In his De subtiltate (1550), Girolamo Cardano gave a vague description of conjurers in 1630s Italy making rings magically link. However, he does not state how many rings and whether the effect was a sudden linking of separate rings into a chain, or whether the trick featured multiple linkings. Consequently, this trick may have been simply a forefather to today’s Linking Rings.

In 1764, a detailed explanation of the Linking Rings was published in Japan, in Hirase Hose’s Hôkasen. Japanese magicians came to call the trick the “Chinese Rings.” While no early record of the trick is known to have survived in China, a troupe of Chinese magicians and jugglers touring the U.K. in 1821 were reported doing the Linking Rings, using eight rings and performing a routine having many features that have survived to the present day. See the Liverpool Mercury, Feb. 16, 1921, p. 6, column 1. A Chinese troupe, perhaps the same one, doing a seemingly identical program, was advertised in the Belfast newspaper The Irishman, Apr. 12, 1822, p. 3, column 4.

Written explanations of the trick did not begin to appear in Western literature until the mid-1800s. An early explanation is given by J. N. Ponsin in Nouvelle magie blanche dévoilée, Vol. 2, 1854, p. 39. Three years later the trick was explained in an English work, the anonymously authored The Magicians' Own Book, 1857, p. 31 (also published as The Boy's Own Conjuring Book, 1859).

In the 1840s, Johann Nepomuk Hofzinser created innovations in the Linking Ring routine, although the extant records may confuse his ideas with those of his student Georg Heubeck. See Hofzinser Zauberkünste by Ottokar Fischer, 1942, translated into English by Richard Hatch as The Magic of J. N. Hofzinser, 1985, p. 136. Martin Chapender's routine in Mahatma, Vol. 7 No. 1, July 1903, p. 756, has been said by some to be the first modern routine, which influenced much of what was to come after.

See also: Linking Rings---the Crash Link, Linking Rings---the Silent Link and Linking Finger Rings.