Spoon Bending

Spoon bending as a mass cultural phenomenon began with Uri Geller, who rose to international fame in the early 1970s performing apparent psychokinetic feats, bending spoons and keys, seemingly restarting stopped watches, and reproducing simple drawings sealed in envelopes, on television and in demonstrations for scientists and journalists. Geller's claims briefly drew serious attention from physicists at the Stanford Research Institute, where Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ tested him alongside their remote-viewing subjects, though critics later argued Geller's SRI sessions were conducted under conditions too loose to rule out sleight of hand.

Geller's fame sparked a wider popular vogue: British television and radio audiences in the 1970s were invited to concentrate on household cutlery during broadcasts, and viewers reported bent spoons and stopped clocks in their own homes afterward, feeding a self-reinforcing cultural belief that ordinary people, not just a gifted performer, could produce the effect simply by trying. The craze made spoon bending, alongside telepathy, one of the most publicly recognisable psychokinesis claims of the twentieth century, discussed on chat shows and in newspapers around the world.

Bending metal through misdirection and pre-stressing is a well-understood technique among stage conjurors, and magician James Randi made exposing Geller's methods a central project of his career. Randi demonstrated repeatedly that every one of Geller's signature effects, including spoon bending, could be reproduced through ordinary sleight of hand: pre-bending a spoon slightly before the demonstration and using misdirection and a final small application of physical force, disguised as gradual mental effort, to complete the visible bend.

The clearest public test came on a 1973 broadcast of The Tonight Show: Randi, working behind the scenes with host Johnny Carson, ensured the spoons, keys, and other props were kept away from Geller until the moment of the demonstration, removing his usual opportunity to prepare them in advance, and Geller was unable to produce any effect during the entire segment, saying he did not feel strong that night. The episode is cited as a clean natural experiment: tightening physical control over the props to a level any conjuring explanation requires eliminated the results entirely, while looser conditions, of the kind under which Geller preferred to perform, consistently produced them. Despite continued parapsychological interest through the 1970s and beyond, spoon bending by any means other than ordinary physical technique has not been demonstrated under controls a skeptical, conjuring-literate observer accepts as adequate.