page_title: Davenport brothers
section_title: Exposures
hierarchical_section_title: Davenport brothers / Exposures
caption_attribution_description: English: The seance cabinet of the Davenport brothers.
context_page_description: Ira Erastus Davenport and William Henry Davenport, known as the Davenport brothers, were American magicians in the late 19th century, sons of a Buffalo, New York policeman. The brothers presented illusions that they and others claimed to be supernatural.
context_section_description: The Davenport brothers were exposed as frauds many times. The stage magician John Nevil Maskelyne saw how the Davenports' spirit cabinet illusion worked, and stated to the audience in the theatre that he could recreate their act using no supernatural methods. With the help of a friend, cabinet maker George Alfred Cooke, he built a version of the cabinet. Together, they revealed the Davenport Brothers' trickery to the public at a show in Cheltenham in June 1865.
  Magicians including John Henry Anderson and Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin worked to expose the Davenport Brothers, writing exposés and performing duplicate effects.  A pair of amateur magicians followed the brothers around Britain, tying the Davenports into their box with a knot that could not be easily removed and thus exposed the trick to audiences who demanded their money back.  The impresario P. T. Barnum included an exposé of the Davenports in his 1865 book The Humbugs of the World.
  The Davenports were rejoined by William Fay for a final American tour before William Henry's death in 1877.  Fay settled in Australia and Ira Erastus lived in America until the two reunited in 1895 and toured with a show that failed.
  The magician John Mulholland also exposed the tricks of the Davenport brothers:
  A number of things immediately become less miraculous when it is known at times the Davenports employed as many as ten confederates. It was a night when a confederate was used that Alexander Herrmann (the stage magician known as Herrmann the Great) described in an article in the Cosmopolitan Magazine. The performance was being given in Ithaca, New York, and many Cornell College students were in the audience. They had brought "pyrotechnic balls so made as to ignite suddenly with bright light." When the lights were struck the Davenports were found to be on opposite sides of the stage waving musical instruments around in the air.
  According to the magician Harry Houdini, Ira had confessed to him that he and his brother had faked their "spirit" phenomena. Houdini in his book A Magician Amongst the Spirits (1924) also reproduced a letter from Ira claiming "we never in public affirmed our Belief in spiritualism." The spiritualist Arthur Conan Doyle refused to accept the exposures of fraud, and insisted that in private Ira was a practicing spiritualist.
  In 1998, skeptical investigator Joe Nickell discovered the Davenports' scrapbook from the museum at the Lily Dale Spiritualist Assembly. Nickell examined newspaper clippings, personal notes and photographs from the scrapbook. He concluded that Doyle was correct about Ira endorsing spiritualism in private and Houdini was also correct about their public "spirit" phenomena being the result of trickery. According to Nickell "taken as a whole, the evidence of the scrapbook does indicate that Ira Davenport was a practicing spiritualist, or at least pretended to be, although he and his brother used trickery to accomplish the effects they attributed to spirits."
caption: Davenport brothers cabinet.
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