The Story of the Old/New Coin

Today I have a story for you. And tomorrow I’ll tell you my takeaways from this story.

This story begins in May 2022. I received an email from supporter Jonathan FC. He had unknowingly dropped some moisturizing cream on a coin, where it sat for a day or so. The next day, when he noticed the coin with the cream on it and cleaned it off, he found that the coin looked new in the area where the cream had been. (For completeness’s sake, this was a body cream with argan oil in it, although I don’t know if that makes any difference.) He asked if I had any ideas of how this could be utilized for some sort of trick.

I didn’t. And still don’t really.

But it got me thinking of a coin that was old and tarnished on one side, but shiny and new on the other. It wouldn’t be difficult to make such a coin. Just clean one side of an old, dirty coin. And then you’d have something you could use as a Copper/Silver coin. But instead of a coin transforming from copper to silver. It would transform from old to new.

I theorized that this would be a stronger effect. An object travelling through time, or us travelling through time with an object, strikes me as more interesting than a silver coin changing to a copper coin. Story-wise, at least. Changing silver to copper for no reason feels more like a straight “magic trick” as opposed to something more fantastical.

But I’m not much of a coin guy, so I had a reader named James T, who has written me often with coin magic ideas, test it out for me.

What’s stronger? Coins changing from silver to copper? Or coins changing from old to new?

His answer? Coins changing from silver to copper got a better reaction.

My thinking was two-fold on this.

1. It’s more visually striking.

2. If a double-sided coin is theorized by the spectator, it’s probably easier for them to conceive of a coin that is tarnished on one side and polished on the other, than a coin that is copper on one side and a totally different silver coin on the other.

So it kind of makes sense.

He tested the trick out in late 2022, early 2023.

In summer of last year, he wrote me again. He was visiting his aunt’s place in Louisiana, where he spent a week twice a year. On her property is a large Weeping Willow tree.

And at certain times of the year you could step under the branches, and it was like stepping into a different little world. He wrote, “It’s like a strange little bubble,” that, “feels like being inside even though you’re outside.”And he mentioned he thought that could be a good setting for a trick, and I agreed.

He came up with some ideas to try out, and I asked him if he’d also try out that coin trick again. The premise would be that there’s almost a sort of “time lag” in this area. And he noticed how his mind always reverted to a more child-like state when he came under this tree. And he thought it was just a psychological thing, and it is mostly, but his grandmother told him how at certain times of the day, in certain times of the year, the effect was even more pronounced. And she showed him this thing you can sometimes do with older objects.

That’s the premise. I don’t know that it makes 100% sense, but it was what we had.

James ended up doing it for three different people last year.

He had the person for whom he was performing take a look at three older coins, and then he’d set two of them on the ground outside the tree’s canopy. They walked in together under the tree, and he showed the first old coin, and soon it changed to a brand new looking coin. “It’s still a 1986 quarter. But now it’s a new 1986 quarter.” After the coin changed, he dropped it in his shirt pocket.

He did this twice more. He reached outside of the tree and picked one of the old coins up off the ground. Showed it for a moment, and it turned into a new coin. Then he dropped it into his pocket.

In total, three old coins became new looking.

But when they stepped out from under the tree, he had his friend reach into his pocket, and now all the coins were old and tarnished again.

They tried another experiment. They stood together under the tree, and he placed a new-looking quarter in his friend’s hand. Then James stepped out of the tree, and they were facing each other with the tree’s canopy hanging between them. He had his friend reach her hand out, and he dropped an old quarter on her palm with the new looking coin. Then he had her close her hand. “We’ll do this sort of blindly. I’m going to reach in and take one at random.” He reached into her fist and pulled out the old looking coin.

Let’s reset the scene. He’s outside the tree with an old looking quarter in his hand. She’s under the tree and has a new quarter in her fist. But now he has them rotate around an invisible point between them, so he is now under the tree and she is outside of it. “Watch,” he says, and he waves the old coin and it becomes new. The coin in her hand, which was just new a moment ago when she was under the tree, is now old.

Both these tricks are standard routines with a copper/silver coin gimmick.

At that time, James reported back that when he performed these tricks with the old/new coin in this manner, the reactions were better than when he tested the trick out previously. But the reactions seemed similar to what they are with a copper/silver coin. So it seemed like a lot of extra work for maybe not that much greater of an impact.

Okay, fair enough. Copper/Silver is probably the more powerful transformation.

Except…

James was back in Louisiana last week, and he encountered two of the three people he showed that trick to. One of them said, “Do you remember that coin trick you showed me? I literally think about that whenever I pass that tree. Even if I pass it like four times a day.”

The other one said, “I’ve told everyone I know about that thing with the coins. Whenever I drive by your aunt’s place with someone, I tell them about it.”

This is over six months after it was originally performed.

As James wrote to me: “I’ve never had a trick stay with people like this. If I’m lucky they’ll remember the general details. But these girls remembered everything from the weather, to what I was wearing, and all the beats of the trick. I’ve never had anything close to that with [the standard copper/silver version of the trick]. It’s wild.”

There are two takeaways to this story. One of them is something I’ve written about for a while now, the other is a thought that’s been becoming clearer to me more recently. I’ll share them with you in tomorrow’s post: The Moral of the Old/New Coin.