How can you bend spoons

Using both of your hands, grasp the spoon and press the bowl of the spoon, open side up, onto a table. Don't let the top if the handle peek out over your thumbs. This image shows the location of the spoons handle in your hands. We've removed one hand to show you the positioning, which is crucial. This shot shows how the effect looks to spectators, the next image shows what is actually happening.

This image shows the position of the spoon's handle when it appears that you have bent the spoon. The arrow shows the circular path of the handle. Of course, this action is covered by your other hand that is gripping the spoon. This trick will take some practice to be convincing. When you're done, simply pick up the spoon off of the table with both hands and then show that the spoon is unbent.

Many magicians perform mentalism style effects where spoons are apparently bent by using the "power" of the mind. In these tricks, the spoons are actually bent and in many cases, destroyed. Name required. Email required. Click here to cancel reply. Get the best cultural and educational resources on the web curated for you in a daily email.

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They can't imagine another way. That's where the magic happens. I did it once during a Scientific American cruise to Bermuda. A guy was telling me how skeptical he is. But he once saw a spoon bent in this fashion, and since he couldn't think of how it was done normally he decided it was paranormal. As he was describing the effect, I slipped the spoon on the table to below the table and bent it as I described above, and as he finished his story I presented it and said, "Did it look like this?

The great Banachek, for example, is the master at it, and you can watch him at work here. As for spoon bending parties, I've been to some.

No one ever bends a spoon without touching it, and they always have to use force to get it started. It's true, once you've weakened the neck of the spoon through repetitive bending, you can get it to the point where it appears to melt to light touch, but that only happens after proper preparation. It takes some practice to make it look smooth. You can prepare spoons before a party to soften them up, but there are no trick spoons that I know of--except for the ones that Richard Wiseman prepared for a conference in which he had over people bend spoons at the same time , a world record!

Every new technique was accompanied by a flurry of technobabble, and assurances that scientists had looked into them. In the 70s, an SRI electrical engineer and a physicist, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ, decided that their expertise in tunable lasers could be applied to parapsychology. The research eventually fell under the umbrella of the Stargate Project, a name so blatantly sci-fi that when I brought up the project in Spoonbenders , my editor thought I was making it up.

Puthoff and Targ decided to test Uri Geller, at that time at the height of his fame. You can watch several examples on YouTube. When the reporter pointed it out, Geller professed amazement: These kinds of things happened around him all the time. Or, as Gene Ang would have put it, sometimes an object just gets activated by all the energy in the room. When Geller was tested by the Puthoff and Targ, Randi notes, Geller fooled them completely, relying not only on misdirection, but on the assistance of his manager and brother-in-law, the beautifully named Shipi Shtrang, who was particularly helpful when Geller had to draw objects from a photograph that only the researchers and Shtrang could see.

When Geller proposed changes in a test, or declared that some random fluctuation in a measuring device was because Geller had done it, the scientists went along. After all that practice it was pretty hard not to. Gene encouraged us to go home and bend something tougher, like an iron rod. But he also warned us not to use our powers carelessly. A few folks became alarmed. Or perhaps some of them were like me and Liza, playing along. We were all having a good time, and a lot of people got to feel special.

What was the harm?