Bolt of Lightning

It’s hard to imagine what it was like, in 1964, when purchasers of a certain new trick looked inside a matchbox and saw a simple nut and bolt, the former securely screwed onto the latter, then poured the nut and bolt into a glass and discovered that they had separated.

Someone had the clever idea of selling Bolt of Lightning (as Eddie Fechter so dubbed it) set up in such a way as to potentially fool the purchaser one time before tipping them onto the secret, a principle new to magic concocted by Norway’s Finn Johan Hauger, better known as Finn Jon. Mr. Jon was in his 20s and already an award-winning magician when he released this exceptional effect, and he continued to invent magical solutions for decades to come.