La Maison De La Magie Robert-Houdin
La Maison de la Magie Robert-Houdin ( French for "The Robert-Houdin House of Magic") is a museum which faces the Royal Château de Blois. It is located in the Loir-et-Cher ''département'' in the Loire Valley, in France, in the center of the city of Blois. As a museum of France and bearing the official label of "Musée de France", it is the only public museum in Europe which incorporates in one place collections of magic and a site for permanent performing arts. The creation of such a site is directly linked to the personality of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, a famous French illusionist born in Blois in 1805. History Inaugurated in 1998, the museum highlights the life and work of Robert-Houdin—multi-talented illusionist, prestidigitator, inventor, clockmaker and maker of automatons. In 1981, descendants of Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin left to the city of Blois the building and all its accessories with a gift requiring they be exposed to the public. 170 objects that were constr ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Blois
Blois ( ; ) is a commune and the capital city of Loir-et-Cher department, in Centre-Val de Loire, France, on the banks of the lower Loire river between Orléans and Tours. With 45,898 inhabitants by 2019, Blois is the most populated city of the department, and the 4th of the region. Historically, the city was the capital of the county of Blois, created on 832 until its integration into the Royal domain in 1498, when Count Louis II of Orléans became King Louis XII of France. During the Renaissance, Blois was the official residence of the King of France. History Pre-history Since 2013, excavations have been conducted by French National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (''INRAP'' in French) in Vienne where they found evidence of "one or several camps of late Prehistory hunter-gatherers, who were also fishermen since fishing traps were found there.. ..They were ancestors of the famous Neolithic farmer-herders, who were present in current France around 6,000 BC ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Rotunda (architecture)
A rotunda () is any building with a circular ground plan, and sometimes covered by a dome. It may also refer to a round room within a building (a famous example being the one below the dome of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.). The Pantheon in Rome is a famous rotunda. A ''band rotunda'' is a circular bandstand, usually with a dome. Rotunda in Central Europe A great number of parochial churches were built in this form in the 9th to 11th centuries CE in Central Europe. These round churches can be found in great number in Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Croatia (particularly Dalmatia) Austria, Bavaria, Germany, and the Czech Republic. It was thought of as a structure descending from the Roman Pantheon. However, it can be found mainly not on former Roman territories, but in Central Europe. Generally its size was 6–9 meters inner diameter and the apse was directed toward the east. Sometimes three or four apses were attached to the central circle and this type has relatives ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne (;''Longman Pronunciation Dictionary''. ; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the ''Voyages extraordinaires'', a series of bestselling adventure novels including ''Journey to the Center of the Earth'' (1864), ''Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas'' (1870), and '' Around the World in Eighty Days'' (1872). His novels, always well documented, are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account the technological advances of the time. In addition to his novels, he wrote numerous plays, short stories, autobiographical accounts, poetry, songs and scientific, artistic and literary studies. His work has been adapted for film and television since the beginning of cinema, as well as for comic books, theater, opera, music and video games. Verne is considered to be an important author in France and most of Europe, where ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Gerard Majax
Gerard is a masculine forename of Proto-Germanic origin, variations of which exist in many Germanic and Romance languages. Like many other early Germanic names, it is dithematic, consisting of two meaningful constituents put together. In this case, those constituents are ''gari'' > ''ger-'' (meaning 'spear') and -''hard'' (meaning 'hard/strong/brave'). Common forms of the name are Gerard (English, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Polish and Catalan); Gerrard (English, Scottish, Irish); Gerardo (Italian, and Spanish); Geraldo (Portuguese); Gherardo (Italian); Gherardi (Northern Italian, now only a surname); Gérard (variant forms ''Girard'' and ''Guérard'', now only surnames, French); Gearóid (Irish); Gerhardt and Gerhart/Gerhard/Gerhardus (German, Dutch, and Afrikaans); Gellért ( Hungarian); Gerardas ( Lithuanian) and Gerards/Ģirts ( Latvian); Γεράρδης (Greece). A few abbreviated forms are Gerry and Jerry (English); Gerd (German) and Gert (Afrikaans and Dutch); Gerrit (Af ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Hallucination
A hallucination is a perception in the absence of an external stimulus that has the qualities of a real perception. Hallucinations are vivid, substantial, and are perceived to be located in external objective space. Hallucination is a combination of 2 conscious states of brain wakefulness and REM sleep. They are distinguishable from several related phenomena, such as dreaming ( REM sleep), which does not involve wakefulness; pseudohallucination, which does not mimic real perception, and is accurately perceived as unreal; illusion, which involves distorted or misinterpreted real perception; and mental imagery, which does not mimic real perception, and is under voluntary control. Hallucinations also differ from "delusional perceptions", in which a correctly sensed and interpreted stimulus (i.e., a real perception) is given some additional significance. Many hallucinations happen also during sleep paralyses. Hallucinations can occur in any sensory modality—visual, auditory, olfa ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Electricity
Electricity is the set of physical phenomena associated with the presence and motion of matter that has a property of electric charge. Electricity is related to magnetism, both being part of the phenomenon of electromagnetism, as described by Maxwell's equations. Various common phenomena are related to electricity, including lightning, static electricity, electric heating, electric discharges and many others. The presence of an electric charge, which can be either positive or negative, produces an electric field. The movement of electric charges is an electric current and produces a magnetic field. When a charge is placed in a location with a non-zero electric field, a force will act on it. The magnitude of this force is given by Coulomb's law. If the charge moves, the electric field would be doing work on the electric charge. Thus we can speak of electric potential at a certain point in space, which is equal to the work done by an external agent in carrying a unit of p ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Optics
Optics is the branch of physics that studies the behaviour and properties of light, including its interactions with matter and the construction of instruments that use or detect it. Optics usually describes the behaviour of visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light. Because light is an electromagnetic wave, other forms of electromagnetic radiation such as X-rays, microwaves, and radio waves exhibit similar properties. Most optical phenomena can be accounted for by using the classical electromagnetic description of light. Complete electromagnetic descriptions of light are, however, often difficult to apply in practice. Practical optics is usually done using simplified models. The most common of these, geometric optics, treats light as a collection of rays that travel in straight lines and bend when they pass through or reflect from surfaces. Physical optics is a more comprehensive model of light, which includes wave effects such as diffraction and interference that cannot be ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Watchmaking
A watchmaker is an artisan who makes and repairs watches. Since a majority of watches are now factory-made, most modern watchmakers only repair watches. However, originally they were master craftsmen who built watches, including all their parts, by hand. Modern watchmakers, when required to repair older watches, for which replacement parts may not be available, must have fabrication skills, and can typically manufacture replacements for many of the parts found in a watch. The term clockmaker refers to an equivalent occupation specializing in clocks. Most practising professional watchmakers service current or recent production watches. They seldom fabricate replacement parts. Instead they obtain and fit factory spare parts applicable to the watch brand being serviced. The majority of modern watchmakers, particularly in Switzerland and other countries in Europe, work directly for the watchmaking industry and may have completed a formal watchmaking degree at a technical school. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Optical Illusions
Within visual perception, an optical illusion (also called a visual illusion) is an illusion caused by the visual system and characterized by a visual percept that arguably appears to differ from reality. Illusions come in a wide variety; their categorization is difficult because the underlying cause is often not clear but a classification proposed by Richard Gregory is useful as an orientation. According to that, there are three main classes: physical, physiological, and cognitive illusions, and in each class there are four kinds: Ambiguities, distortions, paradoxes, and fictions. A classical example for a physical distortion would be the apparent bending of a stick half immerged in water; an example for a physiological paradox is the motion aftereffect (where, despite movement, position remains unchanged). An example for a physiological fiction is an afterimage. Three typical cognitive distortions are the Ponzo, Poggendorff, and Müller-Lyer illusion. Physical illusions are ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Kaleidoscope
A kaleidoscope () is an optical instrument with two or more reflecting surfaces (or mirrors) tilted to each other at an angle, so that one or more (parts of) objects on one end of these mirrors are shown as a regular symmetrical pattern when viewed from the other end, due to repeated reflection. These reflectors are usually enclosed in a tube, often containing on one end a cell with loose, colored pieces of glass or other transparent (and/or opaque) materials to be reflected into the viewed pattern. Rotation of the cell causes motion of the materials, resulting in an ever-changing view being presented. Etymology Coined by its Scottish inventor David Brewster, "kaleidoscope" is derived from the Ancient Greek word καλός (''kalos''), "beautiful, beauty", εἶδος (''eidos''), "that which is seen: form, shape" and σκοπέω (''skopeō''), "to look to, to examine", hence "observation of beautiful forms." It was first published in the patent that was granted on July 10 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Buatier De Kolta
Buatier de Kolta (né Joseph Buatier; Caluire-et-Cuire, 18 November 1845 – New Orleans, 7 October 1903) was a French magician who performed throughout the latter part of the 1800s in Europe and America. Biography Joseph Buatier was born in Caluire-et-Cuire (Rhône, France). His parents were fabric merchants. He started reading books on magic at age six, and as a teenager he was already performing in amateur magic shows in his school. However his father, a devout Catholic, wanted him to become a priest, and persuaded him to enter a seminary. At age 18, he left it and worked as a painter, sharing a studio in Lyon with his more talented friend Elie-Joseph Laurent (1841–1926). He also resumed his performances as amateur magician, and one was noticed by Hungarian impresario Julius Vida de Kolta, who persuaded him to make magic his profession. His shows were immediately successful and he took the stage name Buatier de Kolta, acknowledging his debt to the impresario. In 1870, he s ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Genius
Genius is a characteristic of original and exceptional insight in the performance of some art or endeavor that surpasses expectations, sets new standards for future works, establishes better methods of operation, or remains outside the capabilities of competitors. Genius is associated with intellectual ability and creative productivity, and may refer to a polymath who excels across diverse subjects. There is no scientifically precise definition of a genius. The term is also defined as the exceptional ability itself, as simply genius without the article. In that sense of the word, sometimes genius is associated with talent, but several authors such as Cesare Lombroso and Arthur Schopenhauer systematically distinguish these terms. Walter Isaacson, biographer of many well-known geniuses, explains that although high intelligence may be a prerequisite, the most common trait that actually defines a genius may be the extraordinary ability to apply creativity and imaginative thinki ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |