Harry Houdini

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Apart from E.L. Doctorow, no one was able to conjure the late Harry Houdini, not even his widow.

But she certainly tried. A famed debunker of spiritualists, Houdini made a pact with his wife, Bess, that if the dead could speak to the living, he would deliver to her a special coded message from the beyond. Nobody but the two knew what the special message was. When a poorly received punch to the abdomen in 1926 made it impossible for the entertainer to escape death, his widow annually attempted to contact him through seance. No words were reportedly ever exchanged. The following are a couple of Brooklyn Daily Eagle articles about the wife’s attempts to continue the marital conversation.

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From April 24, 1936:

From February 12, 1943:

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Brilliant writer though he was, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was gullible to lots of complete bullshit, mostly centered around spiritualist shenanigans, even believing frenemy Harry Houdini was doomed to an early death due to his skepticism. In an article in the April 10, 1922 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes explained his vision of the afterlife, which he believed to be a childless place where a man could trade in his wife for a new model.

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I came across this classic photograph of Harry Houdini and President Lincoln, and assumed it was the former debunking seances, which he loved to do. But it was actually a different kind of demystification–that of spirit photography. That phenomenon, which was first documented in the 1850s, supposedly showed ghosts of the dead making their presence known in photographs. It was a funereal kind of photobombing. In the 1920s, when Houdini created this image to show how phony the whole thing was, even bright people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were still arguing that spirit photography was genuine. From Kristi Finefield at the Library of Congress:

“In fact, Sir David Brewster, in his 1856 book on the stereoscope, gave step-by-step instructions for creating a spirit photo, beginning with:

‘For the purpose of amusement, the photographer might carry us even into the regions of the supernatural. His art, as I have elsewhere shewn, enables him to give a spiritual appearance to one or more of his figures, and to exhibit them as ‘thin air’ amid the solid realities of the stereoscopic picture.’

He went on to explain how this was easily done. Simply pose your main subjects. Then, when the exposure time is nearly up, have the ‘spirit’ figure enter the scene, holding still for only seconds before moving out of the picture. The ‘spirit’ then appeared as a semi-transparent figure, as seen in The Haunted Lane.

One of the more famous–and infamous–spirit photographers was William H. Mumler of Boston. He turned his ability to make photographs with visible spirits into a lucrative business venture, starting in the 1860s. Doubts grew about his work, but even when a spiritualist named Doctor Gardner recognized some of the so-called spirits as living Bostonians, people continued to pay as much as $10 a sitting. Mumler was charged with fraud in 1869, though not convicted, due to lack of evidence.  However, his career as a photographer of the spirit world was essentially over.

Celebrities took sides in the debate in the 1920s. Famed author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an outspoken Spiritualist who believed that the supernatural could appear in photographs, while illusionist Harry Houdini denounced mediums as fakes and spirit photography as a hoax. Doyle and Houdini publicly feuded in the newspapers.

To demonstrate how easy it was to fake a photograph, Houdini had this image made in the 1920s, showing himself talking with Abraham Lincoln. He even based entire shows around debunking the claims of mediums and the entire idea of Spiritualism.”

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This classic photo shows Harry Houdini, in the year before he died, revealing tricks used by opportunistic spiritualists to an assemblage of New York clergyman. (Notice beneath the table that the illusionist rings a bell with his toes.) The meeting took place at the Hippodrome, which seven years earlier was the site of Houdini’s famous vanishing elephant trick. What the photo doesn’t show is the magician’s young assistant, Dorothy Young, 17, who he hired that year to help with his stage act. Young lived to 103, passing away earlier this year. From her New York Times obituary:

“Born on May 3, 1907, in Otisville, N.Y., Dorothy Young was the daughter of a Methodist minister, Robert Young, and Lena Caldwell Young, a church organist. It took some convincing for her parents to allow Dorothy to sign a contract with Houdini after she won an audition in Manhattan in early 1925. She was 17.

Though she was with the Houdini tour for only a little more than a year, Miss Young gained notice. Soon after, her dancing skills were paired with those of Gilbert Kiamie, the son of a silk lingerie magnate. As Dorothy and Gilbert, they toured the country and became known for their own Latin dance, the ‘rumbalero.’ She also danced in several movies, among them the Fred Astaire musical comedy Flying Down to Rio (1933).

Miss Young’s first marriage, to Robert Perkins, ended in divorce. She married Mr. Kiamie in 1945; he died in 1992. Besides her granddaughter, she is survived by a son, Robert Jr., two other grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. Though she took her husbands’ names in marriage, she preferred to be known professionally as Dorothy Young.

In 2003, with a considerable inheritance from Mr. Kiamie, Miss Young was able to donate more than $10 million to the creation of the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts at Drew University in Madison, N.J.

In her later years, Miss Young sometimes attended ‘séances’ organized by magicians and Houdini aficionados to celebrate and, perhaps, hear from the master. In November 2006, at a gathering in Manhattan, she sat in one of the 12 occupied chairs on the stage. The 13th chair remained empty.

Miss Young had talked with Houdini about returning from the dead, she said, while he was alive. He told me, ‘It’s humanly impossible, but I’ll be there in spirit.'”

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Here is a cool artifact of Harry Houdini, courtesy of kottke.org. It’s audio from a 1914 wax cylinder that Edison made of the master of escape. In the clip, Houdini describes his Water Torture Cell trick.

Harry Houdini speaking, in 1914 (mp3)

If you’re unfamiliar with Jason Kottke and his site, he’s one of the original bloggers and has been serving up intelligent posts since before most people heard of the word “blog.” Everyone who came after and tried to do something smart in the format owes him a debt. To learn more about his early days as a blogger, have a look at this 2000 New Yorker piece by Rebecca Mead (subscription required).

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More Harry Houdini posts:

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A famous 1899 photo of Harry Houdini, from the McManus-Young Collection.

Today is Harry Houdini’s birthday and the following excerpt from his obituary in the November 1, 1926 New York Times reveals how the man who eventually made an elephant “disappear” initially got his start in show business:

“Houdini was born on March 24, 1874. His name originally was Eric Weiss and he was the son of a rabbi. He did not take the name Harry Houdini until he had been a performer for many years. Legend has it that he opened his first lock when he wanted a piece of pie in the kitchen closet. It is certain that when scarcely more than a baby he showed skill as an acrobat and contortionist, and both these talents helped his start in the show business and his later development as an ‘escape king.’

At the age of 9 Houdini joined a traveling circus, touring Wisconsin as a contortionist and trapeze performer. The Davenport brothers were then famous, doing the first spiritualist work ever seen in this country. They would ring bells while bound inside a cabinet and would agree to free themselves from any bonds. This inspired Houdini to a somewhat similar performance. Standing in the middle of the ring, he would invite any one to tie him with ropes and would then free himself inside the cabinet.

In the ring at Coffeyville, Kan., a Sheriff tied him and then produced a pair of handcuffs with the taunt:

‘If I put these on you, you’ll never get loose.’

Houdini, still only a boy, told him to go ahead. After a much longer stay in the cabinet than usual, the performer emerged, carrying the handcuffs in his free hands. That was the beginning of his long series of escapes from every known sort of manacle. For years he called himself the Handcuff King, a title discarded as he extended and elevated the range of his performances.

From 1885 to 1900 he played all over the United States, in museums, music halls, circuses, and medicine shows, gradually improving his technique and giving up his purely contortionistic and acrobatic feats. In 1900 he made his first visit abroad, and in London his sensational escapes from handcuffs at Scotland Yard won him a six months engagement at the Alhambra. This was the first instance of his cleverly obtaining notoriety by a public or semi-public exhibition outside the theatre. No other showman, unless it was Barnum, knew better how to arouse the curiosity and amazement of the public in this manner.

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Houdini fired a pistol in the air and--poof!--Jennie was gone.

The Hippodrome was a large-scale Manhattan entertainment venue that struggled mightily to make money in its later life, finally closing in 1939. But it had some great moments during its glory years. One such sensation was the time in 1918 when Harry Houdini made Jennie, a several-ton elephant, vanish into thin air in front of a 5,000 awed patrons. How did he do it? Mirrors. A 2007 Daily Mail article recalls the spectacular moment and its backstory. An excerpt:

“‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Houdini cried as, to the audience’s alarm, a full-grown Asian elephant, 8ft tall and weighing over 6,000lb, came running pacily into view. ‘Allow me to introduce Jennie, the world’s only vanishing elephant.’

Jennie the elephant proudly raised her trunk in greeting to the wide-eyed masses, before being led into a huge, brightly coloured box on wheels. The doors were closed behind her, there was a dramatic drum roll and the stage hands flung open the doors at both ends of the box to reveal that it was now – completely empty.

Houdini announced to rapturous applause: ‘You can plainly see, the animal is completely gone.’

The Vanishing Elephant became one of Houdini’s most famous tricks and he performed it in front of over a million people. For more than 90 years, long after his death, the tradecraft by which he made this huge beast disappear remained a secret even other magicians failed to solve.”

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Ajeeb says, "Checkmate, bitch!"

As hoaxes go, Ajeeb, an “automaton” expert at checkers and chess, was a ridiculously simple scam. Ajeeb was one of several alleged machines–the Turk and Mephisto were a couple of others–during the late 1800s and early 1900s that were supposedly capable of defeating humans at board games.

Ajeeb, created in 1868 by cabinetmaker Charles Hooper, was not actually a machine at all. The elaborate-looking 10-foot-tall contraption attired in Turkish clothes hid inside of it a rotating collection of some of the best chess players in the world. Thousands came to see Ajeeb match moves with disbelieving opponents (including Houdini, Teddy Roosevelt and Sarah Berhnardt) on both sides of the Atlantic.

There is intrigue surrounding Ajeeb that supposedly involved theft and murder and more. Eventually technology caught up to imagination and today computers need no help to defeat us.

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