Billed as “the Handcuff King,” he performed at vaudeville houses across the nation.Įver the scintillating showman, Houdini kept developing new tricks and escape techniques beyond merely wiggling out of a cop’s manacles. He emerged sans shackles and was soon riding the rails. As the New York Times reported in its obituary of Houdini, one night in Coffeyville, Kansas, the local sheriff baited him with his handcuffs, bellowing to the audience, “If I put these on, you’ll never get loose.” It was a challenge that changed the young performer’s life. The climax of his act in these early days of his remarkable career was when he invited anyone in the audience to tie him up and he would free himself, inside a locked cabinet. Dietrich, who is a leading female magician and a board member for the museum says, “He instills a feeling of wonder to everyone just by mentioning Houdini’s name.Ever the scintillating showman, Houdini kept developing new tricks and escape techniques beyond merely wiggling out of a cop’s manacles. “I am so amazed that even though Houdini died in 1926…the world is still baffled and mystified by him,” Dorothy Dietrich wrote on the Harry Houdini Museum website. More than 80 years later, Houdini still captures imaginations. His body was battered and bruised both by the acts themselves and all the training.” “His escape artistry required him to be in incredible physical condition, able to endure small spaces in a twisted pose and capable of wriggling free from straitjackets, chains and other ingenious restraints. “Houdini’s death was ironic and tragic in equal measure, ” says Ward. Houdini died of peritonitis seven days later October 31 at age 52. When Houdini had surgery to remove his appendix later that afternoon, doctors discovered it had ruptured and that he was suffering from peritonitis. He took the stage at Garrick Theater even with a fever of 104 and a diagnosis of acute appendicitis. Houdini still continued to travel while in severe pain, and arrived in Detroit on Octofor what would be his final performance. It’s likely Houdini’s appendix would have burst on its own without striking. Upon Houdini’s supposed approval, Whitehead delivered multiple blows to Houdini’s stomach, reportedly hitting him three times before the magician was able to tighten his stomach muscles to protect himself sufficiently. Whitehead asked to test Houdini’s claim to be able to absorb any blow to the body above the waist without injury. According to eyewitnesses, Houdini was laying on a couch having his portrait sketched by a student when Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead, a McGill University student, entered the room. Things came to a head after an October 20 performance at the Princess Theater in Montreal. But Houdini dismissed claims of the supernatural as so much quackery that cruelly played on the hopes of those who had lost loved ones.”īut how did he finally die? Houdini apparently had been suffering from appendicitis for weeks before his death on Halloween of 1926, but hadn’t sought out treatment. Spiritualism had an upsurge after World War I as populations that had suffered horrendous loses sought ways of coping. “Amidst the sensation,” says Ward, “what is not as well known, however, is that Houdini also spent much of his career debunking and exposing charlatans and con-men who used aspects of magic, especially séances with the dead, to dupe a credulous public. In it he was suspended upside-down in a locked glass and steel cabinet overflowing with water. His 1912 underwater box escape in New York’s East River was proclaimed by Scientific American magazine as “one of the most remarkable tricks ever performed.” And Houdini continued his string of legendary stunts, debuting his legendary Chinese Water Torture Cell later that year. Houdini escaped from a wide variety of objects, including items suggested by his audience: straitjackets, boilers, wet sheets, milk jugs and supposedly even the belly of a preserved “ 1,600-pound sea monster” that had washed ashore in Boston. Houdini performing the Chinese Water Torture Cell.
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