20 Things You Didn't Know About The Prestige

The incident that ignites the feud between Angier and Borden is the death of Angier's wife, Julia (Piper Perabo), who drowns inside a tank when a magic trick goes wrong.

Cutter is able to smash open the tank and send her body tumbling to the floor, but it's too late, and all Angier can do is caress her lifeless face.

Through a modern lens, one thing that seems odd about this scene is the fact that nobody attempts to resuscitate Julia - using either chest compressions or rescue breaths - once the tank is broken open. At first glance this might just seem like an oversight, but there's actually a really simple reason why nobody in the room attempts to perform any life-saving measures: CPR hadn't been invented at the time.

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation - to give it its proper and less-catchy name - started to be used during the 1950s and 1960s, decades after Julia's death at the end of the 19th century. Once she was inside the tank, it was already too late.