There is a levitation illusion — one of the most visually striking in the history of stage magic — where a woman floats in the air, a cloth is thrown over her, and then the cloth is whipped away and she has completely vanished. Nothing remains. Not the cloth, not the woman, nothing but empty space.
The history of this effect, which Steinmeyer traces in his work on magic’s history, is not a story of a single inventor. It is a story of an idea that moved through the hands and minds of multiple people across generations, each taking what existed and adding something, each contributing a piece without having access to the full picture of what would eventually emerge.
I find this history more interesting than most innovation stories, because it is honest in a way that most innovation stories are not.
The Mythology of the Flash
We love a particular story about innovation. Someone, alone or nearly alone, has a brilliant idea. A flash of insight. The idea arrives, more or less complete, and the world is changed. The narrative is heroic and individualistic: here is the person who saw what others had missed.
This story is occasionally true, in a narrow sense. But it is far more often a retrospective simplification of something much messier and more communal. The history of magic illusions illustrates the messiness with particular clarity because the magic world — historically secretive, proprietary, competitive — kept unusually detailed records of who had what when, precisely because credit and precedence mattered so much.
What those records show, again and again, is that innovations are not flashes. They are chains. Each link knows about some of the previous links and contributes something that makes the next link possible.
The Levitation’s Journey
Steinmeyer’s account of the floating-and-vanishing illusion traces it through multiple hands, each of whom can make a legitimate claim to some aspect of what became the canonical version of the effect.
The basic concept of a floating figure is ancient — it appears in various forms across the history of stage magic going back centuries. But the specific problem that makes this particular illusion remarkable — how to make the figure vanish after floating, completely, leaving nothing behind — was not solved by the first person to produce a floating figure. It was solved incrementally, by different people working in different countries and eras, each solving a piece of the puzzle without necessarily knowing the other pieces were being worked on simultaneously.
There were figures who contributed the floating mechanism. Different figures who contributed the vanish principle. Different figures again who understood how to combine these in a way that was theatrically coherent. And then there were the performers who took a technically sound but artistically rough combination and refined it into something that could genuinely astonish an audience — which is a different contribution again, and not a lesser one.
No single person invented this effect. The effect is the result of a chain of creative work, most of which was invisible to the other links in the chain.
What This Tells Us About How Innovation Works
The magic world’s version of this pattern is unusually well-documented, but the pattern itself is universal.
Almost every significant creative advance is the product of accumulated work by multiple people, most of whom never received credit for the specific contribution they made. The contributor who gets remembered is often the one who happened to be in the right position to synthesize what had accumulated before them — and the synthesis is genuinely valuable, genuinely creative, but it is not quite the from-nothing invention that the mythology implies.
This matters practically, I think, for how we relate to the creative work we do ourselves.
If you believe innovation is a flash — that genuinely new things come from nowhere, from unique individual genius — then the pressure of originality is enormous. Everything you produce that resembles something that came before it feels like failure. Derivativeness feels like inadequacy. You are either a genius or a copyist, and most of us, most of the time, are clearly not geniuses.
But if you understand innovation as a chain — if you understand that every creative contribution is made possible by the contributions that came before it, and makes possible the contributions that will come after — then the pressure changes. You are not expected to produce something from nothing. You are expected to receive what has been given to you and add something genuine to it. The addition, however small, is the contribution.
My Position in the Chain
I came to magic from the outside, as an adult, carrying things that magicians who grew up inside the tradition typically do not carry: experience of business strategy, of innovation methodology, of presenting complex ideas to skeptical professional audiences, of building things with partners.
These are not magic skills, exactly. But they are contributions to a chain. The way I think about effect design, about audience experience, about the integration of magic into a professional communication context — these reflect the specific things I brought in from outside, applied to a tradition I absorbed afterward.
I am not the inventor of anything significant in this tradition, and I have no illusions about that. But I am a link in some chains. The effects I have developed with Adam, the specific approaches to presenting magic in a keynote context, the ways we have thought about what Vulpine Creations is doing — these are contributions, however modest.
And they were made possible by the people who contributed before me. The giant chain of historical and contemporary practitioners whose work I absorbed, struggled with, built on, and occasionally departed from. I did not create from nothing. I created from what they gave me.
The Ethics of the Chain
Steinmeyer’s account of the levitation’s history also illuminates something darker about how creative chains work in the magic world: the stealing.
“Stolen” is the right word for some of what happened to this illusion. Ideas were taken without credit, without compensation, without acknowledgment. People who made genuine contributions were erased from the record by people with better platforms, better timing, or simply fewer scruples about attribution.
This is not unique to magic. It happens in every creative field. And it is genuinely wrong — not just as a matter of professional courtesy but as a matter of basic fairness. Contributions to a chain deserve recognition, even when the chain is long and tangled.
What I take from this is a straightforward commitment: when I build on someone’s work, I say so. When I perform an effect someone else created, I am clear that it is theirs. The chain is real, and the people who came before deserve to be in it, not erased from it.
The levitation that was stolen four times is a cautionary tale as much as it is a story of innovation. You can participate in the chain honestly or dishonestly. The dishonest version is faster, sometimes, and more lucrative, sometimes.
But the honest version lets you sleep. And the chain, over time, tends to remember.