Welcome to the

The Cups and Balls Museum Banner

The Oldest Trick in Magic

Featured in the Houston Museum of Natural Science exhibit -- Magic:The Science of Wonder.
Located outside of Houston, Texas, the cups and balls museum features examples of the props used to perform this ancient feat, as well as some historical references to this wonderful classic of magic.

To apply for a password, send e-mail to curator@cupsandballsmuseum.com

Be sure to put something like "Please send me a password." in the message body.
If there is no message, I will assume that your request is spam.

Note -- The Cups and Balls Museum has been off-line for a couple of years now, due to some unfortunate problems with various software vendors.

If your username and password no longer work correctly, please send an e-mail to curator@cupsandballsmuseum.com with the phrase "My password to the cups and balls museum no longer works," and I will take care of the problem immediately.

Please note that the Cups and Balls Museum is not open to the public.
It is a virtual museum only.


If you use Spam Arrest or some other similar spam filter program that requires that I send you a confirmation e-mail, click here.

If you use Firefox and have the WOT add-on click here.

The Cups and Balls Museum Entrance Icon

Click here to enter


Search function designed by Houston Magician Michael Satterwhite


When the web site was moved to the new servers, the search function ceased working.
It was revived by Tom Stamm, a database expert, origamist, musician and magician.

Thank you very much, Tom!


All pages on this site © Bill Palmer. All rights reserved.
For permission to republish contact Bill Palmer at the above e-mail address.











If you use Spam Arrest or any other similar spam filter that requires that I send you a request for permission to send you a password, please disable it until you receive the password. You have no idea what a pain in the wazoo it is to have to get permission to send you something you asked for in the first place.

Think about this: You want a password. So you send me an e-mail. Then I have to get a note from your e-mail nanny to send you something you asked for. It's a waste of my time. In fact, it's rude.

If you don't have Spam Arrest, you will normally get your password in an hour or so. If you do have it, it may take a week, a month, or even a year or two.
If you use Firefox with the WOT addon, you will get a message that this web site is untrustworthy. This is based upon the fact that I will not pay them for a certificate. Their certificate costs 390 Euros per year. I don't have that kind of money. They also claim that the server my web site is hosted upon has been responsible for sending out various trojan horses, worms and other kinds of virus. This is not possible, mainly because this site is hosted on an Apache server which uses Unix. Unix does not support these trojan horses, viruses, etc. However, if you are worried, note that on February 8, 2011, I added SiteLock®, which scans the whole web site and handles the same things WOT is supposed to protect you against. It is much less expensive and far more effective than WOT.

To better understand the situation with MyWOT, click here.