By Frank Moraes for Frankly Curious

Radio Lab recently produced an episode called Black Box. As always, it is great. I think Radio Lab is the best thing on the radio. And this episode is about black boxes: situations where you know what comes in and you know what goes out, but you don’t know what happens inside to make the change. The second segment is about “The Piddingtons” — a husband and wife mentalism act from Australia that was huge onBBC Radio in the 1950s. The story is told from the perspective of their grandson and his search for how they did their act.

The act was pretty much the same every time — just like every other mentalism act. Mr Piddington was on stage with an audience. He got some random bit of information from the audience. For example, an audience member picked a passage from a book. And then Mrs Piddington, who was some place far away (in one case in an airplane), read her husband’s thoughts and revealed the passage. This sort of act can be done with a code — and codes can be remarkably subtle. But in one of the examples, Mr Piddington hardly speaks — certainly not enough to transmit the the amount of information that Mrs Piddington reveals. (Thanks to Michael Lyth )

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