On the night of Saturday, March 23, 1918, the packed audience at the Wood Green Empire, in north London, awaited the climax of Chung Ling Soo’s magic act – in which he ‘caught’ two speeding bullets between his teeth and then spat them onto a china plate.
A hush felt as two assistants – one of them Soo’s Oriental-looking wife – loaded their rifles with circular lead bullets marked by two members of the audience. They took aim, fired – and, instead of the sound of bullets pinging onto the plate, a bullet struck Chung Ling Soo in the chest. It passed through his body and lodged in the scenery. Clutching his chest, the magician staggered backwards into the wings. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he died the next day, aged 58.
Soo – who was actually a New Yorker named William Ellsworth Robinson and was married to an Englishwoman – had successfully performed his ‘Catching the Bullets’ illusion hundreds of times in theatres on both sides of the Atlantic. Each of his muzzle-loading rifles had a steel tube fitted under the barrel to hold the ramrod when it was not being used. It was the ramrod tube – filled with a blank charge – that was actually fired, not the barrel itself.
The trick with the marked bullets was even more ingenious. Carrying two unmarked bullets in a cup, a girl assistant went down into the audience and asked two people to scratch marks on the. The cup had a false bottom containing another pair of bullets already marked by Chung Ling Soo. It was these that were loaded into the rifles by two more members of the audience on stage. The other two marked bullets remained in the cup.
The magician had a third pair of bullets, which he had also marked, hidden in his mouth. When the rifles were fired, he spat his two bullets onto the plate – and showed them to the members of the audience on stage. They confirmed that the bullets had the marks on them – although, of course, they did not know whose. The girl put the bullets into the cup and went back down into the stalls. Operating the trick bottom for a second time, she showed the first two volunteers the bullets they had marked and which had never left the cup.
The stunt seemed foolproof. But on the fatal night the exploding percussion cap in one of the rifles accidentally ignited both the blank charge in the ramrod tube and the live charge in the barrel. Constant use had damaged the insides of the weapons so that the fine gunpowder worked its way from the ramrod tube into the barrel.
The fault lay with Chung Ling Soo, who – afraid of sharing his secrets with a gunsmith – had insisted on servicing the rifles himself.
Picture Credit : Google