Chinese Magic Mirror

Magic Mirrors come from China and Japan. They became popular in Europe in the early part of the 19th century and many distinguished scientist have attempted to explain the phenomenon.

Superficially there seem to be two kinds of magic mirror, those which produce images similar to the relief patterns on their backs, thus giving the illusion of being "transparent", and those which produce a totally different image from the relief on the back. This difference may be just a deception. It may also explain why there are so many theories about how they work, and how they are/were made.

The front of a Magic Mirror is a polished metal surface, and is indeed an extremely good mirror. No sign of any image or picture. However when you shine a beam of light onto the mirror (sunlight works well) and direct the reflection onto a flat surface, lo and behold an image appears.

Our mirrors are modern replicas, and are made in China.

This small size of Magic Mirror is 7cm in diameter, and comes in an elegant Chinese presentation box. At the moment we only have small mirrors with zodiac symbols or with the symbols of the Magic Circle. All of our mirrors project the same 'image' as the design on their back.

In the video, Tim uses a torch to display the image. This is a normal LED torch, but there are a few important things to say about the torch. It has a single LED, and also we have unscrewed the front of the torch and removed the silver reflector. Thus the light comes from a single point source.