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A cousin of mine showed me a nice lil' gimmick he recently acquired off Ebay - unfortunately it was 2nd hand and only came with basic instructions - not even the name of the gimmick was included

The Magician displays a cylindrical brass tube aprrox 4 inches in length with a screw-on cap which is handed out for examination. Next a black bag is produced and the magician empties the contents onto the table - 5 brass rods all of similar length but all having different markings to distinguish them apart:

rod 1 has 1 red band around it
rod 2 has 2 black bands around it
rod 3 has 3 blue bands around it
rod 4 has 4 green bands around it
rod 5 has 5 yellow bands around it

(The colours are prolly wrong - it's just an example)

The magician turns his back (no peeking whatsover) and the spectator freely places 1 rod into the tube, screws the lid on and hides the remaining 4 rods out of site.

Now I don't want to say too much about the next bit in case I give clues to the workings of the trick, but when the Magician turns back around he can accurately predict which rod is in the tube (he can even tell if someone is messing around and not placed a rod in at all!)
Everything is completely examinable from start to finish and no sleights of hand are necessary (just my kinda trick lol!)

My question to all you helpful ppl out there (grovel grovel) is - what's this trick/gimmick called and where the devil do I get hold of it plzz ?
I've been scouring various magic shops etc on the internet but to no avail.
Help plzz - I've even tried offering my cousin more money than what he paid for it - but he won't part with it

Not Cipher Sticks is it ?

Kati

katrielalex wrote:Not Cipher Sticks is it ?

Kati

cooooooool

that's the 1

thanks alot

Looks intereesting, is that an trick any good?
Does anyone else have it?

Penguin also has the Psychic Color Sticks - which Rune reviewed and recommended a while back. I'm wondering if the method is the same. If so, I would think the psychic sticks would be the better value, given the difference in price.

Psychic Colour Sticks can be obtained from Jeremy & Cheryl's Practical Magic, in Ellesmere, Shrops., at £10. The original, I believe was called Demon Pencil Mystery and put out by Davenports before World War 2. This had a black plastic/celluloid tube and 4 small coloured rods. It was my first BIG trick in 1943 & I still have it. I closed my first public peformance magic act in Junior school with it. The headmaster said 'I'd never make a magician!' Mind you my grammar school head also said ' I'd never make a drama teacher but should go into the theatre' Both were drastically wrong. Davenports probably imported the trick from somewhere like Germany. They still have the pre war models at £7. Paul Clive who had a stand on the Central Pier Blackpool, and magic shops on Central Drive and the North Pier( all my childhood holidays were spent in this shop) and one in London also put out the coloured pencil trick. I finally met Paul Clive in 1980. His brother was Douglas Craggs (Magic C.) who wrote The ABC of Ventriloquism in 1944, rebublished and re edited in 1966( Faber pub.). My father bought me the original(Large very thin war time paper from Davenports.) and a book finder found me the Faber hard back re issue two months ago.This is still the DEFINITIVE book on learning ventriloquism with the only really true explanation & diagrams of forming the labials.
Allen Tipton