To peer into the future of magic, it helps to start by looking at its past. If I were to perform for you the first known card trick to have been written down, it would be very likely to fool you just as it fooled audiences in Italy in 1478. The techniques behind it are still used today. Magicians have a long and secret history of preserving our best methods. But great magic requires more than merely mastering the mechanics. It requires mastering the audience.

Take Harry Houdini. A century ago onlookers were gripped by the sight of a man in a straitjacket dangling from a skyscraper. Houdini’s escape act was brand new and thrilling, allowing his name to become synonymous with achieving the impossible. It was an innovative performance, but not the product of new technology. Instead, Houdini engaged his audience emotionally, by playing to their hopes and fears. That is why it worked so well.

Magic is a form of applied psychology. The psychological basis of performance magic has been used much as it is today for thousands of years.

Several years ago, in preparation for a television special, I travelled to the deepest part of the Venezuelan rain forest and visited the Yanomami tribe. These families lived more or less as they had 5,000 or 10,000 years ago. Nothing had substantially changed for them. I was amazed to witness their lead shaman performing what I could easily recognise as sleight-of-hand magic—but he was using it to make his audience believe that seemingly impossible difficulties could be overcome.

Magicians have also long exploited science to create entertaining spectacles, sometimes using technology well before the general public would become aware of it. One 17th-century German priest is thought to have been the first to publish the notion of the magic lantern. This new device could create spectres which looked like pure magic to the audience. It was used as a secret device for centuries before descending down to the everyday world and being renamed the slide projector.

Another innovator was Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin (from whom Houdini would take his name). In 1856 he used the scarcely known phenomenon of electromagnetism to help stop a rebellion against colonial France in Algeria. He outdid local religious leaders by showing that, seemingly through will-power, he could make even the strongest man unable to lift a small iron box that a small child could pick up.

Today, of course, it is not so easy to have such a technological advantage over the audience. In the information age we have magicians concerned that YouTube exposures will kill their craft. It is true that most secrets can be Googled and discovered in moments with an iPhone. Just Google “How do you cut a woman in two?” and you come up with myriad links and even a Wikipedia article on the subject.

But will these illusion-destroying spoilers really matter? The challenge for magicians is to keep reinventing our art. That is actually what makes the future exciting.

This is not the first time that magicians have come under pressure. In 1872 an Englishman named Angelo Lewis, posing under the pseudonym “Professor Hoffmann”, began revealing secrets of magic for the public in a boys’ magazine and then a book, “Modern Magic”. Magicians feared for their future, as audience members would learn the secrets behind their tricks.

Not only did the book fail to kill magic, it became one of its most important boosters, by inspiring children to take an interest­­—and encouraging some to become magicians themselves. Magic went on to enjoy a golden period, becoming more popular than ever.

All in the mind

The secret is that magicians influence what you think by using your own preconceived ideas of the world around you to amaze you

One of the wonderful things about the art of magic is that it doesn’t really matter where the trap door is. This is not the secret. The secret is that magicians influence what you think by using your own preconceived ideas of the world around you to amaze you. We realise that you will think your own experience while watching magic is unique to you, but we know that, in general, everyone thinks in more or less the same way. Even as it gets harder to have a technological edge, applying this psychological edge offers us nearly limitless possibilities.

Much of the secret innovation behind magic will not appear on YouTube. It comes from endless hours of trial and error in an effort to understand our audience.

Details will change and methods will improve, but we know that the card tricks that would have amazed Leonardo da Vinci will still amaze you. In this respect the art of magic may carry a wider lesson for our technology-obsessed age. As in many professions in 2015 and beyond, it is the primitive skill of understanding people, perceptions and relationships that will increasingly matter.

