Harry Houdini

Harry Houdini married his fellow performer, Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, in 1893, after which she continued to work as his partner onstage as Beatrice ‘Bess’ Houdini.

He was operated on a ruptured appendix on October 24, 1926 at Grace Hospital, Detroit, and contracted peritonitis. While undergoing a second surgery and an experimental serum, he died on October 31, 1926, at the age of 52.

He was transported from Detroit to New York in the bronze casket which was designed for his yet-to-happen buried alive stunt in 1927.

Harry Houdini was born as Erik Weisz on March 24, 1874 in Budapest, Hungary, as one of the six kids, to Rabbi Mayer Samuel Weisz and his second wife, Cecilia Steiner Weisz.

His family immigrated to the United States in 1878 and started living in Appleton, Wisconsin, where they changed their surname to German ‘Weiss’, while his name was modified to ‘Ehrich’.

In 1887, the family then relocated to New York City, where he took up odd jobs to support his family and developed an interest in trapeze arts.

He started performing as a magician in dime museums, sideshows and circuses in 1891 but didn’t see much success. He then took up escape acts using handcuffs.

Harry Houdini started earning recognition in 1899 when he performed the handcuffs act, escaping from prisons, at the best vaudeville venues, arranged by entertainment manager Martin Beck. These acts made him the highest-paid performer in US shows.

He performed throughout the United States during the early 1900s, increasing the repertoire of his acts. His acts included escaping from handcuffs to straitjackets, coffins, nail packing crates, and locked, water-filled tanks.

He took his show to Europe and after initial struggle, he was sponsored by Dundas Slater who booked his escape acts at the Alhambra Theatre for six months.

His uncanny strength and quick thinking to get hold of locks took him to Scotland, France, Germany, England, Russia, and Netherlands, where he was locked by the local police in jails and made successful escapes.

He debuted in filmmaking with a documentary of his escapes ‘Merveilleux Exploits du Celebre Houdini Paris’ (1901) and acted in a variety of movies, such as ‘The Grim Game’, ‘The Master Mystery’, Terror Island’ and ‘The Man From Beyond’.

As a challenge by London’s Daily Mirror in 1904, he went on to unlock the special handcuffs, built by a Birmingham locksmith in five years, after a 90-minute struggle and deemed it as his career’s most difficult escape.

He invented the Milk Can escape in 1908, where he was handcuffed and locked inside an over-sized milk can, filled with water (later replaced with milk), and advertised it as ‘Failure Means a Drowning Death’.

Among his most infamous stunts was the underwater box escape introduced in 1912, wherein he took 57 seconds to unlock the handcuffs and leg-irons, and escape from a crate loaded with 200 pounds of lead and immersed in water.

In 1912, he started the Chinese Water Torture Cell. In this act, he was suspended upside-down in a locked glass-and-steel cabinet filled with water and held his breath for over three minutes to escape.

By remaining submerged in a sealed bronze coffin for one-and-half hour in 1926, he broke Egyptian performer Rahman Bey’s record of one hour, claiming to have breathed quietly without using any trick or supernatural power.