Conjuring Credits

The Origins of Wonder

User Tools

Site Tools


One-handed Palm Change

The palm-to-palm exchange with coins is Earl “Presto” Johnson's, who first published it in Dick Brooks and Dorothy Dietrich's Hocus Pocus, Vol. 1 No. 2, Sep./Oct. 1978, p. 52, as “Presto-Chango”. For further discussion of this sleight, see Genii, Vol. 73 No. 12, Dec. 2010, p. 73.

Precursor

The single-handed switching of objects for one another dates back much farther with dice. In a book warning readers about the dice cheat, Gilbert Walker mentions the one-handed palm change being in use at the time. See Walker's A Manifest Detection of the Most Vyle and Detestable Use of Dice Play, 1552, p. 24 of the 1850 edition.