Harry Houdini Biography

Harry Houdini (March 24, 1874 – October 31, 1926) was the stage name of Ehrich Weiss, one of the most famous magicians, escapologists, and stunt performers of all time as well as an investigator of spiritualists. He legally changed his name to "Harry Houdini" in 1913.

Houdini was born as Erik Weisz on March 24, 1874 in Budapest, Hungary, to Jewish parents (his father was Rabbi Samuel Weisz, his mother was Cecilia Steiner Weisz). In 1878, his family moved to the United States, where the immigration authorities changed their surname to Weiss, and Erik's given name to Ehrich.
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At first, they lived in Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father, Mayer Samuel Weiss, served as rabbi of the Zion Reform Jewish Congregation. After losing his tenure, Mayer moved to New York City with Ehrich in 1887, where they lived in a boarding-house on East Seventy-ninth Street. Mr. Weiss later called for the rest of his family to join him once he found more permanent housing.

The name "Harry" came from a family pet name for Ehrich, Ehrie (rhymes with 'Harry').

In 1891, Ehrich became a professional magician, and began calling himself Harry Houdini as a tribute to the French magician Jean Eugčne Robert-Houdin. Initially, his magical career met with little success, though he met fellow performer Wilhelmina Beatrice (Bess) Rahner in 1893, and married her three weeks later. For the rest of his performing career, Bess would work as his stage assistant.

Houdini initially focused on cards and other traditional card acts. At one point he billed himself as the King of Cards. One of his most notable non-escape stage illusions was performed in London's hippodrome: he vanished a full-grown elephant (with its trainer) from a stage, beneath which was a swimming pool.

"My Two Sweethearts". Houdini with his wife and mother, ca. 1907.He soon began experimenting with escape acts, however. Harry Houdini's "big break" came in 1899, when he met the showman Martin Beck. Impressed by Houdini's handcuffs act, Beck advised him to concentrate on escape acts and booked him on the Orpheum vaudeville circuit. Within months, he was performing at the top vaudeville houses in the country. In 1900, Houdini travelled to Europe to perform. By the time he returned in 1904, he had become a sensation.

From 1904 and throughout the 1910s, Houdini usually performed with great success in the United States. He would free himself from handcuffs, chains, ropes and straitjackets, often while hanging from a rope or suspended in water, sometimes in plain sight of the audience. In 1913, he introduced perhaps his most famous act, the Chinese Water Torture Cell, in which he was suspended upside-down in a locked glass and steel cabinet full to overflowing with water.

He explained some of his tricks in books written in the 1920s. Many locks and handcuffs could be opened with properly applied force, others with shoestrings. Other times, he carried concealed lockpicks or keys, being able to regurgitate small keys at will. He was able to escape from a milk can which had its top fastened to its collar because the collar could be separated from the rest of the can from the inside. When tied down in ropes or straitjackets, he gained wiggle room by enlarging his shoulders and chest, and moving his arms slightly away from his body, and then dislocating his shoulders. His straitjacket escape was originally performed behind curtains, with him popping out free at the end. However, Houdini discovered that audiences were more impressed and entertained when the curtains were eliminated, so that they could watch him struggle to get out. He performed his straitjacket escape dangling upside-down from the roof of a building for increased dramatic effect on more than one occasion.

Difficult though it was, Houdini's entire act, including escapes, was also performed on a coordinated but separate tour schedule by his brother, Theo Weiss ("Dash" to the Weiss family), under the name "Hardeen". The major difference between the two was in the straitjacket escape; Houdini dislocated both his shoulders to get out, but Hardeen could dislocate only one.

In 1910, while on a tour of Australia, Houdini brought with him a primitive bi-plane with which he made the first controlled powered aeroplane flight in Australia, at Diggers Rest, Victoria.[1] History records that there were several competitors for the record-making flight, but they narrowly missed out.

Houdini swims above Niagara Falls in a scene from The Man from Beyond (1922)[edit]
Debunking spiritualists
In the 1920s, after the death of his beloved mother, he turned his energies toward debunking self-proclaimed psychics and mediums, a pursuit that would inspire and be followed by latter-day magicians James Randi and P. C. Sorcar, and even Penn and Teller. Houdini's magical training allowed him to expose frauds who had successfully fooled many scientists and academics. He was a member of a Scientific American committee which offered a cash prize to any medium who could successfully demonstrate supernatural abilities. Thanks to Houdini's contributions, the prize was never collected. As his fame as a "ghostbuster" grew, Houdini took to attending séances in disguise, accompanied by a reporter and police officer. Possibly the most famous medium whom he debunked was the Boston medium Mina Crandon, a.k.a. Margery.

These activities cost Houdini the friendship of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle, a firm believer in spiritualism during his latter years, refused to believe any of Houdini's exposés. Doyle actually came to believe that Houdini was a powerful spiritualist medium, had performed many of his stunts by means of paranormal abilities, and was using these abilities to block those of other mediums that he was 'debunking' (see Doyle's The Edge of The Unknown, published in 1931 after Houdini's death). This disagreement led to the two men becoming public antagonists.

Houdini's last performance was at the Garrick Theatre in Detroit, Michigan on October 24, 1926. The next day he was hospitalized at Detroit's Grace Hospital.

Houdini died of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix on Halloween, October 31, 1926, at the age of 52. Houdini had sustained multiple blows to his abdomen from McGill University boxing student J. Gordon Whitehead in Montreal two weeks earlier. A long-standing part of Houdini's act was to ask a member of the audience to punch him in the abdomen, but Houdini was reclining on his couch after his performance, in this instance, and was struck several times, without the opportunity to prepare himself for the blows. Despite popular belief, the appendicitis and not the blow was the cause of his death -- the pain inflicted by the blows probably masked the pain of the appendicitis, preventing the performer from seeking treatment.

Houdini's funeral was held on November 4 in New York, with over two thousand mourners in attendance. He was interred in the Machpelah Cemetery, Queens, New York, with the crest of the Society of American Magicians inscribed on his gravesite. The Society holds their "Broken Wand" ceremony at the gravesite on the anniversary of his death to this day.

Houdini left a final sting for his spiritualist opponents: shortly before his death, he had made a pact with his wife, Bess Houdini, to contact her from the other side if possible and deliver a pre-arranged coded message. Every Halloween for the next 10 years, Bess held a séance to test the pact. In 1936, after a last unsuccessful seance on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel, she put out the candle that she had kept burning beside a photograph of Houdini since his death, later (1943) saying "ten years is long enough to wait for any man."

The United States Postal Service issued a postage stamp with a replica of Houdini's favorite publicity poster on July 3, 2002.

"The Houdini Serial", 1919In 1919, Houdini signed a contract with film producer B.A. Rolfe to star in his fifteen part serial The Master Mystery. As was common at the time, the film serial was released simultaneously with a novel. However, financial difficulties resulted in B.A. Rolfe Productions going out of business and Houdini was signed by Famous Players-Lasky Corporation for whom he made two pictures before setting up his own film production company. Called the "Houdini Picture Corporation," he produced and starred in three films, writing the screenplay for one and directing two others. Although success in film eluded him and he gave up on the business in 1923, his celebrity became such that years later he would be given a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7001 Hollywood Blvd.

A mostly fictionalized version of Houdini's life was made in a film in 1953 starring Tony Curtis. Most of the misconceptions about Houdini's life are due in part to this film. For example, it portrayed him dying from the Chinese Water Torture Cell, instead of the less spectacular peritonitis.

British singer Kate Bush recorded a song about Houdini's wife visiting mediums to see if his soul had survived which was included on her 1982 album The Dreaming, the cover of which showed Bush as Mrs Houdini, passing a small key to her husband via a kiss.

Experiment 604 in Lilo and Stitch: The Series was named Houdini, in his honour.

Harry Houdini also appeared in the Image Comics title Spawn. In the two issue story-arc, (issues #19-#20) Houdini reveals to Spawn that he is actually a dimension-traveling hyper mage, ten times more powerful than his early 20th century stage act let on. Both Spawn and Houdini worked together to protect New York from extortion at the hands of physicists from the former Soviet Union who possessed a nuclear bomb. The disaster averted, Houdini again resumed his dimensional travels.

Controversy surrounds the decision by the Outagamie Museum in Appleton, Wisconsin to reveal the details of how Houdini performed his Metamorphosis trick.

On November 2, 2004, Houdini's last remaining niece, Marie H. Blood, passed away. Until shortly before her death, Ms. Blood attended magic conventions (including the Society of American Magicians's in New York, June 2002), signing autographs.

Ironically, Houdini is often called upon in seances by "psychics", and other charlatans he sought to debunk.

HARRY HOUDINI PICTURES

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HARRY HOUDINI BIOGRAPHY