They first met in Philadelphia in 1974. Teller was a high school Latin teacher who did magic in his spare time. It had gripped him with the force of an obsession since, as a five year-old laid up at home with a heart ailment, he had sent away “15 cents and three Mars bar wrappers” for a magic kit advertised on television. Penn was a student and a juggler with a fierce distaste for magicians. “Early on, Teller said to me that magic was essentially an intellectual art form which, when you picture the kind of dips---s that do magic, sounds like an insane thing to say,” he says. “Can you do magic without insulting the audience? Can you do magic that is intellectually satisfying? It is those questions, rather than the magic itself, that fascinates me. Those are the question that we have been playing with for 35 years.”