Smoke and mirrors

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Smoke and mirrors is a classic technique in magical illusions that makes an entity appear to hover in empty space. It was documented as early as 1770 and spread widely after its use by the charlatan Johann Georg Schröpfer, who claimed to conjure spirits. It subsequently became a fixture of 19th-century phantasmagoria shows. The illusion relies on a hidden projector (known then as a magic lantern) whose beam reflects off a mirror into a cloud of smoke, which in turn scatters the beam to create an image.

Idiom

The phrase "smoke and mirrors" has entered North American English to refer to "obscuring or embellishing of the truth of a situation with misleading or irrelevant information."{{Cite book |last=Ayto |first=John |title=Oxford Dictionary of Idioms |date=2020 |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-884562-1 |edition=4th |series=Oxford Quick Reference Series |location=Oxford |at=smoke}} The earliest known use of the idiom came from the biography How the Good Guys Finally Won: Notes from an Impeachment Summer, published in 1975. It was written by the American political journalist Jimmy Breslin,{{cite book |last1=Breslin |first1=Jimmy |title=Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations |year=1989 |chapter=1415 |chapter-url=https://www.bartleby.com/73/1415.html}} who reported the Watergate political scandal in Washington first-hand. Breslin described politics as the theatrical use of "mirrors and blue smoke" to make people see what they wish to see. The idiom was flipped and shortened to its current form and had become a common term in politics by the end of the 1970s.{{Cite book |last=Safire |first=William |title=Safire's Political Dictionary |date=2008 |publisher=Oxford University Press USA - OSO |isbn=978-0-19-534061-7 |location=Cary |pages=671 f.}}

References

{{cite journal |last1=Vermeir |first1=Koen |title=The Magic of the Magic Lantern (1660-1700): On Analogical Demonstration and the Visualization of the Invisible |journal=The British Journal for the History of Science |date=2005 |volume=38 |issue=2 |pages=127–159 |doi=10.1017/S0007087405006709 |jstor=4028694 |s2cid=143404000 |url=https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00644485/file/VERMEIR_-_Magic_of_the_Magic_Lantern.pdf }}

{{Cite magazine|title=Magic and the Brain: Teller Reveals the Neuroscience of Illusion|language=en-us|magazine=Wired|url=https://www.wired.com/2009/04/ff-neuroscienceofmagic/|access-date=2020-11-24|issn=1059-1028}}

Smoke and mirrors

Idiom

See also

References

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Further reading