Year: Day to Day Men: March 14

Aries the Ram

The fourteenth of March in 1878 marks the birth date of Louis Nikola, a British magician, actor, director and author. Born Walter James Obree Smith in Southampton, he performed under the stage name of Louis Nikola, a persona he found in Australian novelist Guy Newell Boothby’s series of occultist criminal mastermind Dr. Nikola, an early Victorian forerunner to Fu Manchu.

Louis Nikola began his career as a professional magician in 1901. Known for his painstaking perfection and inventive illusions, he performed throughout the world. Nikola’s “Card Castle” was one of the many highlights in his performances. After spreading a deck of cards on a tray, he would cover it with a silk scarf and slowly raise the scarf. At its height, the scarf would be removed to reveal a standing castle built from the cards. He would deliberately jog the tray and the castle would collapse due to its delicate construction. 

Nikola published some of his magic through a series entitled “The B.O.P. Magician” that appeared in the 1898-1899 Volume XXI of “The Boy’s Own Paper”, a British story-paper run by the Religious Tract Society to provide young male readers with a positive moral influence. In 1927, Nikola published “The Nikola Card System: A New Power for Magicians”, a card system for magic tricks more advanced than the previous “Si Stebbins” or “Eight Kings” stack systems. Even on close examination, the pre-arrangement of cards was seemingly impossible to detect. 

In 1934, Louis Nikola published a compendium of articles on fifty magic illusions entitled “Magical Masterpieces” in a collaboration with magic historian Will Goldston. Among the illusions in the volume were “The Incorrigible Cigars”, “A Message from Mars”, and “The Topsy Turvy Tea Table”. Nikola is credited with the invention of two major magic illusions: the “Magic Melding” in the early 1930s and, in collaboration with magician Roy Enoc, the “Milk Pitcher” circa 1917. 

In addition to his magic illusions, Louis Nikola was also an entertainer proficient in the art of hand shadows. Using a light source and his two hands, he would create shadow representations of  animals as well as historic and fictional characters. In 1913, Nikola published a small volume entitled “Hand Shadows: The Complete Art of Shadowgraphy” that contained, along with the illustrations of fifty hand shadows, instructions on lighting and hand exercises. A second edition was printed in 1921.

Beginning in 1913, Nikola was discovered by the British film industry who cast him in several films as a magician and a spiritualist. He was an actor in director Charles Raymond’s short 1913 “The Seer of Bond Street”, a six character story of a fake medium attempting to steal money from an heiress. Nikola was screenwriter, director and actor for the 1914 “Magic Squares”, an animation of paper squares and hand shadows.

Walter James Obree Smith died at the age of fifty-eight in South Harrow, London on the eleventh of November in 1936.