Harry Houdini: the king of escapes against the fake mediums
From Budapest to stages around the world: Houdini, his impossible escapes, his friendship with Conan Doyle and his battle against fraudulent mediums.
Erik Weisz was born in Budapest on 24 March 1874 and came to the United States as a child with his family, the son of a rabbi of modest means. As a boy he read the memoirs of the French conjuror Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and was so struck by them that he adopted his name, adding a vowel: he thus became Harry Houdini. Few twentieth-century performers embodied as he did the idea of the modern magician, able to defeat chains, locks and even water.
The impossible escapes
After years of modest shows in circuses and vaudeville, Houdini found his way with escape acts. He had himself handcuffed by the police of the cities where he performed and freed himself within minutes; he had himself locked in crates, sacks, milk cans and straitjackets. Many of his acts took place outdoors, as when he freed himself from a straitjacket while hanging upside down from the front of a building, before enormous crowds.
In 1912 he presented his most famous act, the Chinese Water Torture Cell: a tank of glass and metal into which he was lowered head first, with his feet locked. Houdini did not claim supernatural powers and insisted that his feats came from training, skill and technical knowledge. But the public experienced them as proof of an almost magical ability, and he carefully cultivated this mystery.
Robert-Houdin, the disowned master
In 1908 Houdini published a book entitled The Unmasking of Robert-Houdin, in which he accused his former model of claiming other people's inventions as his own. The volume, polemical and partly unfair, shows how passionate a collector of books, posters and documents on the history of magic Houdini was. His library, one of the most important in the field, was left largely to the Library of Congress in Washington.
The crusade against mediums
In the 1920s spiritualism enjoyed a new season of success, fuelled by the grief of the Great War. Houdini, who had lost his mother in 1913 and sincerely wished to communicate with her, attended many séances. He came away convinced that the phenomena were produced by tricks that, as an illusionist, he could recognise. From then on he devoted much energy to exposing fraudulent mediums, through lectures, articles and demonstrations.
This battle damaged his friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a convinced spiritualist. During a séance in 1922 Doyle's wife claimed to receive through automatic writing a message from Houdini's mother, but the text was in English, a language the woman did not speak. In 1924 Houdini sat on a committee of the magazine Scientific American that examined the Boston medium Mina Crandon, known as Margery, and he published the book A Magician Among the Spirits.
Houdini died in Detroit on 31 October 1926, Halloween night, of peritonitis. He had agreed a secret message with his wife Bess that she would recognise if he managed to communicate from beyond. For years Bess held séances on the anniversary of his death without receiving the expected sign, and the tradition of séances for Houdini continues today among magic enthusiasts, as a tribute rather than an experiment.