Welcome to magic and welcome to the forums! I love the history of effects and their variations, so grab your favorite beverage and settle in for a good read.
So let's start with the slide talking about Vernon and the Cups & Balls -- not exactly. The Cups and Balls has been around for a while. There is a 1502 painting entitled
The Conjuror and a written description of the effect appears in Reginold Scott's
The Discoverie of Witchcraft which was published in 1584. A full routine is published in Professor Hoffman's
Modern Magic in 1876. A series of 13 lessons on the Cups and Balls was published by Ellis Stanyon in The Jinx magazine from 1937 to 1938. Dai Vernon's first publication of a Cups and Balls routine was his "Impromptu Cups and Balls" in 1948 in Stars of Magic. Vernon's classic routine was published in the Dai Vernon Book of Magic in 1957. Although Vernon's routine is the basis for many current routines (based significantly on Michael Ammar's teaching of the Cups and Balls since Ammar was a student of Vernon), Vernon didn't invent the effect.
And now onto Triumph. You are correct that there were a number of gaffed or as they called it back then "mechanical" decks to accomplish the effect. The first is Theodore DeLand's "Inverto" that was marketed in 1914 and then Charles' Jordan "Ultimo" that was marketed in 1919. Jordan also had an effect around the same time called "Reversed Cards" which used a regular deck and that was subsequently published in Hugard's Encyclopedia of Card Tricks in 1937. There also is an effect called "Reversible Cards" in Encyclopedia of Card Tricks that uses a stripper deck. The first record of there being a selected card is found in The Lost Notebooks of John Northern Hilliard (notebooks from the 1930s and 1940s by the author of Greater Magic that were published in 2002) which details Steward Judah's use of a selected card from the mid-1930s. "The S. L. Reversed Card," by Sid Lorraine which was published in Subtle Problems You Will Do and used Sid's Slop Shuffle. That effect was also published in 1948 in Royal Road to Card Magic as "A Tispy Trick." Vernon's Triumph was published in Stars of Magic in 1946. An interesting note is that the shuffle in Stars of Magic was not the shuffle Vernon actually used when performing Triumph -- According to Johnny Thompson, Vernon used a push-through shuffle with a single card block transfer.
Following that publication in Stars of Magic, everyone seems to have developed their variations. In 1948, Ed Marlo came out with "Marlo's Triumph" in Marlo in Spades. Marlo would actually have more than two dozen variations (including one called "Bored With Triumph"). There was a subsequent gimmicked version marketed by U.F. Grant in 1948 which is a variation of DeLand's "Inverto." To get a sense of the number of variations you can click on the following links to Dennis Behr's Conjuring Archive for
Versions of the Classic Plot and
Variations. John Racherbaumer has a book Arch Triumphs that explains 20 different versions and has a bibliography listing 186 versions.
Some of my favorite variations are Francis Carlyle's Upside Down Deck (in Scarne on Card Tricks), Paul Harris' Unshuffling Rebecca and Gambler vs. Mentalish vs. Magician (both in Art of Astonishment Volume 1); Derek Dingle's Color Triumphant (Dingle's Deceptions, The Complete Works of Derek Dingle and Arch Triumphs); John Bannon's
Play it Straight (in Impossibilia, Six.Impossible.Things and High Caliber), Dani DaOrtiz's
Open Triumph and So Sato's
Bushfire Triumph (Secrets of So Sato).
