Vanishing Bird Cages – Vintage!

Recently I had a magician reach out to me to let me know there were some vanishing bird cages in a magician’s estate. I didn’t have much information to on as to what one of the cages was.

vanishing bird cage

Obviously one of them is a Milson Worth Silver Meteor vanishing bird cage. This one is cool, because I’ve owned dozens of Milson Worth cage, but never had the instructions, until now!

Milson Worth Silver Meteor vanishing bird cage

Now for the interesting cage, the one that’s not clear as to who made it. There wasn’t a lot of information that I could pull from the pictures, so I totally took a gamble when buying it.

Here’s the cage:

Owen Challenge Cage Mystery



It looks a lot like my Owen Magic vanishing bird cage, so here they are side by side:

Owen Challenge Cage Mystery

The dimensions are exactly the same. There are a couple of small differences. The cage I just got isn’t stamped “OWEN” where the cage on the left that’s 100% and Owen is stamped. The lack of a stamp doesn’t mean that it’s not an Owen, as there was a period decades ago were many weren’t stamped. The Owen cage that I already has was much more modern.

Another difference between the two cages are the corner pieces.

Owen Challenge Cage Mystery

The modern Owen cage on the right appears to have the ends peened, where the mystery cage looks like they’re peened and a blob of solder is added. I was chatting with a friend of mine and he found an old Owen Magic Supreme catalog and the ends of the corner bars also have the solder blobs!

Owen Challenge Cage Mystery

This catalog is from the 80’s and back then the Challenge Cage Mystery was $97.50!!!

After asking around a bit, I got this little bit of information:

Owen Challenge Cage Mystery


The size of the rails match those dimensions.

Based on all of this, I’m now 99% confident to call this birdcage and Owen Challenge Cage Mystery!

One problem is that one of the corners needs a repair, it’s missing the solder blob.

Owen Challenge Cage Mystery

I’m sending this out to my birdcage guy and he’s going to repair it and polish up the cage!

-Louie

PS: if you come across a vanishing bird cage, feel free to reach to me to see if I’m interested in buying it!

Vanishing Bird Cage Comparision

There really aren’t many vanishing bird cages that are currently being made. It’s really the vanishing bird cage from India or the Baby Lindy and Walter Blaney cage from Dan Summers. Those two makers couldn’t be further apart in pricing! The cage from India is about $50, and the Summers cages are $1,500-$2,000!

I recently has someone ask me about the two, and there’s really no comparing them. For starters they are completely different style of cages, so it’s not an apples to apples comparison.

What the magic market is lacking is a good, entry level cage, something in the $200-$400 range, however that doesn’t currently exist right now. I’m going to do a quick comparison of the India cage and the Milson Worth Silver Meteor which is the cage style that the Indian cage copied.

For me there are two main differences. The first is weight!

The Milson Worth cage is 115 grams and the Indian cage is 149. You really feel that extra 34 grams in weight when the cage lands in your sleeve!

The other difference is texture. The Milson Worth vanishing birdcage has all the soldered spots smoothed out, where the India cage is rough and that will create a lot of potential snags when the cage is going up your sleeve.

I know that the Milson Worth magic company isn’t around anymore, so you can’t buy the cage new, but there are a lot of them out there for sale on sites like eBay, etc. This cage is a decent beginners cage and one to use if you want to try out the cage before investing thousands of dollars in a cage!

Just a quick note, if you end up searching for a Milson Worth Silver Meteor cage, don’t pay more than $150-$200 for it. There’s a seller or two on ebay asking for way too much for the cage!

-Louie

Four Cages…

When I was at the Abbott’s Magic Get Together a couple of months ago, on the way home in Minneapolis, I added four new vanishing birdcages to the collection. Two were the older rigid styles and two were the more modern semi rigid style cages.

We’ll start with talking about the most modern cage of the bunch. It’s one of the semi rigid cages made in the style of the Milson Worth Silver Meteor vanishing cage.

I think the Indian design is slightly better than the original as the bars don’t stick out as far as on the Milson Worth cage. The problem with the Indian cage is that whatever metal it’s made from is very heavy when compared to the original Milson Worth cage. When you vanish it, it drops like a ton of bricks!

Now let’s look at the two rigid cages:

Both of these cages are made is similar styles and both have the “spoon” broken off of the front right corner. The spoon tries to eliminate some snags on the sleeve as the cage goes up your sleeve.

The cage on the left is polished metal and the has a little bit more care taken in putting in the bars. It also weighs a ton!

The cage on the right isn’t polished and is slightly bigger, but was made of lighter metal.

Honestly, I can’t imagine using this style of cage compare to the modern semi rigid lindhurst style vanishing cages. They are very heavy, and don’t collapse well.

Now let’s chat about the final cage, which is the linhurst style cage.

This is the same style of cage that I’ve been using for a while. The only difference is that this cage has all of it’s bars! It also has some loops added to hang the bird on. I think these loops were added by whoever bought the cage, and not the manufacturer (but I could be wrong)

This cage is virtually the same dimensions as an Owen’s Challenge Cage and it has a great collapsing action. This cage is going to be my main working cage from here on! I totally lucked out on finding it and the price it was sold to me for.