Harry Houdini, Master Mystifier

Once known as the world's greatest magician, Harry Houdini's reputation still resonates with modern fans of illusion and magic. Join Katie and Sarah as they explore the fact -- and fiction -- surrounding the spectacular Harry Houdini in this episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the amazing,
the marvelous, the stupendous stuff you missed in History Class podcast.
I am Katie the Clairvoyant Lambert and I am the

(00:21):
spectacular Sarah Dowdy. And we are injecting a little extra
magic into our podcast today because we're talking about the
master mystifier, Harry JUDINERI Hudini. If someone asked you to
name a famous magician, Judini is probably the very first
person who comes to mind, at least before David Blaine,
one would help, or Joe Bluth. Maybe, well, he does allusions.

(00:44):
He's a pretend famous magician. All right. So Houdini wasn't
born Harry Judini though, of course. Who was born Eric
Weiss on March seventy four to Cecilia Weiss and Mayor
Samuel Weiss in the newly consolidated Budapest. Which is interesting
because in a lot of his later interviews he claims

(01:06):
he was born in Wisconsin, but he was actually Hungarian. Yeah.
He moved to Appleton, Wisconsin when he was a toddler
or young boy because his father was called to serve
as a rabbi for the German speaking zion Reform Jewish Congregation.
But unfortunately for the family, his father's tenure there was
not very long because the congregation thought he was so

(01:27):
old fashioned, right, and they dismissed him abruptly, and the
family never quite recovered financially from this. They've got seven kids,
and it's tough to keep a family with seven kids
afloat regardless. But when you're hopping from job to job
and camp, find the study of my English, and now
it's they have a tackle a tough life early on. Um.
So they end up moving from Appleton to Milwaukee, and

(01:51):
the young Eric shines shoes and sells newspapers and does
little osenon type jobs to help keep his family afloat.
And around this time it's also when he sees his
first circus, and after that he teaches himself to walk
a tight rope in his backyard. And he'd also seen
the tight rope walker hang by his teeth from the

(02:12):
tight rope, so you know, little Eric is very excited
about this, and he tries it himself and knocks out
all of his teeth because he hadn't realized you use
mouthpiece and that sort of thing, and your human body
doesn't really dangle well from you know, little seven year
old teeth well. And he's also really into locks at
this point, and he starts messing around with him at
home and shops. He supposedly learns how to pick locks

(02:34):
in the kitchen, trying to steal baked goods from from
his mom, while all his mom wasn't looking as good
as start as any magic. And he also makes a
solemn promise at the age of twelve to his dad
that he will always always provide for his mother, especially
if something happens to his father, and he keeps to
his word for the rest of his life. Really attached

(02:55):
to his mother, but he does leave home at twelve
and trying to make his fortune, trying to help out
yea strike out on his own, he goes to Delavan, Wisconsin,
and um he meets a new mother figure there, woman
who feels sorry for this little ragamuffin boy and takes
them in, gives them a bath and a bed and food,

(03:17):
and when he has a job when he's older, he
sends her a shirt with dollar bills in it and
continues to send her presents from all over the world.
For for the rest of her life. So this gives
you an idea of Houdini's character and the kind of
guy that he was. The family ends up in New York,
and again, Harry's got all kinds of odd jobs trying

(03:39):
to help the family. He's a messenger boy for a
while and just trying to help florry or a little
bit of money. And uh. He starts performing in vaudeville shows,
but he's not terribly successful. If you're someone like Hoodina,
you imagine him being successful as soon as he gets
on stage. But it takes a long time. It is
a long, hard climb to the top. It does. And

(04:00):
but while he's working in a necktie cutting factory in
New York, he at least makes one change that sends
him on the road to fame. He reads an autobiography
of Robert da who's the father of modern magic, and um,
he likes the name so much that he decides to
take it on himself for a stage name. Right. A

(04:20):
friend of his had told him that if you add
the letter I to someone's name in French, it means
that you're like them. So he thought, okay, no Uda Houdini.
It's perfect because Uda had some very cool tricks. One
of them was he had these orange trees that would
just grow in front of the audience, or a wine
bottle that poured whatever you want. That's bottomlessly a nice concept,

(04:44):
very cool, and Houdini also accepted UDA's belief about magic,
which is that a magician isn't just someone who performs tricks.
He's someone who almost has supernatural powers. And he's also
someone who has to believe his own lies or the
ad dance isn't going lives lives the life exactly um.
But by Judini's father died and even though that makes financial, uh,

(05:11):
the financial situation for the family even harder, it allows
Judini to be a full time performer. You have to
imagine his former rabbi father was kind of reining him
in a little bit there. So around this time is
when the brothers Houdini are formed, and first it's Harry
and his friend Jacob Hyman. It ends up being Hyman's
brother Joe, and then Harry's brother Theo. But they do

(05:31):
tricks with scarves and flowers, lots of stuff with cards.
Judini really focuses on cards early on for a long time. Yeah,
and they do a simple trunk escape, but that's about it.
He's honing his craft. He learns some rope high escapes
from an Australian magician, but it's pretty simple stuff in
the beginning. They're not really minor league there. They do
get to perform at the Chicago World's Fair, so they

(05:54):
have some publicity. They're just not making much money, right,
and part of that is because Houdini, how hasn't learned
yet about showmanship, which he eventually gets the hang of.
It's not just doing tricks. You've got to sell the
audible persona Pudini right when he starts doing his famous
straight jacket escape, he puts on the straight jacket and
then actually goes behind a curtain, gets out of it,

(06:15):
and comes back out. And finally someone suggested to him,
why don't you do it in front of the audience
so they can see how you do it well in
having that delay for escapes, you know, so that you
don't get out right away because then people think something
they were tricked somehow, But actually take your time and
pretend to struggle and really play it all upright fence
and but the act changes in around because Judini meets

(06:41):
a girl Best Raymond, whose real name was Willemina Beatrice Ronner,
and she's working with the Floral Sisters, which is a
song and dance act, and THEO arranges a blind date
for him his brother's Harry, Bess and some other girl
from the group, and it is love at first sight
for Harry and married after three weeks, and they're very poor.

(07:01):
Best so she basically paid for her own ring, and
her Catholic family was completely horrified that she'd married a
Jewish guy. And you have a pretty great quote from Best.
She said she sold her virginity to Houdini for an orange,
just as an idea of just how pul there they were.
So Houdini replaces THEO with Bess, and she's a tiny

(07:23):
little lady, five ft ninety pounds, so she's great for
these future escape kind of tricks he'll be doing um
And they work together in a circus for a while,
and it's there that he learns to use his toes
almost like fingers, and picks up strong man stuff and swords,

(07:43):
swallowing all all things that will come into his show
later on. Right, And I imagine if you couldn't work
with your toes that well, it would be very helpful
for helping getting out of knocks and straight jackets. And
he also learned a trick where he would swallow a
bunch of needles and then a thread, and then you
could look inside his mouth. Nothing there, of course, and

(08:04):
then somehow he pull out the thread with the needles
threaded on it, and this becomes a signature of the
Houdini act. I would like to see that he also
starts the straight jacket escape in around. It's very dramatic.
He came across the idea when he was at an
asylum in Canada and was trying to figure out just
how he could do it, like if you had to,

(08:24):
you know, dislocate your shoulders right, And so then he
learned to do it in front of an audience and
with all the writhing and jerking about that made it
so intense. But even while picking up all these impressive skills,
Houdini and Best are still really poor. They have shows canceled,
no one's buying tickets, and um, this is when they

(08:46):
actually live on rabbits for a few weeks with a
quarter they borrowed. It wasn't even their own money. So
they get into seances because spiritualism has become very popular,
and this is one thing they can actually make money,
big money making industry just communicating with the dead, a
lot of a lot of tricks to make people believe

(09:07):
that you actually have a spirit present, and um, it's
a lot of some of it's just not so nice.
Like for a while they worked as bible salesman, so
they could get in people's homes and look at their
family bibles and look up old family members and death
and right, so they could use that information later or

(09:28):
pick up little things in the street. Judini had said
that when they were in one city, he'd seen a
woman talking to her child, you know, and warning him
to be careful in his bicycle. So later, when they
were channeling some spirit or other, he said that the
little boy would have broken his arm, and she went
home and he had in fact broken his arm, and
Houtini felt terrible about that. Yeah, he's he's pretty superstitious

(09:50):
as his best, and the deception behind the seances really
bothers them. And this will come up a little bit later,
but first we'll get to Houdini's fame when he becomes
someone who makes something like forty five thousand dollars a
week in today's money, so I'm thinking of switching to magic.
So the key decision for Hudini was getting away from

(10:12):
the card tricks and moving towards doing escapes, and the
Impressario Martin Beck advises him to do this and then
books him on Vaudeville's Orphian Circuit. So this is Houdini's start, right,
And nineteen hundred is when the fame really hits. He
gets this reputation for these destifying escapes from shackles and

(10:32):
ropes and all sorts of containers and handcuffs, and he
starts promoting himself in Europe. By the time he gets back,
he is an international superstar. Yeah, and his abilities depended
partly on his amazing strength and endurance. Houdini ran and
swam and maintain this um incredibly in shape physique. Um.

(10:54):
But he's also got the skill at manipulating locks, which
is something that's pretty unique to him. Right. So he
comes home and he's super rich and buys all these
houses and pretty much can do whatever he wants. So
he starts a magazine called Conjurors Monthly in nineteen o six,
which is a place I think i'd like to work

(11:14):
because it's very much his own personality that's coming through.
He'll write these snotty articles about his enemies, and then
really cool stuff about his own handcuff tricks and cryptography,
and then nasty book reviews of people he doesn't like.
It sounds like a lot of fun. I'm not going
to alive. And he writes a book on the history
of magic around this time too, where he turns on

(11:36):
Robert da his his namesake right and tries to quote
unquote give him his proper place in history. I think
that's the final title of it. At first, I think
it was just going to be look, how amazing who
does And then after a while and think maybe he
was just an imitator and took other people's ideas. So
we're going to go through some of Danny's great escapes

(11:58):
because I'm sure you listeners would like to like to
hear your favorites mentioned. His first big one was January seven,
nineteen o six, when he escaped from the Washington, d c.
Jail cell of Charles Guitaut, who was the assassin of
President Garfield. So as you even imagine, that got a
lot of press escaping from the Assassin's cell, and in

(12:21):
January of nineteen o eight he introduces the milk Can
escape in St. Louis, which is still one of his
most famous tricks. And it's a little hard to explain.
You kind of need the visual look up a milk
can Google image that, but it's this teeny tiny space
and what he would do is first just get into
it while it was full of water, and he tell

(12:41):
the audience to hold their breaths and see if they
could do it for as long as he could, because
Judini could hold his breath for three minutes, so of
course none of them can, and they're all gasping by
the time he gets out of it. And then he
would come out very dramatically and be handcuffed several times
and then go back into the milk can and somehow
get out, and of you can imagine Whodini has a

(13:01):
lot of imitators. One guy Janasta dies while trying to
do the milk Can Escape, and Judini was trying to
discourage a lot of imitators. He would say, you know,
the showmanship stuff, the justifying stunt and all that helps
promote but also maybe dissuade people from copycatting. Because again
he was in fantastic shape, and even then it was

(13:22):
really hard on the body. The water can stuff and
things like the straight jacket. At some point he burst
the blood vessel trying to get out of chains. He's
in chronic pain for the rest of his life. He's
aren't eas easy on the body to do. Uh. By
March thirty to April fourth of nineteen o eight, he
performed at the Hammerstein's Theater in New York in the

(13:43):
famous weed tire grip chain Escape. And then not too
long after that, he did a manacle jump from Harvard
Bridge in Boston. In Paris he jumped handcuffed from the
roof of the morgue into the sun. And he also
jumps off Queen's Bridge in Australia. Is one of the
best ones grows. It's over kind of a a nasty,
muddy river And when he came up from his jump,

(14:05):
there were two figures and the crowd is sitting there
looking part of the exactly but it was a corpse
that he dislodged from the river mud. And he described
that water is not particularly toothsome no, and he makes
a challenge to his fans A thousand dollars for a
device that would hold him, which even continues to further

(14:26):
his his fame. A lot of people take him up
on it and they try to try to figure something
out that will hold the great Hoodini um. And by
nineteen ten he's gotten an interest in aviation. He's the
first person to sustain flight of Australia. This is also
hard on his body right, and it it contributes to
that whole Daedeuble mistique because flying was extremely dangerous at

(14:48):
the time. While his very first flight crashed, He's lucky
he ended up not being hurt, but there were several
casualties when it all first started. So the fact that
he was so into it and so willing to do
it so some about his character as well. This might
be one of our favorite illusions. He performs in eighteen
he vanishes Jenny the Elephant at New York's Hippodrome. Would

(15:09):
really like to see that. I want to see this
so badly. There are pictures of Houdini and the elephant,
but that's that's not enough for me. What happened vanished,
you can't. He's also in a lot of motion pictures
from nineteen sixteen to ninety three, but surprisingly these don't
do well. The switch to motion pictures was just one

(15:30):
change in his career. As he got older, he started
a campaign against Charlatan's, against the mind readers and the
mediums and the people who claim they had supernatural powers.
He was going to expose them as Charlatan's, debunk their powers,
and uh got pretty into it. It was a crusade
almost for him, right, because a lot of these people

(15:52):
were making a very lucrative living off of people's grief.
You know, they would have a child dies, he knew, right,
you'd have a child or a family member, a loved
one die and they would say they could put you
in touch with that person. One guy who was even
put a man in touch with his dead wife but
really just hired a prostitute to dress up like her
and the man ended up dying of a heart attack.
But it was a shady business, yeah, so say the least,

(16:17):
so a little guilt from his own own experiences as
a Charlottean early in his career, and then just um
trying to shine the light on this shady industry that's
really thriving. And his main target is a woman named
Nina Crandon who's known in her medium life as Marjorie,
who did a lot of seances, and she's championed by

(16:39):
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who is a very good friend
of Houdini's until this business kind of starts up and
us falling out. He ends up not quite being able
to disprove Marjorie, but a Harvard grad student does later,
and she will come up in a little later. We'll
remember her name, Remember the name Marjorie. He writes a
couple of books on this miracle mongers and their methods

(16:59):
and a magician among spirits, and he even combines this
exposing the Charlatans into his own act. He does sort
of triumvirate of Houdini um skills, you know, magic tricks
and escapes and then exposing the Charlatans. So a triple bill,
if you will. But despite all of that, Houdini and

(17:21):
Best make an agreement among themselves and whoever dies first
will try to communicate with the other one. They have
a secret code word. I think it's something like Rose
Bell or Roosevelt. But it doesn't work. Beatrice herself says
it's a failure before she died. Yeah, So keeping on
the subject, of death. On October thirty one, n Houdini

(17:44):
died in Detroit, and a lot of people think that
he died in one of his escape acts um specifically
the upside down water torture cell, which is kind of
like the milk can thing, except he's placed upside down,
like shackled by his feet to the top of this

(18:04):
water cell. It's likely you've seen this because why people
believe he died in this act is because of the
Tony Curtis movie from the nineteen fifties, and you've probably
seen it in countless magician movies. It's sort of the
main attraction. But Houdini did not die in one of
his tricks. Now, and the quote unquote true story is

(18:24):
that he was punched in the abdomen by a college
student and then dies of a rupture dependix a week later.
So let's give that a little background. Yeah, so Houdini
would accept punches from people because he had such amazing
abdominal control that it would just bounce off basically wouldn't
hurt his organs. So this college student comes up to

(18:44):
him when he's relaxing on the sofa and asks them,
is it true that you can be punched in the
stomach and Houdini, yeah, yeah, it's true, and doesn't have
enough time to contract his muscles and protect himself before
the college students starts punching away. And so it's thought

(19:05):
that Houdini's injured in these punches and dies from the
appendicitis a week later. But medically that doesn't make a
lot of sense, because you can't just punch someone and
rupture their appendix and then they end up dying of appendicitis.
That's not how it works. He may have already had appendicitis,
and I'm sure being punched in the appendix aggravated certainly

(19:26):
wouldn't help. But it also didn't help that there is
no such thing as antibiotics at the time, and that
he refused to go to the doctor. He just kept
putting on shows even though he clearly wasn't well. He
was just sweaty and feverish, and finally I think Bess insisted,
but at that point it was too late. But there's
another theory put forward in the Secret Life of Houdini,

(19:46):
which is a book published a few years ago by
William Collusion Larry Sloman, and that's that Houdini was murdered,
not a manslaughter kind of thing like the college student,
but was really murdered, and Poise specifically right and Best
did have food poisoning and was in the hospital I think,
at the same time as Harry Houdini. So there's at

(20:08):
least a little tiny bit of evidence to So the
author's contacted Marjorie, the medium who you might remember from earlier,
contacted her great granddaughter and asked her if she had
any papers and records, and she did, And it turns
out that Marjorie's husband was a Harvard trained surgeon and
an expert in appendecked mes and hated Houdini, hated him

(20:32):
as Marjorie would have too. How could you hate Hudini? Well,
if if he's trying to debunk your whole profession, um,
and the husband is weird too, he's adopting little boys
from England and they're disappearing. So there's this whole nebulous
situation with the mediums going on right around Hudini's death,
and the mediums foretell his death and he dies right after,

(20:56):
So there might be a some kind of sketchy connection there.
If you're into conspiracy theories, this is when we'd like
to hear more about Email us at History podcast at
how Stuff works dot com and let us know what
you think. Well and Katie, I also realized that a
lot of our podcasts involve exhuming a body. That seems

(21:16):
to be a theme lately of us telling you to
dig up this and that's come up. With Houdini. Some
people want to exume him and try to find out
if he was really murdered. But that's a weird deal too,
because um, there was supposedly a request to exhume the
body up in two thousand eight, but that you won't

(21:37):
find anything about it since then. If you do, please
email us because I'm really curious about that. I say,
publicity stunned. So who might be proud by the button? Yeah?
By the guys who wrote The Secret Life of Houdini
side note also from the book, These guys have suggested
that Houdini was a secret agent before World War One

(21:59):
with the at the States and Great Britain. Yeah, he
certainly was friends with police and with agents. But they
suggest that he befriends the head of Scotland Yards Special Branch,
William Melville, and he's sends back info from Germany on
stuff like you know, I just saw the Kaiser's aircraft
and um on a double side note on that. Melville

(22:22):
retires in nineteen o three or so everyone thinks, but
he actually goes on to start the m I five
and was the handler of Sydney Riley, who is believed
to be the template of James Bond. So I really
like the idea that maybe British intelligence services use some
of Houdini's tricks when training their secret agents. And he

(22:43):
was interested, really interested in stuff like cryptography and special
little gadgets to hide things because of course you always
want to hide a half key if you can. So
it's really cool to think that, Yeah, he might have
been part of that. And the fascination with Houdini's life
and death has not slackened since there's an official Houdini

(23:05):
seance every year. Houdini is buried in Queens, but the
cemetery has had to be closed to the public because
there's been so much vandalism to its tomb. Yeah, in
nineteen the original marble bust if Hudini was crushed with
a sledgehammer trying to get the secrets out of his head.
It's a very literal interpretation of that. Guys and the

(23:26):
Society of American Magicians have replaced it twice with cheaper copies,
but they've disappeared. Um so they finally had to create
a removable version that you know, makes appearances on special
occasions and rides around in a child's safety seat, always
stuck alout. It goes to a secret like it it's
kept permanently in a secret location maintained by a Brooklyn dentist.

(23:50):
But one of the one of the stolen busts reappeared
just a few years ago in a closet in a
cardboard box. So be wild. And as far as Houdini
memorabilia goes, a lot of his letters and posters and
cards from performances were destroyed in a house fire in
late two thousand six when a burglar attempted to light

(24:12):
his crack pipe. So thanks a lot crack pipe smoking burglar.
They memorabilia is kind of scattered all over the place.
And he had so much stuff because he was writing
that book on the history of magic. So it wasn't
just his own stuff, it was also things you know,
from Robert Udan all these others fathers of magic. He
was kind of a historian of magic, and a bunch

(24:33):
of that is simply gone, but some of the memorabilia
is in a permanent location in Appleton, Wisconsin at the
Houdini Museum, and the museum features an explanation on the metamorphosis,
a trick that was a switcheroo between Houdini and Beatrice.
And there was a lot of controversy over this exhibit

(24:53):
because it revealed the secret to the trick, which some
magicians thought breaked the magician's code. Right, But Houdini revealed
some of his own secrets. He told a lot of
his handcuff tricks in his own writing, and even tried
to sell them at some points when he was poor,
so I'm not sure he'd be entirely against his signature

(25:14):
trick being told. I guess that's about it, Ladies and gentlemen.
I hope you enjoyed your introduction to the marvelous world
of Harry Houdini. But if that's not enough for you,
We've got articles on how sword swallowing works and how
fire breathing works, and you can look for them on
our homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com.

(25:35):
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