Its the birthday of one of the great showmen in American history: Harry Houdini, born Erich Weiss in Budapest (1874). His family immigrated to the United States when he was just a baby. He began working as a circus acrobat when he was a teenager, but he decided to switch to magic and took the stage name of Harry Houdini. Early on, his signature trick was to swallow a series of needles, and then pull them out of his mouth threaded together. After he got married, he performed with his wife, and she specialized in mind-reading on stage. They also had a comedy routine. But Houdini had developed an interest in lock picking, and he began to develop a trick in which he escaped from a pair of handcuffs. The performance didnt become a big hit until he got the idea of inviting the local police to lock him up in their own handcuffs. The presence of the police made the trick more real somehow, and people were amazed. Houdini began to play bigger and bigger venues, and he would escape from more and more elaborate contraptions: straitjackets, jails, coffins, trunks, steel containers, and glass boxes filled with water. In one trick, he leapt from a bridge wrapped in chains, and he had to escape before he drowned in the river. When asked about his success as a performer, Houdini said, The easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place someone is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will result in sudden death.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 09:49:58 +0000
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