Pinetti is reported by George Johnson to have made the time on the watches of spectators in his audience regress half an hour, when audience members complained of him being late to begin his performance. See The Magic Wand, Vol. 16 No. 133, March 1927, p. 4. The clever swindle was accomplished by having stooges with watches in the audience, when few at this time owned them. This would have taken place sometime in the latter half of the eighteenth century or the first years of the nineteenth. There is a chance the story may be apocryphal. Johnson's source for it was an unnamed wanderer who heard it while somewhere in South America. The South American source was likely a newspaper, repeating the story from earlier European newspapers. The story appeared in the Apr. 10, 1813, issue of Affiches, annonces et avis divers, No. 67, approximately eight years after Pinetti's death. Other iterations were printed decades later in French and German newspapers (Messager du Midi, Vol. 9 No. 255, Sept. 17, 1856; Der Bazar: Illustrirte Damen Zeitung, May 8, 1869). Details vary in the recountings, and the stories may be newsroom fabrications. Nevertheless, the effect and a plausible method were established no later than 1813.

After this, the effect seems to have gone dormant until 1970, when Uri Geller was reported moving the hands on borrowed watches. This led to magicians devising methods for secretly altering the time on a spectator's watch.