Professor Pepper’s Ghost

Abstract

The raising of a ghost has always been regarded as the supreme achievement of any magician – whether a self-confessed conjuror or not. The Lord Chancellor before whom the case was tried, formed the opinion that the witnesses were perjurers and that the diagram had been surreptitiously copied from Pepper’s own patent specification. In 1868 the great conjuror Robert Houdin arranged an elaborate ghost effect, on Pepper’s principle, for a melodrama, La Czarine, at the Theatre Ambigu. Armed with his English patent, and already successful in one law suit, Pepper and Hostein instituted proceedings against Robin. Dircks dismissed Pepper’s adaptation as trifling alterations of no scientific importance; Pepper dismissed Dircks’ original plan as completely impractical and clumsy; and Silvester claimed to be the real inventor of the perfected stage illusion.

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