Harry Houdlni's Escape from Ehrich Weiss
EPSTEIN, DANIEL MARK
hen my grandfather was a boy he saw the wild-haired magician escape from a riveted boiler. He would remember that image as long as he lived, and how Ham Houdini, the rabbi's son, defeated (he...
...He was the Bobby Fischer of locks...
...The spectacle of this American Jew bursting from chains by dint of ingenuity did not amuse the rich...
...The publicity surrounding his escape from the most prestigious police force in the world opened up many another door for the young magician...
...Then they stood back to watch...
...But Hermann died as Houdini was about to ask him the question...
...He hired the most prominent trial lawyer in Cologne and ordered him to sue Werner Graff and the German Imperial Police for criminal libel...
...In the Strafkammer, or court of appeals, he presented thirty letters from legal authorities declaring that the escape artist could not justify his advertisements...
...On March 17, before a house of 4,000 in the London Hippodrome, a journalist fastened the cuffs on Houdini's wrists and turned the key six times...
...There was no trap door in the floor of the Hippodrome, and the elephant could not fly...
...On January 7, 1918, Houdini had a 10,000-pound elephant led onto the bright stage of the Hippodrome in New York City...
...In March of 1904, the London Daily Mirror discovered a blacksmith who had been working for five years to build a set of handcuffs no mortal man could pick...
...The long-enduring marriage produced no children...
...Houdini died in Detroit on Halloween in 1926, of acute appendicitis...
...The journalist denied the request, since Houdini had never before seen the handcuffs unlocked, and unlocking them might give him an advantage...
...His own technique was so highly evolved that its practice might have satisfied him, but his curiosity was unquenchable...
...Whether or not the acts were supernatural is beside the point—billing them as such was bad business and hazardous to life and limb...
...These are facts that cannot be exaggerated, lor they were conceived as exaggerations...
...So on his opening night at Dresden's Central Theater, Houdini arranged to be fettered in the leg irons and manacles of the Mathilde-gasse Prison...
...By the time Melville got to the door the magician was free to open it for him...
...So at last we know- more about Houdini's technique than about any other magician's...
...Houdini used his strength and athletic ability to extricate himself from the tightly fitting straitjacket in which he was hung upside down...
...The packing case was hauled up intact, with the manacles inside, still fastened...
...diligent study assured him that, as of 1901, there could be no such locksmith on the face of the earth...
...His straitjacket escapes he performed in full view of the world, so they could see it was by main force and flexibility that he freed himself...
...Had the Jew so much as hinted his powers were spiritual, he might have expected no better treatment than the renegade Hebrew of Nazareth...
...on the contrary, he continually denied that he had such powers Houdim's marriage in 1894 to Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, a Roman Catholic, though discouraged by his wife's family, was embraced by his mother, his only surviving parent at that time...
...The son of a rabbi, Houdini pursued his studies with rabbinic thoroughness...
...The "Challenge" act filled the Alhambra Theater for two months...
...Graff's lawyer appealed the case...
...He asked the judge to clear the courtroom, and in the ensuing turmoil the magician released himself so quickly no one knew how he had done it...
...mi lid one would miss the point...
...According to Houdini...
...It sounds like sheer euphemism...
...The police chief reluctantly signed the certificate Houdini demanded, but the newspapers gave him little coverage...
...But ten minutes later there was a cry from the cabinet and Houdini leaped out of it, free, waving the handcuffs high in the air...
...Strange, because it was Houdini's habit to escape only from barred jail cells where the locks were within easy reach, and then only after inspection so he might hide picks in crannies or excuse himself if he foresaw failure...
...It seemed a sure case of technique unleashing a supernatural force...
...In California he was buried six feet underground, and clawed his way out...
...They could not hear him and kept right on shoveling as fast as they could, so as not to keep him waiting...
...They were interrupted four minutes later by the entrance of Houdini, who tossed the manacles on the judge's bench...
...It was not until 1899, when his manager, Martin Beck, convinced Houdini to eliminate magic from his act and specialize in escapes that Houdini broke into the big-time vaudeville circuits...
...In the same Canadian museum, you may view the Chinese water torture cell in which the magician was hung upside down in water, his ankles padlocked to the riveted roof...
...This time Count von Windheim, the highest ranking policeman in Germany, signed the certificate of Houdini's escape...
...While the crowd roared, several men from the audience carried Houdini on their shoulders around the theater...
...If you are a scholar you can inspect them...
...Give a wizard twenty years to build a cabinet that snuffs an elephant, and you will applaud his cleverness if he succeeds, in the controlled environment of his theater...
...But surrender the same man, stark naked, to the Russian police, who stake their honor upon detaining him in a prison van, and you may well suspect the intercession of angels should he get out...
...Someone called out that Houdini had been handcuffed for more than an hour...
...At Hanover, the police chief, Count von Schwerin, plotted to disgrace Houdini, challenging him to escape from a special straitjacket reinforced with thick leather...
...But so much controversy has arisen concerning his powers—so much conjecture that they may have been supernatural—thai extraordinary measures have been taken to assure us Houdini was a mortal genius...
...Then, during his Berlin engagement, he worked up to ten hours a day at Mueller's locksmith on the Mittelstrasse, studying restraints...
...We know how Houdini got out of other handcuffs, but not these...
...When the magician at long last opened at the Olympic Theater in Paris, in December of 1901, he was the highest-paid foreign entertainer in French history...
...Houdini is reported to have said, "I don't bribe police officers or set up fake challenges...
...But before we grapple with the mysteries, let us begin with what we can understand...
...They polished the act until it happened in less than three seconds—three rather blurred seconds in their own minds...
...Until his death, his place of birth was always mentioned as Appleton, Wisconsin, not Budapest His father, Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weiss, left Hungary after he killed a man in a duel over anti-Semitic name-calling...
...The manager wanted to buy out Houdini's contract with the Wintergarten of Berlin so as to hold him over in Dresden, but the people of Berlin could not wait to see the magician...
...In 1908, thousands of spectators watched as Houdini jumped and then reappeared 35 seconds later, carrying the chains in his unfettered hands...
...One possible reason why he was not an observant Jew on a day-to-day basts is that he did not have the responsibility of teaching his own children Houdini was conscious that there was a certain amount of anti-Semitism, and that he had best be on his guard, especially during his tour of Germany in the earty 1900s...
...A while later they saw his bleeding hands appear above the ground...
...The friendship was an odd one...
...He obeyed in his work the talmudic injunctions against performing miracles...
...Booked at the Alhambra Theater in London, he performed his "Challenge" handcuff act, which had made him famous on the vaudeville circuit...
...The chisa4ad-mart>4e monument marking Houdim's grave was vandalized in 1975...
...bul they do not know how he made the elephant disappear in 1918...
...The great critic Edmund Wilson, who admired Houdini and understood his gifts, recognized that the magician had appeared at a critical moment in the history of spiritualism...
...Yet it remained a private and professional concern until Houdini's career forced it upon the public...
...And like their colleagues the world over, the Dresden police viewed Houdini's news clippings as so much paper in the balance with their locks and chains...
...The disturbing news is that, 62 years after his last performance, some of his more spectacular escapes remain unexplained...
...We have additional information from technicians and theater historians...
...They wanted desperately to demythologize him...
...Audiences in Liverpool, Leeds and Paris rioted, stormed the stage and ran the mediums out of town, crying that their performances were an outrage against God and a danger to man...
...His expertise was the escape act, that specialty of magic furthest removed from theater, for its challenges are quite real and sometimes beyond the magician's control...
...After almost an hour, Houdini came out of the cabinet again, obviously worn out, and his audience groaned...
...When he did, it was to hold the lock up to the light...
...When the Houdinis performed the "Metamorphosis," Bess would handcuff Harry, tie him in a sack and lock him in a trunk...
...What concerns us here are a few sentences that, coming from the woman who shared his life and work and who maintained her loyalty to Houdini alive and dead, we must regard as altogether startling...
...Influenced by Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin's life, Ehrich changed his name to Houdini, creating a link between himself and his spiritual mentor...
...Houdini, the Family Man Born Ehrich Weiss, Harry Houdini traveled to the United States as an infant from his native Budapest It is not clear whether most of his vast audience knew that Houdini was Jewish...
...There, a German judge and jury would try his skill, and, should they find it wanting, Houdini would be washed up, exiled to play beer halls and dime museums...
...Houdini might have stayed there if Germany had not already booked him...
...So he demanded that Graff apologize and the newspaper publish a retraction...
...Ehrich, the fourth of seven children, had to shine shoes and sell newspapers at a young age to help put food on the table...
...inside out over his head, he shredded it loose with the penknife and returned to the cabinet...
...At the age of 17, Ehrich Weiss read the Memoirs of Hjbert-Houdin, the autobiography of one of France's greatest performers...
...But Henning would be the first to tell you his was not Houdini's version but his own, and Henning would not do it onstage before a live audience seven nights a week, with matinees on Wednesday and Saturday, because the trick would be unspeakably dangerous even if he could perform it there...
...It was in a letter to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who had been a close friend of hers and Houdini's...
...The judge allowed Werner Graff to seek out the most stubborn locks and chains he could find and tangle Houdini in them, in full view of everyone...
...By command of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany...
...It is perhaps no more remarkable than that an American Jew won a verdict against the German police for criminal libel in 1901, or reversed a religious movement in America in 1922...
...More than 80 years of technological progress have shed no light upon it...
...The management appealed to the theater that would host Houdini's next engagement, in Vienna, so they might hold him over an extra month in Berlin...
...He escaped, hundreds of limes, from the most secure prisons in the world...
...The request was denied...
...In Dortmund, he escaped from the irons that had bound Glowisky, a notorious murderer, beheaded three days before...
...Their manacles were paper to him...
...It is an issue he carefully avoided in public while studying it diligently in private...
...Houdim's sense that life is learning was an important Jewish value probably transmitted to Houdini by his father...
...Where we remain troubled by a few of his illusions and escapes, our ancestors were horrified by most of them...
...As far as anyone can tell, the Mirror handcuffs remain as the blacksmith described them—a set of handcuffs no mortal man could pick...
...The method of this trick is only mysterious if you cannot pay for it...
...The revolt of 1905 was in its planning stages and the Imperial Police were understandably touchy...
...How did he do such things...
...Houdini began leaping from bridges as a publicity stunt to interest spectators in buying tickets to his shows...
...Sealed inside an airtight box, Houdini remained underwater for an hour and a half, discrediting a similar stunt performed by the fakir Rahman Bey, who claimed that because of his psychic powers he had survived in a box of the same dimensions for an hour...
...Such tireless ingenuity produced the incandescent light bulb and the atom bomb...
...The Schoffengericht fined the astonished policeman and ordered a public apology...
...But the Siberian transport cell made his blood boil...
...Whereupon Houdini, in full view of the 4,000, extracted a penknife from his pocket and opened it with his teeth...
...Two months later, Graff was better prepared...
...And how on earth did he do it...
...The maestro himself misjudged the weight and, realizing his folly, tried to signal his crew when the grave was not yet full...
...He did this, he did that...
...Upon Houdmi's death, an envelope sealed 10 years earlier was opened to reveal Houdmi's instructions for his burial in Machpelah Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, with his mother and other family members Houdini stands by hit mother's grave in the Machpelah cemetery, New York, when he would eventually he buried To the right is the headstone marking hit brother Hermann's grave...
...HARRY H ESCAPE FROM EHRICH WEISS DANIEL MARK EPSTEIN 90 seconds later Houdini surfaced...
...Houdini remained close to his mother throughout his life...
...There is no evidence that he ever failed, though in several cases he nearly died from the effort required to escape from sadistic shackles...
...Doyle never stopped trying to get Houdini to confess...
...But his instinct was sound...
...Nor was he mistaken by the aristocracy, who stayed away in droves...
...That might suggest a crisis of confidence...
...And, from the beginning of his career, he sought out the living legends of magic and badgered them in retirement, sometimes with tragicomic results...
...Two friends of mine once acted it in my living room as a birthday present...
...It was as if the man himself had been overwhelmed by his escape...
...But the growing congregation became disillusioned with the rabbi's old-country traditions and he was replaced by a younger man Weiss continued to move the family, holding odd jabs along the way—mainly teaching Torah—until they finally settled in New York City...
...Of course, more wonderful than any of these skills was the courage that allowed him to employ them in predicaments where any normal person would panic...
...After Houdini stopped making elephants disappear, nineteen weeks later, the trick would never be precisely duplicated...
...Mounted on a wagon, the zinc-lined steel cell stood in the prison courtyard in view of Chief Lebedoff, his staff and a number of civilians...
...After some card tricks and standard illusions, Houdini would stand before the proscenium and challenge the world to restrain him with ropes, straitjackets, handcuffs—whatever they could bring on— from lock shops, prisons and museums...
...II ¦lAoudini was not Solomon...
...The police were so furious they would not sign' the certificate of escape, but so many people witnessed the event that the news was soon being shouted all over Moscow...
...With the same determination that opened the world's locks, Houdini searched for an answer...
...The magician's wrists were padlocked and his ankles fettered before the police locked him into the convict-proof van...
...Houdini's work was no more miraculous than his life...
...Such a claim, Graff wrote, was a lie, and Houdini ought to be prosecuted for fraud...
...c Wl9 o we come to the central issue in the case of Harry Houdini...
...No magician will reveal Houdini's secrets— their code forbids it...
...He would remember that image as long as he lived, and how Ham Houdini, the rabbi's son, defeated (he German Imperial Police al the beginning of the 20th century...
...There had not been such a public display of apparent miracles in nearly 2,000 years...
...Germany, even in 1901, was one of the most authoritarian states in the world...
...Again, as with the vanishing elephant, we are reviewing a stage illusion under controlled conditions, and may bow to a master's technical superiority without fretting that he used supernatural powers...
...Let Houdini try to get out of these...
...He hung upside down in a strait jacket from the tallest buildings in America, and escaped in full view of the populace...
...The couple worked odd jobs in a circus, a medicine show, and at one time with an older magician, rarely earning more than $20 or $30 a week...
...The magician retired to his cabinet onstage, and the band struck up a march...
...That explanation is as good as any...
...The court fined Werner Graff thirty marks and ordered him to pay for the trials as well as a published apology...
...He only tried it once, and nearly died in the struggle, but the feat was attested, and you do not need a degree in physics to know it is as preposterous as rising from the dead...
...In the Houdini Museum at Niagara Falls, Canada, you may view the famous Mirror handcuffs...
...The Houdini problem arises from certain outrageous effects no one has ever been able to explain, though capable technicians have been trying for more than sixty years...
...the packing ease was dropped from a tugboat into New York's East River and Houdini mounted a show to unmask spiritualists...
...To order the book, see p. 13...
...But the Mirror handcuffs and the Siberian van escape are troublesome, as are certain of Houdini's escapes from reinforced straitjackets and packing cases under water...
...A single failure might have ruined him...
...She would draw a curtain hiding the trunk, and then it would open, showing Houdini free upon the stage...
...Try doing this with no oxygen...
...With a chessmaster's foresight, Houdini devised a set of picks to release every lock in existence, as well as any he could imagine...
...Houdini arrived in Berlin in October of 1900...
...When Werner Graff snapped the "new" handcuffs on Houdini, they were not strange to the magician...
...at the news of her death in 1913, he fainted to the floor...
...Behind him are the objects used in the act he had established with his wife, Bess...
...He amassed the world's largest collection of books pertaining to magic and the occult, and no less a scholar than literary critic Edmund Wilson honored Houdini's authority...
...It was the escapes, as his wife later wrote, that were truly dangerous, and Houdini privately admitted some anxieties about them...
...Only a locksmith whose knowledge surpassed Houdini's could stop him...
...His new first name, Harry, may have derived from a nickname given to him by his brothers—Ehrie...
...Houdini went on with his program, which might have been making the Hippodrome disappear, for all the audience knew...
...You have probably seen this classic illusion...
...The weight of the earth is so crushing, you could not lift it in the open air...
...But meanwhile, there was big trouble brewing in Germany...
...He crusaded against mediums, clairvoyants and all who claimed psychic power, advertising that he would reproduce any of their manifestations by mechanical means...
...He demonstrated how cheesecloth could be made to appear as a "spirit" in a dimly lit room, and how messages from the dead were created by eichanging a blank slate for one with writing...
...Would that Albert Einstein had been so discreet in 1905...
...A reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle noted: "The program says that the elephant vanished into thin air...
...As far back as 1895, it seemed to Houdini something peculiar was going on when he performed the "Metamorphosis" with his wife, Beatrice, who was known as Bess...
...When Houdini died he willed the contraption to his brother Hardeen, a fine magician in his own right...
...Looking down on the scene was a bust of the Kaiser against a crimson background, and a scroll that read: "The Imperial Police of Cologne slandered Harry Houdini . . . were compelled to advertise 'An Honorary Apology' and pay costs of the trials...
...There has never been any man who appeared to be more capable of effecting miracles than Houdini, and yet Jewish tradition tells us mat even rf miracles are possible, human beings are not to perform them Nowhere in his writings will you find an affirmation that he was able to defy the laws of physics...
...Spiritualism was a homegrown, persuasive religious movement, a bizarre reaction to American science and pragmatism...
...One is tempted to dismiss the whole affair as mass hypnosis...
...The tone of this letter, penned so soon after her husband's death, is somber throughout, painfully sincere...
...Despite his constant reassurances that his effects were technical, and natural, the practical-minded layman could not believe it, and even fellow magicians were disturbed by his behavior...
...J> Adapted from "The Case of Harry Houdini" which appeared in Daniel Mark Epstein's collection, Star of Wonder...
...Settling me family m Appleton, Wisconsin, the elder Weiss took a job as me town's first rabbi...
...That is the single "conventional" illusion of Houdini's repertoire that remains unexplained...
...Of course, the Dresden police had no more success than those of Kansas City or San Francisco or Scotland Yard...
...As the band played on, the journalists of the Daily Mirror could taste the greatest scoop of the 20th century...
...He had a message that he delivered forcefully: Humankind cannot be held in chains...
...And to admit such a power, in his position, would have been a monumental stupidity...
...If the police began calling him a fraud in every town he visited, Houdini would lose his audience...
...He was sealed into a paper bag and gol out without disturbing the seal...
...Where was Bess...
...In 1922, it was more than a personal issue...
...He was probably telling the truth as he understood it...
...The trick is performed fifteen feet from the backdrop and the cabinet is slightly elevated...
...Mediums made such claims at their own risk...
...And when people asked him why he did not continue, he told them that Teddy Roosevelt, a great hunter, had begged him to stop before he exhausted the world's supply of pachyderms...
...He may or may not have been able to dislocate his shoulders at will—he said he could, and it seems no more marvelous than certain other skills he demonstrated...
...The Society of American Magicians quickly replaced the desecrated monument This time, the court permitted Houdini to work in privacy, and a guard led the magician to an adjacent chamber...
...They could not hold him...
...Ten minutes later Houdini stuck his head out, asking if he could have a cushion to kneel on...
...It was not a simple matter of pride...
...Yet Houdini's lecture-demonstrations and exposures of false mediums only fueled Doyle's suspicions that his friend was the real thing, a physical medium...
...Houdini agonized for one and a half hours while von Schwerin looked on, his jubilant smile melting in wonder, then rage, as the magician worked himself free...
...Graff, along with von Schwerin and other officials, feared Houdini was weakening their authority and inviting jailbreaks, if not other kinds of antisocial behavior...
...He also made a point of neither smoking nor drinking...
...Houdini's creation of a theatrical metaphor made a comparable impact on the human spirit...
...Graff refused, and other German dailies reprinted his letter...
...To wit: Can a magician, by the ultimate perfection of a technique, generate a force that, at critical moments, will achieve a supernatural result...
...If he ever experienced a psychic power, it surely humbled his understanding...
...The Wintergarten was overrun with spectators...
...Throughout his life Houdini categorically denied that any of his effects were achieved by supernatural means...
...This trick he performed only for a few months in New York...
...There was standing room only in the Cologne Schoffengericht...
...A libel case against Graff would turn upon the magician's claim that he could escape from any restraint, and the courtroom would become an international theater...
...the same athletic prowess, when applied at the bottom of the East River or while dangling from a rope attached to the cornice of the Sun newspaper building in Baltimore—these talents account for the vast majority of Houdini's exploits...
...Though he knew the letter was nonsense, the magician could not ignore it, for it was dangerous nonsense...
...Everyone else settled down for a long wait, in a chatter of anticipation...
...The police ran to the door of the van...
...The creator of Sherlock Holmes believed in spiritualism, and championed the seance with all the fervor with which Houdini opposed it...
...We know he was a superbly conditioned athlete who did not smoke or take a drop of alcohol...
...Nobody saw him get out, but he was out...
...There were two great mysteries in Doyle's life: the powers of Sherlock Holmes and the powers of Harry Houdini...
...And Graff had brought a shiny new pair of handcuffs, engineered especially for the occasion by the premier locksmith of Germany...
...The seance had become big business in America, with millions of bereaved relatives paying to communicate with their dear departed...
...We know he did these things because his actions were more public than the proceedings of Congress, and most of them he performed over and over...
...He was crying as if his heart would break...
...the Germans could hardly wait to get a look at him...
...Bess, his wife of 30 years, was loyal to him in this, as in all other things...
...As I told Lady Doyle often he would get a difficult lock, I stood by the cabinet and I would hear him say, ' 'This is beyond me," and after many minutes when the audience became restless I nervously would say, ' 'Harry, if there is anything in this belief in Spiritism—why don't you call on them to assist you," and before many minutes had passed Houdini had mastered the lock...
...Doug Henning has written, "It remains one of his escapes about which the real method is pure conjecture...
...He was not the greatest illusionist of his time, though he was among the better ones...
...For all his other talents, Houdini was a notoriously wooden actor, and we may assume the rare tears were altogether real, the product of an uncounterfeitable emotion...
...Some of the locks weighed forty pounds...
...One can hardly blame them...
...But Hardeen would not get in it either, and the instructions were to be burned upon his death...
...I \\r\ know how Houdini wulkcd through the brick wall at Hammcrslein's Root Garden in 1914...
...Pestered for revelations about Houdini's magic long after his death, the widow swore by her husband's accounts...
...In 1901, when Houdini took on the German Imperial Police, he was not whistling in the dark...
...So when the Houdinis had done the trick they were often as stunned as their audiences...
...On May 11, 1903, the chief of the Russian secret police searched the naked Houdini inside and out...
...Remember that most "Challenge" handcuffs were regulation, and familiar to Houdini...
...Also, in case he should forget the Jewish law, it is strictly against the magician's code to claim a supernatural power, for reasons impossible to ignore...
...Only an artist with colossal pride and total confidence in his methods would act as Houdini did...
...The cumulative anger of the German police went public in July 1901...
...By the time he had left America at the end of the 19th century, he had dissected every kind of lock he could find in the New World, and whatever he could import from the old one...
...Yet the Davenports were no more than a sideshow compared to Houdini...
...Inside the trunk, inside the sack, handcuffed—there was Bess...
...And that is exactly what Houdini did, in one of the strangest and most celebrated escapes of his career...
...In the face of spiritualists who accused him of being a physical medium, he protested that all his escapes and illusions were tricks...
...He wanted the handcuffs to be unlocked for a moment so he could take off his coat, as he was sweating profusely...
...If we find Houdini's record unsettling, imagine what our grandparents must have thought of him...
...Then they would slam him into a cell and turn the kr\ ul a thrce-b.....i burglar-prool lock...
...but his publicity boasted he could escape from restraints of any kind...
...Turning the coat Houdini preparing for an underwater feat at the Hotel Shelton pool in New York City, 1926...
...Hearing those tales and others even more incredible, 62 years after the magician's death, we cannot help but wonder what did the historical Houdini really do...
...If for no other reason, because the Talmud forbids the performance of miracles, and Houdini was the obedient son of Rabbi Weiss...
...So is the fact that he was buried six feet underground and clawed his way out...
...He did not emerge for twenty minutes...
...He was sewn into a huge loot ball, into the belly of a whale, and escaped...
...He searched the markets, antique shops, and locksmiths, buying up all the European locks he could find so he could dismantle and study them...
...The European middle class had reached an impressionable age, and the meaning of Houdini's theater was not lost upon them...
...They knew almost nothing of his technique...
...It was not about to happen in the German courtroom...
...Houdini's first tour or Europe depended upon the good will and cooperation of the law...
...I get out with my specialized knowledge and muscle power...
...Houdini eiposed their tricks...
...A trainer marched the elephant around a cabinet large enough for an elephant, proving there was space behind...
...The police stripped him naked and searched him thoroughly before binding his wrists and ankles with five pairs of irons...
...Many secrets have leaked out, and others have been discovered from examining the props...
...Houdini performing a publicity stunt for his show at Keith's Theater in Washington, D.C...
...Twenty-eight minutes later Houdini was walking around the courtyard, stretching...
...To cheapen the supernatural claims of the fakir Rahman Bey, Houdini remained underwater in an iron box for ninety minutes, as against the fakir's sixty...
...The Handcuffed and chained, Houdini prepares to jump into Boston's Charles River...
...Doyle knew the Houdinis intimately, and nothing the magician said could shake Sir Arthur's conviction that certain of Houdini's escapes were supernatural...
...Perplexed, Houdini planned to interview Hermann the Great, the preeminent conjuror in America, in 1895, to ask Hermann what was up...
...This was not a subject for levity, this being the central issue in the life of Harry Houdini...
...Arriving in London, Houdini could write that there were only a few kinds of British handcuffs, ' 'seven or eight at the utmost," and these were some of the simplest he had ever seen...
...Houdini ushered the pachyderm into the cabinet and closed the curtains...
...The Dresden officers were not enthusiastic, yet they could hardly refuse the magician's invitation to lock him up...
...When he arrived in London in 1900 (he twenty-six-year-old magician did not have a single booking...
...He had already invented them, so to speak, as well as the pick to open them, and the pick was in his pocket...
...Two of the more famous mediums of the 19th century, Ira and William Davenport, achieved manifestations similar to Houdini's...
...Let us briefly recall those effects...
...Inspector Werner Graff witnessed Houdini's escape from all the manacles at the Cologne police station and vowed to end the humiliation...
...The young Houdini pulling silk scarves from a small tube held in his hands...
...It seems the police there had little sense of humor about Houdini's peculiar gifts, and the Jew had quickly exhausted what little there was...
...The same tireless ingenuity, when applied to locks and jails, packing cases and riveted boilers...
...The newspaper challenged Houdini to escape from them...
...Here was a hitch, for Houdini did not wish to show the crowd his technique...
...The audience, packed to the walls, went wild over his escape, and the fact that he spoke their language further endeared him...
...If anything could have held him captive, it would have been the adoring burghers of Dresden, who mobbed the theater for weeks...
...Should Harry Houdini sue the German policeman for libel...
...What else can we understand about the methods of Harry Houdini, born Ehrich Weiss...
...He accused mediums and psychics of using cheap tricks to prey on the emotion* ami wallets of naive spectators, harming the reputation of magicians...
...Viennese finally yielded, demanding an indemnity equal to Houdini's salary for one month...
...We just knew that that particular instrument was the one to open that lock, and so did all his tricks...
...Believe me, you cannot get into the trunk in less than three seconds...
...Houdini was the self-proclaimed avatar of nothing but good old American know-how, and that is how he wished to be remembered...
...But Rabbi Drachman, who spoke at Houdini's funeral and had been in a position to receive confidences, said, "Houdini possessed a wondrous power that he never understood, and which he never revealed to anyone in life...
...Perhaps the vandals believed a magician who had announced that the secrets of Houdim's escapes were hidden there...
...magicians combined physical prowess and careful study to accomplish feats of skill, not of the supernatural- Using his knowledge of the techniques employed by psychics...
...he was a vaudeville specialist...
...it sounds like the Houdinis' lifetime of work had uncovered a power so terrifying they would not admit it to each other, let alone the world...
...Houdini was the only man living who had the authority, and the competence, to expose the predatory mediums, and his success was decisive...
...I ow this is surely a wondrous tale, like something out of the Arabian Nights, and it will seem no less wonderful when we understand the technique that made it come true...
...As he had done in the United States and England, Houdini began his tour of Germany with a visit to police headquarters...
...Weiss was so completely absorbed in his talmudic studies that he was never able to provide well for his large (amity...
...We never attributed this to psychic help...
...Houdini explained the techniques he developed to accomplish this feat He breathed deeply until the lid of the box was shut, then lay flat on his back, moved as little as possible, and conserved oxygen by breathing rhythmically with short intakes of air...
...His news clippings eventually inspired an English agent, who had Houdini manacled to a pillar in Scotland Yard...
...So what if Harry Houdini, once in a while, "spirited" himself out of a Siberian van, or a pair of Mirror handcuffs, or a packing case at the bottom of the East River...
...It is, of course, the essential mystery of classical magic since before the Babylonians...
...For all rational people who are curious, 62 years after the magician's death, there is good news and bad news...
...But the Houdinis' timing of the "Metamorphosis" got very mysterious indeed...
...Two months after Houdini died, Sir Arthur wrote to Bess, in despair of ever learning the truth from the magician's lips, and she wrote Doyle a long letter in response...
...Werner Graff explained to the judge that the lock, once closed, could never be opened, even with its own key...
...What kind of double-talk is this, when the widow refers to the summoning of spiritual aid as "that particular instrument," as if a spirit were no different from any other skeleton key...
...Much of our knowledge comes from the magician's writings, for Houdini kept ahead of his imitators by exposing his cast-off tricks...
...And routinely, the magician would hold his breath for as long as four minutes to work underwater escapes...
...He was chained hand and foot and nailed into a packing case weighted with lead...
...In all fairness, Doyle was a credulous old gentleman who knew nothing of Houdini's techniques...
...He was born in Budapest on March 24, 1874, but told the world he was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, on April 6. Not until after World War II did Americans discover that their greatest magician was an alien...
...His escape from this cell was the crowning achievement of his stage career, and though he performed it on tour during the last ten years of his life, no one has the slightest notion of how he did it...
...Then he opened them, and where the elephant had stood there was nothing but empty space...
...Seeing that Houdini was securely fastened...
...And while magicians such as Doug Henning are bound not to expose their colleagues, they are free m admit whai mystifies I hem...
...The European journalists thought he was some kind of hobgoblin, a shapeshifter who could crawl through keyholes or dematerialize and reappear at will...
...The good news is that we know how the vast majority of Houdini's tricks were done, and the explanations are as fascinating as the mystery was...
...We have mentioned the disappearing elephant...
...The newspaper accounts arc voluminous and consistent...
...So Graff wrote a letter to Cologne's newspaper, the Rheinische ?eitung...
...Houdini's writings show this was the abiding concern of his intellectual life...
...Consider the circumstances...
...But against her best intentions, Bess clouded the issue by saying just a little more than was necessary...
...So the Strafkammer upheld the lower court's decision, as did the Oberlandesgericht in a "paper" appeal...
...The door was still locked and the shackles lay on the floor of the undamaged van...
...Houdini's next poster showed him in evening dress, his hands manacled, standing before the judge, jurors, and a battery of mustachioed policemen...
...His life was no more miraculous than the opening and closing of a flower...
...Friends reported that his toes could untie knots most of us could not manage with our fingers...
...The man was blinding...
...Houdini was an American, a Jew who embarrassed the police...
...An award-winning runner as a young man, Houdini developed a vigorous regime of exercises, which he performed daily throughout his career...
...The letter stated that Houdini had escaped from simple restraints at the police headquarters, by trickery...
...Let us begin with my grandfather's favorite story, the case of Harry Houdini versus the German police...
...He studied the lock in the light, and then went back into the cabinet as the band played a waltz...
...Examining Houdini, a physician testified that the fifty-year-old wizard had halved his blood pressure while doubling his pulse...
...The first thing he did was march into the police station, strip stark naked, and challenge the jailers...
...Examining the cuffs, the best locksmiths in London agreed that they had never seen such an ingenious mechanism...
...I will never be offended by anything you say for him or about him, but that he possessed psychic powers—he never knew it...
...So what on earth is Bess trying to tell Sir Arthur when she testifies to the invocation of spirits in one sentence and repudiates psychic help in the next...
...The gifted Doug Henning revived the act in 1975 on television...
...Superintendent Melville of the Criminal Investigation Department said he would return in a couple of hours, when the escapist had worn himself out...
Vol. 13 • May 1988 • No. 3
