Can we just take a minute to appreciate the United States of America. I know their government oscillates between capitalistic neoliberals and capitalistic cryptofascists, their healthcare system is designed to funnel money towards corporate health insurance, they have actual unfiltered nazis marching in the streets and bizarre fiscal loopholes allowing billionaires with more wealth than a small country to not only avoid paying tax but actually receive tax rebates courtesy of the regular citizenry… *deep breath* but damn it if their physical currency isn’t just designed from the ground up for magicians.
The dollar bill is worth so little that it’s cheaper to make a cover for an exercise book with actual money than to use that money to buy nice paper for the cover. The one, two, five, ten, twenty, fifty and one hundred dollar bill are all the same size and mostly printed in the same colours, made from a soft enough paper to fold easily and hold a nice crease. If you ask the average person on the street for a coin you are all but guaranteed to get a quarter, and there’s a statistically favourable chance that the quarter will have the design used for the majority of the 20th century, that of the eagle.
Admittedly the production of state quarters since 1999 has slightly scuppered that last point but the odds are still heavily in your favour that the person you borrow it from won’t even notice if you switch it for one which does.
God Bless America… and fuck the goddamn Royal Mint.
English currency, in the same period, scrapped it’s lowest denomination note, decimalised to entirely new coins, then changed the size of the decimalised coins, introduced new coins, then changed the metals the coins are made from¹, all while continually redesigning the tails side of coins and updating the queens portrait on the heads side, finally culminating in the introduction of a £2 coin, a total change in colour and shape for the £1 and switching paper bank notes – which have never been the same size or colour – to plastic notes with all the same flaws and a see through window. We have no ubiquitous coin, like the quarter, because inflation over tat period has taken us from the point where a cinema ticket cost a penny, to the current state where the sweets we called penny chews as I grew up now cost about 10p.
It’s anarchy, and not in the egalitarian stateless way.
A monarchic pandemonium of numismatism.
Oh, and that’s before you address the fact that I said English currency. This gets worse once you realise: Scottish bank notes are legal tender in the UK.
Maybe you don’t see why this is a problem? Well let me outline some types of tricks that don’t work as well (or at all) in the UK.
The Ticket Stub Principle
It has long been a staple of magic that if you’re going to make a banknote vanish and reappear and don’t want to go through the faff of getting it signed², an ideal way to identify it is to tear a small piece off, the chaos of the torn edge being a unique signifier to prove that the note found later in an impossible place is the same one. Indeed this idea was once used in medieval Europe as a form of book keeping.
This of course doesn’t work with plastic banknotes, which are impossible to tear.
The ticket stub principle is also used in an excellent Jay Sankey effect Spiral, in which a borrowed dollar bill transposes with a sheet of paper from a spiral bound notepad, which they can then keep. of course… this has another implication.
The Marxist Theory of Souvenirs
Karl Marx defined value in two ways. All items available for human consumption have a use value and an exchange value. So for example a cheeseburger and filet mignon have exactly the same use value, they are a meal, but fine cuisine has a much higher exchange value, that is to say people are willing to pay more for it. This is the nightmare that underlines all the horrors of consumerist late capitalism but we don’t have time to unpack all of that.
What matters to us is that a magic trick souvenir such as a signed card has a use value based on it’s emotional connection to how that trick made the audience feel in the moment. I would suggest that there is an upper limit to this sensation, which in the case of money is always going to be at odds with the exchange value of the currency in question. I have a dollar bill folded into a boot by Hannibal as part of his excellent bookends routine, but if it was a hundred dollar bill, I doubt even as huge a magic lover as me would resist the temptation to open it up and spend it.
That spiral trick is cute when it’s a dollar, but I doubt many people would hold onto a notepad with a five pound note bound into it. Small denomination notes allow for these kind of borrowed object impossibilities to be worth saving.
This is why some people hold onto signed folded cards and some people throw them away because whilst they have an emotional link, they only make sense if you were there. If on the other hand the object contains within it a microcosm of the trick, it becomes valuable to show other people… but maybe not £5 worth of valuable.
Which is why many people eschew paper money souvenir tricks in favour of coinage tricks, such as Coinvexed, where you magically bend a coin. Except… it’s not quite that simple.
Metallurgy for Beginners
Before there was money, weighed quantities of precious metal were used as a fungible way to exchange value. Everyone could agree that gold or silver were worth a lot, so a few grams of either could be exchanged for goods and services, safe in the knowledge that the recipient would be able to pass them on to someone else in the same way. Then as people started to try passing off cheaper common metals as their expensive rare counterparts, a system was put in place to cast pure precious metal into exact weight ingots, marked with an official seal to prove their provenance. These markings gradually got more elaborate, the ingots got smaller and now we have coins.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
But wait, if that’s how all this started, how come we don’t have pockets full of silver and gold? Instead we have nickel plated copper, copper plated steel, and whatever fucked up alloy they make the euro out of.
Well what happened is that over time as we mined it all out, the supply of new gold and silver was reduced, and so even though there was the same amount in the world, they were technically rarer because there was an every increasing supply of world to share it out amongst. As such a silver dollar could be melted down and sold for more than a dollar simply as a lump of precious metal. So coins that were once gold became silver, silver became bronze, bronze became copper and copper became steel³. By that point however, people were so used to the aesthetics of the existing coinage that the steel coins were plated in copper or nickel to maintain their iconic appearance.
What this means for the United States America is that once silver coins are now nickel plated copper, and coins from the UK which were once solid copper are now steel core.
Copper coins are easy to modify because copper is quite a soft metal. You can cut and drill holes in it without specialist equipment and, most importantly, it takes far less psychic energy to magically bend it. When I showed that trailer for Coinvexed above I intentionally shared the 3rd edition. Look at this performance of the original. At the end, the bend in the coin is far more pronounced than the bend in the trailer for the 3rd edition. Did they make the trick worse? No, the coins changed under us.
In the USA you can still get a bend that good on a quarter. Quarters also won’t stick to magnets, which is super handy if you happen to use a magnet in a trick and you would like to not have it emerge from your pocket covered in coins.
But quarters… they’re a particular bugbear of mine.
Lowest Common Denomination
There is something linguistically fucky about borrowing a coin in the UK. Not so in the Americas. in the UK you can just about get away with asking for a penny or a pound, but they are both fairly rare coins for people to knowingly carry.
I know that’s an odd turn of phrase but what I mean is that enough things cost £4.99 that statistically most people will have a penny on their person. The value of this coin is so low however that people may just drop it into a pocket ready to deposit in the next charity box they see, and will likely forget that it is even there. If you ask someone for a penny, the process of searching for it will likely frustrate them. Pound coins on the other hand are likely to be spent first out of all the coins and processed down into a purse full of what we lovingly call shrapnel.
Conversely asking for a 10p or a 50p doesn’t have the same ring to it, being a numerical request, and people will dig around in their pockets and finally say, “Erm… I’ve got a ten and two twenties, will that do?”
Where as I could walk up to any person on the street in San Francisco, ask for a quarter and that person would immediately know if they had one, and (if I was dressed well enough to not appear homeless) provide the exact single coin.
Why is this?
Partly its because whereas the UK has coins for 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 20p, 50p, £1 and £2, there are four American coins, all of which have names: the penny(1c), the nickel (5c), the dime(10c) and the quarter(25c). That makes a quarter the largest denomination coin, so it occupies the same value slot as a pound, even though by the current exchange rate, a quarter is worth about 20p, so people end up carrying a lot of them. This ubiquity is why most US coin accepters are based around the quarter, thus driving up demand for quarters, and the whole thing has a self sustaining evolutionary logic to it⁴.
This same ubiquity loop means that American magicians can all focus their efforts on things they can do with quarters, safe in the knowledge that they will always be able to borrow one. Quarters can be pierced, bitten, stretched, folded, punctured, turned to chocolate, zagged, the list goes on. No such effort has been lavished upon a British coin, because no one can agree on where to focus the effort.
And as I mentioned piercing…
What’s going on here?
This is probably going to come across more as a nuance but I think it’s important. What’s going on here:
Is Andrew Mayne magically passing his finger through the bill unharmed? No, he’s tearing a dirty great hole through it, tearing it down it’s length, and then magically fixing the bill.
Technically this exact effect can be performed with a plastic bill, but no one is going to believe that you made a hole with your finger. Or a pencil. Or even a pen.
There are decades worth of modern magic that rely on paper banknotes, none of which will work anymore with the switch to plastic, either in terms of an incompatible method or an unbelievable premise.
Pretty grim, right? But at least it can’t get any wor-
Oblivion Looms
There is an idea bubbling under the surface of modern society. It has slowly formed through the years as banks dropped the gold standard and went to entirely digital ledgers. It all rests on a single question: “What is a bank note anyway?”
A piece of paper has no value in and of itself, and outside of currency the only scenario in which a piece paper is worth a hundred dollars (or more) is if Scarlett Johansson blew her nose on it⁵. Rather if you carefully examine a bank note in the UK you will still find the words “The bank of England promises to pay the bearer” because originally that’s what bank notes were – a nationally agreed system of IOUs, where people didn’t have to carry a pound of gold bullion because the bank held onto the precious metal that was actually worth something and regular people went about their day essentially trading with ticket stubs for the worlds most secure cloakroom.
But since no one ever asked for the gold, that idea was dropped and now the value held by the banks is that they have the big spreadsheet with everyone’s account balance. That’s it. Because we treat the notes as the items of value we missed the biggest magic trick of all, when money disappeared and we were all left holding IOUs for a number on a computer.
Ironically coins are meant to be little pieces of precious metal but the metals in them are worth so little that they only have exchange value in the same way that notes do, and they’re so annoying to carry that there is a company called coinstar whose machines in supermarkets will take in a big jar of coins and output notes in exchange for a voucher you can spend in the shop, and their tag line is “coins in, spending money out”. A few years ago it was “Turn your coins into cash”. Both of these are suggesting that the coins are worthless and paper money is the real deal, when in fact the opposite is true.
And now they want to get rid of the notes. And the coins too.
Governments around the world are drawing up plans to switch to cashless societies, where all payments are made digitally with contactless devices, credit/debit cards and bank transfers for small, medium and large transactions respectively. No one will carry coins, no one will carry paper money, these things will be relics of the past.
Obviously this has huge ramifications for society as a whole. What of the homeless with no bank account? How will people tip buskers? What will become of charity collection boxes? What if some banking authority decides it wants to follow a puritanical code of conduct and suspends the accounts of anyone who earns money from a field they consider unethical, such as sex work or queer literature? What if fascism continues to accelerate and the government decides to un-person an ethnic minority and seize all their property?
But most importantly… how am I gonna zag when there are no quarters?
I know I said money is the root of all evil and society would be better off without it, but I didn’t just mean the physical tokens of it, I meant capitalism as a whole. You can’t get rid of one and keep the other, that’s not fair.
This post is an introduction to a longer project I am embarking on where I will try to solve some of these issues, documenting my own solutions to cashless performing of classic money magic. I’m still going to post other things here, but expect me to return to this theme a lot in the coming weeks and months.
¹ From non ferrous to ferrous, no less.
² Or for other reasons
³ Okay so it wasn’t quite that straight forward, gold became brass, silver became nickel plated copper, just roll with it.
⁴ Just don’t call it evolution, they hate that.
⁵ I use the ScarJo example here for comedic effect (although that is real, it sold for thousands of dollars) a slightly less ridiculous example was Salvador Dali paying for a meal by doodling on the napkin when he was finished. I did say it was only slightly less ridiculous.