How to saw a person in half: 100 years of a sensational illusion From David Copperfield to Paul Daniels, the trick is as iconic as pulling a rabbit from a hat Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 06:00 Mark Brown Sorcar, the Indian magician, cuts his assistant Dipty Dey in half in London in 1956. Photograph: Terry Fincher/Keystone/Getty
A hundred years ago next weekend a magician named Percy Thomas Tibbles literally and laboriously sawed through a sealed wooden box that contained a woman. It was a sensation that has since become one of the best-known magic tricks, performed with all manner of tools and varying degrees of blood – always involving someone cut in half and nearly always with them miraculously put back together.