January 16: Bottle Conjurer Hoax

On this evening in 1749—the London playbills insisted—a conjurer would appear at the Haymarket Theater and insert himself into a quart bottle. When he didn’t appear on the stage, the audience angrily stormed out; some pillaged the theater and started a bonfire in the street. We still don’t know who was responsible for the Bottle Conjurer hoax. It was an apparent joke about the public’s gullibility, or maybe about a magician’s skills at overpromising. A Modest Apology, a parody published after the event, was supposedly written by the missing conjurer. He blamed his lack of success on immigrant labor, particularly the Italian singers, dancers or fiddlers that drew the public’s attention. The famous bottle trick finally made it to London—in a manner of speaking: Simon Drake squeezed into a bottle on The Secret Cabaret TV show (1992). It was corked and Drake was apparently dropped into the Thames, concluding the series.