Conjuring Credits

The Origins of Wonder

User Tools

Site Tools


This is an old revision of the document!


Bathing Beauty

This perennial small apparatus trick focuses on a banner showing a young woman at the seaside. The banner is rolled up and a piece of her costume is removed from the roll. Each time this is done, the banner is unrolled to show the picture of the woman has altered accordingly. When her final garment is removed from the rolled-up banner, the visual punch line is delivered: She is shown up to her neck in the ocean. This trick is the invention of British professional Fred Culpitt and was first marketed by the short-lived Blackstone Magic Company (without credit to Culpitt), and later by the Abbott's Magic Company. Culputt's claim to the trick was made in print by Max Holden in The Sphinx, Vol. 29 No. 2, Apr. 1928, p. 64. Sid Lorraine provides a brief but more detailed history of it in The Tops, Vol. 4 No. 1, Jan. 1939, p. 7.