He would wind up passing away because of an infected and ruptured appendix. A college student challenged Houdini about how strong his abdominal muscles were and punched him the stomach. He did narrowly escape death dozens of times during his act, but a simple punch to the stomach is what eventually seems to have killed him. Some folk stories say that Houdini was killed when he failed to get out of one his famous escapes. He would end up spending 25 years of his life investigating and discrediting mediums. His interest would quickly fade when he realized that mediums were basically doing the same thing that he was doing, but selling their performances at the expense of people’s emotions. When Houdini’s mother died, he became very intrigued with the idea that the living could communicate with the spirits of those who had passed on before. Spirituality That Turned Into a Public Mission. His ability to get out of a tight spot would eventually bring him a personal invitation to meet with Woodrow Wilson.Ĥ. Not bad for a kid that was born in Hungary as Erik Weisz, would later emigrate to the USA and change his name to Ehrich Weiss, or be known as the magician Ehrich the Great early on in his career. In 1910, he would become just the third person to fly across Australia. He had a love for flying and watched avidly as the technology developed in the early 1900’s. It Wasn’t All About Being On The Ground Either. Houdini taught several classes that would help soldiers be able to escape from handcuffs and ropes or how to escape from a sinking ship. Even then, however, it wasn’t always about magic. When the first world war broke out, he would also take his tricks to the troops to help entertain them. Houdini would end up passing along information to the British from what he learned while performing in both Germany and Russia thanks to the access he had to their heads of state. To the British, this meant that he would also make for the perfect spy. He was fluent in German and already had a knack for slight of hand. Houdini was well loved throughout the world. Many jail cells or locked containers had keys hidden in them as well. In a pinch, he’d bring in a partner who would just palm him a key before he’d begin his illusion. Whether it was under his foot or trapped in his hair, there was always a way to unlock the lock. Houdini would simply have keys tucked in places that no one would expect. The ability to get out of shackles or a lock wasn’t a complicated skill or relied on some strange level of flexibility. Houdini was and still is a superstar and here are some interesting facts about him. His nickname as the Master of Illusion is still true today even nearly a century after his death. His performances involved coffins, chains, shackles, and even jail cells. All Rights Reserved.One could easily argue that Harry Houdini created the modern magic performance. Begley writes, and was never quite the same again.Ĭopyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Reminding her of the commitment he had made to his father, he asked that she hold out her apron and, as Adam Begley adroitly puts it in his “Houdini: The Elusive American,” “poured the coins, a tinkling golden cascade, into his mother’s lap.” When she died a year later, Houdini “mourned extravagantly,” Mr. Nearly a quarter-century after his father’s death, having become famous as the Great Houdini, the performer demanded that one employer pay him in gold coins, and then took a sack of them to Cecilia. Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, he was “a mama’s boy all his life,” Joe Posnanski writes in “The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini.” Years later, long after the Weisz (now Weiss) family had moved to America, his dying father, an out-of-work rabbi in Manhattan, reminded Erik (now Ehrich) of an earlier promise to take care of his mother, Cecilia. If ever a life called for a brief reversion to Freudian psychobiography, it is that of the escape artist Harry Houdini.
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