Vanishing the Statue of Liberty

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Making the Statue of Liberty seem to disappear on live television in 1983 is one of David Copperfield's most memorable tricks. The illusion was a creation of Jim Steinmeyer [1] and Don Wayne, and it is still unpublished. The book Bigger Secrets tells what could have happened.

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[edit] Suggested Possible Method

In the book Bigger Secrets, William Poundstone published his speculative guesses and put forward a fairly plausible sounding theory for how Steinmeyer's illusion may have been accomplished. Poundstone suggests that the entire stage and seating area for the audience was atop a rotating platform. Once the curtains were closed, blocking the view, the platform was rotated—slowly enough to be imperceptible. When the curtains opened again, the audience was facing out to sea rather than toward the statue. Poundstone also speculates that, once the stage rotated, the statue itself was perhaps mostly concealed behind a brightly-lit curtain tower. To further misdirect attention, there were two rings of lights: one, initially lit, around the statue, and another (dark and invisible at first) in the area the audience would end up facing. When the trick "happened", the statue's lights were doused and the others turned on. The radar blip highlighted in the television presentation was possibly simply an animation. As for the three Kodak flash cameras taking pictures of the statue at the moment that it "vanished," Poundstone suggests that the cameras' tiny flashbulbs would probably not have been powerful enough to illuminate the statue on their own once the main lights had been switched off.

Some claim that this explanation is unsatisfactory, maintaining that one end of the statue's pedestal base was visible to the live audience at all times. Furthermore, the size of the suggested platform would have to be very significant to support the curtain towers and guidewires as well as be moved in some silent fashion to not arouse suspicion in the live audience. However in viewing the video recording a slight wobbling of the camera can be seen, which might lend a degree of support this theory. Several witnesses, not part of the illusion audience, reported that at one point during the filming of the illusion the lights on the Statue of Liberty were switched off. Whether this has anything to do with the method is a moot point.[citation needed]

Others 'in the trade' claimed at the time that the statue itself was a smaller scale model on a stage somewhere other than in New York City, and that the "live" audience were paid actors. Possible factors which might lend some support to this claim is that the crown of the statue right before it disappears shows bright white lights compared to the softer blue that appears in the real statue, and the number of visible groups of lights increases from ten to eleven. However, as is well-known, the lighting arrangements for the statue have not remained exactly the same between 1983 and the present day, and thus at the time, this lighting system was in use at the time.

One of the audience members in the interview jokingly says that she "never saw the Statue of Liberty disappear like this one did". This statement may perhaps be taken by the uninformed viewer of only the shorter, edited footage to be implying that this was not the real Statue, however the original, longer footage from the TV special of 1983 conclusively shows it was intended as a tongue-in-cheek joke. The statement was followed by laughter from the interviewer, the audience and the woman herself. The woman was indicating the extraordinariness of the disappearance of such a large object by humourously suggesting that it is a feat that she has seen performed several times before.

[edit] References

Poundstone, William. (1986). Bigger Secrets. Houghton Mifflin. 

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