78 The EconomistNovember 14th 2020
A
s a boy he invented a pop-up toaster. He blew a hole in the floor
of the breakfast room while conducting a chemistry experi-
ment in the family basement in northern Toronto. And when, at
Sunday school, he queried whether what the Bible claimed was ac-
tually true, he was promptly sent home. His parents never knew
what he might do next. When they took him to Toronto General
Hospital for psychological testing, all they learned was that he was
terrifically bright—his iqwas 168, higher than Albert Einstein’s is
thought to have been. At least his high school had the right idea.
They let him bunk off class and teach himself, coming in only to do
his exams.
Before he was able to graduate, though, he was hit by a car while
out riding his bike. For 13 months he lay in a full-body cast, beating
boredom by reading magic books, unpicking locks and turning
card tricks. His doctors thought he would never walk again, but he
showed them. And when he did he joined the carnival, where for
two summers he called himself Prince Ibis and wore a black tur-
ban. He was a small chap, secretly gay and distant from his father.
Doing magic made him feel bigger, especially when two policemen
who recognised him showed him a pair of handcuffs. Could he get
out of them? He could. They drove him to the local jail. Could he
break out of there? He could—and did, 28 times over the years from
different jails in Canada and America.
His ambition was to beat his hero, Harry Houdini. In 1956 he ap-
peared on television, submerged for 104 minutes in a sealed metal
box at the bottom of a hotel swimming pool, which earned him his
first entry in the “Guinness Book of Records”. Houdini barely man-
aged an hour and a half. A local newspaper in Quebec christenedhim “L’Étonnant Randi”—the Amazing Randi. He liked it enough to
adopt it as his stage name. In 1973 he went on tour with Alice Coo-
per, the ghoul-eyed rock star; every night he decapitated him on-
stage using a fake guillotine. Later he wriggled out of a straitjacket
while suspended, in deep midwinter, over the Niagara Falls.
For all the trickery and sleight of hand, he always insisted that
magicians were the most honest people in the world. They did ex-
actly what they said they were going to do. It was the hucksters that
made him mad: the hoodwinkers and bamboozlers, the card
sharps, cozeners and thimbleriggers. Pedlars of woo-woo, he
called them. Perhaps he felt a growing need to live by the truth. He
was 81 when he finally came out publicly, but when he was almost
60 he fell in love with the man he would eventually marry and he
gave up turning tricks of his own to focus on another line of work
he’d been developing: looking, with his insider’s eye, at how other
people worked their magic.
He could see through them, of course. He knew how. One of the
first he had rumbled was an evangelical Christian healer called Pe-
ter Popoff who liked to summon forth individuals from his congre-
gation, and tell them they should throw away their crutches and
walk. God had told him they would be healed. On “The Tonight
Show”, Mr Randi played Johnny Carson a clip in which Mr Popoff
appeared to know what each congregant was called and what ailed
them even though he’d never seen them before. And then he played
the clip again, with the sound turned up, to show how an electrical
scanner revealed Mr Popoff was wearing a secret earpiece and be-
ing fed the information by his wife who was backstage. “Popoff
says God tells him these things,” he would later say. “Maybe he
does. But I didn’t realise God used a frequency of 39.17 megahertz
and had a voice exactly like Elizabeth Popoff’s.”
Time did not mellow him, as it does others. His ten books—on
psychics, faith healers, extrasensory perception and the mask of
Nostradamus—were rambling, crotchety and filled with diagrams
and long-winded explanations. He did not set out to be a debunker;
that presupposed that something deserved to be debunked even
before it had been examined. He thought only that people should
be open-minded and willing to question what they saw before
them. What he wanted most was to inspect and test every claim
that was presented to him. Over the years these numbered into the
thousands. He offered a $1m reward to anyone who could produce
evidence of paranormal powers under controlled conditions.
Many tried, but none of them succeeded. He never paid out a cent.
Nor did he lose a single libel action brought against him by the
angry and the thwarted.
His most devoted adversary was a tall handsome Israeli, who
arrived in America in the early 1970s, claiming to be able to bend
spoons using psychokinesis, or mind power. With consummate
showmanship, Uri Geller travelled across the United States, insist-
ing that he could read minds, foretell events and, with nothing
more than psychic energy, distort magnetic fields, streams of elec-
trons and solid metallic objects. Even the venerable Stanford Re-
search Institute was taken in. Shortly afterwards, Johnny Carson
again asked Mr Randi for advice on how to test Mr Geller’s claims.
Use only your own props, he said; nothing that Mr Geller could
have had access to beforehand. As the cameras rolled and Mr Geller
realised he was going to be put on the spot, any paranormal abili-
ties he may have had simply vanished. “This scares me,” he said. “I
don’t feel strong.”The uses of enchantment
“The Truth about Uri Geller” was one of Mr Randi’s most popular
books. Mr Geller never forgave his tormentor. At his death, he
tweeted: “How sad that Randi died with hatred in his soul. Love to
you all.” Such pious glee would have delighted the little magician
with the twinkling eyes. As he had said himself many times over
the years: “When I die I want to be cremated and I want my ashes
blown into Uri Geller’s eyes.” 7James Randi, magician and professional sceptic, died on
October 20th, aged 92The woo-woo catcher
Obituary James Randi