The man who fooled Edison … but not Houdini

In one of the earliest letters exchanged between magician Harry Houdini and Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a fervent Spiritualist, the English author asks his friend about the mysterious powers of one Professor Bert Reese.

In actual fact, Reese was no professor--his real name was Berthold Riess (1841-1928). A fat, bald, and jovial character, Reese toured the world astounding crowned heads and the cream of the crop of society with his demonstrations of apparent telepathy. Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the phonograph, had seen him perform and became convinced that he really possessed supernatural powers. "Most prodigies are merely prodigies, meaning, really, nothing, and this may be the case with Reese," said Edison with nonchalance. "But, on the other hand, he may mean something--something big. I cannot, yet, explain his power Apparently he saw through solids. But--Well, why not? Do not X-rays do that?"

The Pellet Test

Predictably, Houdini was less impressed. He wrote to Doyle:

   Reese, is, without doubt, the cleverest reader of Messages that
   ever lived. He has deceived the great minds of Germany--in the
   Courts--winning a lawsuit, and in America, I know he has made
   children of our brainiest men. Edison actually believes in him, and
   when charged with fortune-telling in Judge Rosalsky's Court, he
   gave a test for that shrewd man of the world, and convinced him
   that he was genuine; and was discharged. Reese knew who I was, when
   I called for a sitting, and I will say that, of all the clever
   sleight-of-hand men he is the brainiest I have ever come across. I
   was amazed at his skill, and if I had not been extremely familiar
   with all sleights, and all moves of Mediums, who resort to the
   Pellet Test, I would have been completely fooled Why, he allows you
   to hold the Pellets in your hands, place them in your pocket and
   asks you which one he will read and answer first--you open them
   yourself and, sure enough, it has been properly read! He failed to
   answer one peculiar question I put in writing: "What am I building,
   and for whom?" Rather a strange question, but it happened that I
   was having constructed an Exedra for my Beloved Mother, and
   naturally he could not "guess," though, from the other questions he
   answered, he is a gifted reader of character and judges human
   beings perfectly. I caught him red-handed, and he acknowledged it
   was the first time in his life that anyone had ever "recognized his
   Powers." And I'll put it in writing that he was the slickest I have
   ever seen.

What was Reese doing then? What is the "Pellet Test"? A pellet, in magician's lingo, is a billet rolled into a ball. Reese would ask his sitters to write something on their billets while he left the room: a question, a name or something else. When he would return, the billets would be rolled into balls--pellets--and he would correctly guess the content of each one.

According to Martin Gardner (1996)

   ... the best account of Reese's methods is certainly "Bert Reese
   Secrets," by magician Ted Annemann, published in the 1936 Summer
   Extra issue of his periodical, The Jinx. It includes a photograph
   of Reese, his hand holding the cigar that he habitually smoked
   during his performances because it made it easier to palm a folded
   billet. Annemann writes that Harvard's distinguished
   German-born philosopher and psychologist Hugo Munsterberg
   (1863-1916) became such a believer in Reese's powers that he was
   preparing a book on him when death prevented its finish.

Unlike his friend William James, Munsterberg was a well-known skeptic of the paranormal who had an expansive record of exposing mediums and other psychic charlatans with carefully contrived traps. One of his most celebrated exposures was that of Eusapia Palladino (Polidoro and Rinaldi 1998). Gardner was unable to verify this. I would like to take this opportunity to repeat Gardner's question about this episode: "Can any reader shed light on Annemann's startling claim?"

Houdini Fixes Reese

As usual, Doyle could not be persuaded that someone could really deceive a luminary of some sort, and so Doyle wrote again to Houdini, asking if he was sure that this was the same Bert Reese "because I hear stories of his proof in court to a New York magistrate, and also to Edison, which don't seem to fit into fraud." Houdini swiftly replied:

   You have heard a lot of stories about Dr. Bert Reese, but I spoke
   to Judge Rosalsky and he personally informed me that, although he
   did not detect Reese, he certainly did not think it was telepathy.
   I am positive that Reese resorts to legerdemain, makes use of a
   wonderful memory and is a great character reader. He is
   incidentally a wonderful judge of human beings.

      That he fooled Edison does not surprise me. He would have
   surprise me if he did not fool Edison. Edison is certainly not a
   criterion, when it comes to judging a shrewd adept in the art of
   pellet-reading.

      The greatest thing Reese did, and which he openly acknowledged to
   me, was his test-case in Germany when he admitted they could not
   solve him.

      I have no hesitancy in telling you that I set a snare at the
   seance I had with Reese, and caught him cold-blooded. He was
   startled when it was over, as he knew that I had bowled him over.
   So much so that he claimed I was the only one that had ever
   detected him, and in our conversation after that we spoke about
   other workers of what we call the pellet test-Foster, Worthington,
   Baldwin et al. After my seance with him, I went home and wrote down
   all the details.