Effect:
Your friend reaches into their pocket and grabs a handful of coins and sets them on the table. You turn your back and they pick one coin up, remembering what the date on the coin was.
Then they take the coin and mix it up with the rest of the change. You pick up each coin, and by looking at the date on the coin, are able to figure out which coin they selected.
Secret:
This one is a very cool coin trick. Want to learn how to do this coin trick? Great. The way it works is that when you are picking up the coins in order to “look at the date”, what you are actually doing is feeling the heat of the coins. Because of what’s called “specific heat” in physics – metals conduct heat better than wood and other materials. It’s because of this fact that when someone holds onto a coin for even just 20 or 30 seconds, the heat from their fingers will be transferred to the coin.
Sometimes, people may pick up on the method, if you don’t confuse them a bit by talking about the date. This is one of those tricks that if you play it up right, it can work wonders. If someone does guess that you’re just feeling which one is the hottest coin, then sometimes you can get away with directly throwing them off by saying. “I wish it were that easy, but I’m not telling the secret!”. That indirectly gets your friend to think that it must be something else, and that you still have a secret that you are keeping!So all you have to do is pick up the coins one at a time and pretend to look at the date. So imagine that you pick up a quarter, a nickel, a dime, and a couple pennies. But the coins could even be exotic foreign coins. When you get to the coin that is warm, say something like “This nickel was made in 1983. That’s interesting, because in 1983 blah blah blah was going on and I just knew that you’d pick it!
It’s perfect for the dinner table when you go out to eat with a few of your friends, or when you don’t have a deck of cards with you and someone asks for you to show them a magic trick! No trick coins required! You asked for a cool coin trick, and you got it!