rebuild the one Robert-Houdin made and Barnum owned.
Most said it would cost about a quarter of a million dollars
and take well over a year to complete.
I passed.
But then one day a month or so ago I got a call from a
potential new client. He was a delight to talk to. He per-
forms magic, runs a speakers bureau, and was familiar with
most of my books. During the course of our lively conversa-
tion he floored me by announcing that he inherited a few
automatons.
I couldn’t believe it.
“You what!” I blurted, almost too excited to speak.
“I have some automatons my best friend made,” he ex-
plained. “He left them to me in his will.”
“How many do you have?”
“Oh, I dunno, maybe fifteen.”
“Fifteen?!?” I mumbled, truly shaken to the core that he
had any automatons let alone over a dozen of them.
“I have one that does mind reading and another that lev-
itates,” he said. “They all do something different.”
You can’t imagine how stunned I was to hear about this.
It was like finding the Holy Grail of Automatons. While
these particular devices are all modern and nowhere near
as valuable as the one made by the great magician Robert-
Houdin, any automaton today is a rare and collectible
item.
I was intrigued.
And I wanted those automatons.
“How much do you want for them?” I asked.
“I could never sell them,” he said. “I inherited these from
a man who lived to be ninety and treated me like his own
son. I’ve got them in storage.”
At that point I did something naturally and instanta-
neously. Right there on the spot I weaved a hypnotic story
that changed my life—and his.
Here’s how it went.HYPNOTIC WRITING