How did a watchmaker become the father of modern magic?

Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin was a French watchmaker, magician and illusionist, widely recognized as the father of the modern style of conjuring. Before him, magic belonged to the fairs, where it was a pastime for the lower classes. He transformed it into an entertainment for the wealthy, offered in a theatre he opened in Paris. His legacy is still visible every time a magician walks on stage wearing tails.

His start was an accident. He had ordered two volumes on clockmaking by Berthoud, and when he opened the wrapping at home he found a two-volume set on magic called Scientific Amusements. He was upset that the books revealed how the secrets were done but did not show how to do them, so he took lessons from a teacher named Maous, who told him that digital dexterity came with repetition. As a direct result, Robert-Houdin practiced incessantly.

On 3 July 1845 he premiered his 200-seat Théâtre Robert-Houdin. He envisioned a stage as elegant as the drawing rooms where he was hired to perform, and decided that a magician should wear traditional evening clothes. His own opening night, he said in his memoirs, was a disaster: stage fright made him talk too fast and in a monotone. Then came Second Sight, in which he walked into the audience and touched items held up by spectators while his blindfolded assistant, his son, described each one. It caused a sensation and filled the theatre.

The most surprising chapter came in 1856, and it was a colonial one. Napoleon III asked him to help "pacify" the tribes of French Algeria, where the French Army maintained order. Napoleon was worried about religious leaders called Marabouts, who advised their leaders to break ranks with the French and whose hold over their tribes the usual account puts down to faux magic. He wanted Robert-Houdin to show that French magic was stronger. Robert-Houdin said afterwards that interpreters were told to make people understand that his pretended miracles were only the result of skill, an art called prestidigitation, in no way connected with sorcery. The French government rewarded him for suppressing any possible rebellion. Decades later a young man named Ehrich Weiss read his autobiography and took the stage name Houdini in his honour.