex and will fail when you need them most. Like all the best magic and mentalism, the modules and projects in this ebook are all simple in their design and construction. They’re cheap to build, and it’s you who will wield the soldering iron. It’s you who will know just how sturdy you have made your devices. My great hope is that the ideas they embody will spark your imagination to explore further. But regardless of whether the electronics you use in magic and mentalism is scratch built by you or commercially produced, always abide by these simple but golden rules:

Treat your equipment gently and pack it securely

Check your equipment before you leave for a gig

Check your equipment just before you perform

Always use freshly charged batteries for each performance

Keep spare, freshly-charged batteries handy

With all this in mind, I sincerely hope this first volume of Electronics for Magicians sparks your imagination and enthusiasm for exploring a world all-too infrequently touched on by magic and mentalism.

Jon Thompson

Darkest Cheshire

July 2009

2. Electricity and Electronic Components

Electricity is, it must be said, weird stuff. It lurks in batteries and mains outlets, waiting to be put to use. It’s a form of energy, which different electronic components control or turn into other forms of energy, such as light, sound, or movement¹.

If the closest you’ve ever been to electricity is a static shock when you take off a woollen sweater, it’s a good idea to begin by imagining electricity in a wire as a flow of stuff². If you connect up a torch bulb across the terminals of a battery, electricity flows from the positive terminal to the negative one, through the bulb as it goes, heating its element and making it glow. In this way, a bulb converts some of the electricity flowing through it into heat and light energy. Not all the electricity therefore makes it back to the battery, which is why they eventually run down. There are plenty of different kinds of electronic component at your disposal, and all use electricity in one way or another. They’re all very simple, reliable, and as long as you don’t bash them about or expose them to extreme heat or cold, they won’t unexpectedly stop working.

What the following components all have in common is their size. Both Corinda and Annemann wrote small sections about the use of electronics in their seminal works on mentalism, but since then component sizes have shrunk and technology has advanced to the point where components that would have seemed miraculous to both men are now manufactured in the hundreds of millions every year.

It always frustrates me when I find really interesting and useful circuits in books or on web sites that turn out to require either obscure or obsolete components. So, throughout this ebook I deliberately only use components that are industry standard. This also makes them very cheap indeed, especially given the technology some of them contain.

Before we dive in, I’d just like to say that though there’s a lot in this chapter, we won’t be using all the components described. I’m introducing them and what they do so that if you think of something you’d like to build, you can use this chapter as a starting point to get some ideas about what might need.

2.2 Components

Every country has at