I was recently asked by a fellow juggling history aficionado what I felt my most important discoveries have been during my time as a juggling historian and researcher. This was not an easy question to answer considering that I’ve written over 500 eJuggle articles and 15 books about juggling history. Obviously I’ve written biographies of many dozens of jugglers, from the most famous to the quite obscure. I’ve also written about many forms of juggling and props. However, I took the time to look back through my work and have settled on what may be my most important discoveries or areas of research.
Frank Le Dent
The obvious place to start is with my research into Frank Le Dent (1886 – 1948). If you look at juggling history books before my work, you would be lucky to find more than a single sentence mention Le Dent, if even that. He was a juggler that was almost completely overlooked and forgotten. This is despite the fact that the evidence clearly indicates that he performed 11 balls and 9 plates in the first decade of the twentieth century. This evidence includes many newspaper accounts, advertisements, and first hand accounts by other jugglers.
Why Le Dent’s achievements were forgotten still remains a mystery, although I believe his transition from numbers juggling with balls and plates to being an expert with top hats is one reason. Another reason for his lack of universal fame could be the fact that he was, despite his tremendous skill, primarily a comedy juggler, even from his early days of performing. This may have prevented many people from giving his achievements the respect that they were due.
I’ve written two eJuggle articles about Frank Le Dent. You can click here and here to read them.
Other Obscure But Important Jugglers
There are other jugglers similar to Frank Le Dent that somehow appear to have been passed over by previous historians. I’ve tried to focus on many of these performers in my research rather than writing about better known jugglers. These lesser known jugglers include Ollie Young (the inventor of club kick ups), Youna, Joseph Rosani, the Reverhos Trio, Ferry Mader, the Breen Family, Bert and Chrys Holt, Kathi Gultini, Zarmo, Anglo, Franco Piper, Eric Philmore, George Moore, Morris Cronin, the Mongadors, and many others.
Ollie Young
Ferry Mader
Chrys Holt
Kathi Gultini
The Society of American Jugglers – The First Attempt To Organize Jugglers
The IJA was formed in 1947 at a convention of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. Much has been written about how this came about, but until my research in 2018, it seems that no one knew that an earlier attempt had been made to form a juggling organization more than twenty-five years earlier. Between 1918 and 1921, Archie Onri, a professional juggler best known for his devil stick work, attempted to organize jugglers performing in the United States into a “Society of American Jugglers” through his “Juggling and Jugglers” column in Billboard Magazine. While this attempt to organize never got off the ground, the attempts to do so were lost to history until just a few years ago. You can read about this attempt by clicking here.
Juggling Stars Prior to Paul Cinquevalli
It has often been stated that Paul Cinquevalli (1859 – 1918) was the first famous juggler. While it was true that no juggler had attained anything close to his fame before hand, many have taken this to mean that we didn’t know much of anything about any jugglers prior to Cinquevalli’s advent in the 1880s. This is not quite the case. Jugglers such as Karl Rappo, Medua and Mooty Samme, and Ramo Samme were highly successful and known. I’m proud to have found information on other early jugglers that we didn’t know much of anything about. One of these was Signor Vivalla, the juggler whom P.T. Barnum managed at the start of the showman’s career. You can click here to read about this performer’s sad life.
Signor Vivalla
Another juggler of the early to mid 1800s was Old Malabar (Patrick Feeney, 1800 – 1883). We know a fair amount about this colorful character, who you can read about in my article from 2019 by clicking here.
Old Malabar
Old Malabar
Our knowledge of jugglers doesn’t just extend back to the 1800s. I’m very proud of my research into a number of talented wire-walking jugglers of the 1700s, including Mohamed Caratha, Anthony Madox, and Jacques Sandre. You can read about them by clicking here.
Mohamed Caratha
Anthony Madox
Jacque Sandre
The History of Juggling Props
Certainly one of the areas of research that I’ve focused on has been the origins and history of various juggling props. This includes articles on the history of balls, rings (click here, here, and here), and clubs (click here, here, here, here, and here), as well as many obscure and forgotten props such as cup sticks, tobacco pipes, table lamps, balancing whips, the whirligig, the hoop and glass, the Kara Box, and others. This area of research has also resulted in many articles sharing prop catalogs from many of the early juggling prop makers, such as Edward Van Wyck, Otto Maurer, Ellis Stanyon, Charles Devere, and others.
A future article will look at some other important areas of research that I’ve done over the past decade.
David Cain
David Cain is a professional juggler, juggling historian, and the owner of the world's only juggling museum, the Museum of Juggling History. He is a Guinness world record holder and 16 time IJA gold medalist. In addition to his juggling pursuits, David is a successful composer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and singer as well as the author of twenty-six books. He and his children live in Middletown, OH (USA).