When I started going deep into the history of magic — which happened somewhere in the middle of that first year, when the technical fascination spilled into wanting to know where all of this came from — I did what most people do: I followed the obvious names.
Robert-Houdin. Houdini. Thurston. Kellar. The story that gets told, the one in the books that are easy to find, follows an almost entirely male lineage. Master to student, generation to generation, a clear transmission of the art form through identifiable men.
And then I found Adelaide Herrmann.
I found her almost by accident — she appeared in a footnote, then a paragraph, then I started looking specifically for her and found that the actual record of what she did was extraordinary, and the primary narrative had simply left her out.
Who She Was
Adelaide Herrmann was born in London in 1853. She married Alexander Herrmann — “Herrmann the Great,” one of the most celebrated stage magicians of the Victorian era — and began performing with him. Not as an assistant in the modern understanding of the term. As a full performing partner, with her own specialties, her own stage presence, her own place in the act.
Alexander Herrmann died suddenly in 1896, of a heart attack, at the height of his fame. His touring show — with its large cast, its elaborate staging, its expensive contracts — was left without its headliner.
Adelaide took over.
Not as a stopgap. As the headliner. She reformed the company, kept the show touring, and performed for the next twenty years as the principal attraction. She developed her own material, her own persona. She became known for illusions and stagecraft on a scale that matched anything her late husband had done.
And she performed the bullet catch.
The Bullet Catch Specifically
The bullet catch is one of the most dangerous acts in the history of magic. Performers have died attempting it. The effect — catching a fired bullet between the teeth, or on a plate, or in some other manner — is not merely technically demanding but genuinely dangerous in ways that most stage magic is not.
Adelaide Herrmann’s version involved catching six bullets on a plate, fired by six audience members simultaneously. This was not a gentle version of a dramatic act. It was a performance of sustained courage in front of a live audience, night after night, for years.
To perform that act as a woman in the 1890s and early 1900s, in a culture that largely believed women were unsuited for dangerous public performance, and to draw audiences who came specifically to see her — that’s not a footnote in magic history. That’s a central part of the story.
What Copperfield’s History Revealed
Working through David Copperfield’s History of Magic — which is built around the actual artifacts in Copperfield’s private museum, one of the most significant collections of magic history in the world — I found Adelaide Herrmann given serious attention. Items from her career, from her decades as a headliner, exist in the historical record.
The artifacts are there. The posters, the programs, the documented performances. The physical evidence of a major career.
What struck me was that the physical evidence existed, the documented career existed, but the narrative that most people absorb about magic history — the received story, the names everyone recognizes — had absorbed almost none of it.
This isn’t because Adelaide Herrmann was obscure. She was internationally known. She performed in major venues, drew major audiences, and had a career that by any reasonable measure was among the most significant of her era.
The obscurity was imposed afterward, in the accumulation of histories that chose what to emphasize and what to treat as secondary.
The Pattern
What I found as I looked more carefully: Adelaide Herrmann was not an exception. She was an example of a pattern.
Women performed magic throughout the history of the art form. They performed at court, on stage, in salons. They trained apprentices. They created original material. They performed dangerous acts and technically demanding illusions. The performing history is full of them, once you look for them.
But the primary histories — the books that became canonical, the names that became standard references — were written mostly by men, about men, in an era when the public record of women’s professional lives was systematically less detailed than the record of men’s.
The result: the women were there, performing, succeeding, creating. The documentation of that work is thinner, harder to find, scattered across newspaper archives and private collections and footnotes. And when you’re teaching someone the history of magic, you teach the documented version. The underdocumented work disappears through a kind of passive omission.
Adelaide Herrmann didn’t disappear because she was forgotten in the immediate aftermath of her career. She was known and celebrated. She disappeared in the accumulated retellings that followed, as the story of magic was written and rewritten by people working from the records that were most easily available.
What This Does to the Art Form
When a tradition erases significant portions of its own history, it loses something real — not just the individuals but the knowledge and approaches they carried.
Adelaide Herrmann’s twenty years as a headliner, building and running a major touring company, developing her own material and persona, included solutions to problems that every performer faces. How do you take over a show built around someone else and make it your own? How do you build an audience for a version of yourself that nobody has seen before? How do you sustain a major act across years and changing tastes?
Those aren’t trivial questions. The answers she found are not available in any systematic way because her work was never analyzed and documented at the level that her male contemporaries’ work was.
Every performer who came after her had access to Robert-Houdin’s written work, to Houdini’s publicity, to the documented approaches of the men who were written about at length. Almost no one had systematic access to what Adelaide Herrmann knew.
Why I Keep Coming Back to This
My initial encounter with magic history was as a tourist — interested, curious, following the obvious paths. Finding Adelaide Herrmann was the beginning of understanding that the obvious paths weren’t the whole territory.
There was a history beneath the official history. A more complicated, more interesting, more diverse story than the one that got transmitted. Finding pieces of that story has been one of the more rewarding parts of going deep into this field.
It has also made me more careful about what I accept as “the history.” Every received account was constructed by people making choices about what to emphasize. Those choices reflected the assumptions and priorities of the people making them. The women, the non-Western performers, the working-class innovators — all of them are there in the actual record. The received accounts just don’t reliably include them.
Adelaide Herrmann caught six bullets on a plate while running a major theatrical touring company at the turn of the twentieth century. That’s one sentence in a story that deserves many more.
She deserves to be in the lineage that gets taught. The fact that she isn’t yet, in most versions of that teaching, is a problem worth naming.