A candle burning under water?!? You can click on the image to see a Quicktime movie of how it gets there, and how the illusion works, but read this first. What you are seeing is a standard physics lecture demonstration version of the classic 19th Century stage illusion, Pepper's Ghost. The idea was proposed by Henry Dircks and implemented on-stage by John Henry Pepper. With Pepper's installation, audiences could view a play in which moving, transparent "ghosts" appeared and disappeared from mid-stage, with no covering or trap doors, and interacted realistically with live performers. The secret was not much more than a single, very large sheet of plate glass at the very front of the stage.

Magicians are all familiar with a great advance over the original illusion, best remembered today through its use in Harry Kellar's circa-1900 "Blue Room" Illusion. The basic concept was patented by Pepper and J. J. Walker in 1879. It uses a movable sheet of plate glass which blends smoothly from transparent at one end to reflecting mirror on the other, and has an invisible leading edge. With this very clumsy but wonderful device, Kellar could walk to an easy chair in a living room set, sit down, and begin to wave his arms about— as he waved, his clothes and flesh gradually faded out in full view of the audience, to reveal a naked, still guesturing skeleton! The skeleton's head, arms and legs would then detach and float about the stage, reassemble, and slowly fade back in to Kellar who would immediately get up from the chair and walk to stage front, to thunderous applause! Because of the very delicate, intricate, heavy and difficult-to-transport nature of the apparatus, this illusion has been presented only a few times since the days of Kellar.