Happy Saturday. One of our upcoming episodes this week is Harry Houdini Adjacent So Today's Saturday Classic is an episode on Houdini from way back in the show's earliest years. It came out on December seventh, two thousand and nine, from previous hosts Katie and Sarah, and toward the end of the episode, uh Sarah and Katie talk about a two thousand and eight request to exhume Houdini's remains that exhamation never happened. They also talked about ongoing issues with vandalism at Houdini's grave. In the last few years, the Society of American Magicians has been working to restore the Houdini family grave site and to fund it's ongoing upkeep. Most recently, replica gravestones were installed for Houdini's brother and sister, Leopold and Gladys, with funding from the Houdini Museum and magicians Dick Brooks and Dorothy Dietrich. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History ass a production of My Heart Radio. 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 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 hope, or Joe Bluth. Maybe, well, he does illusions. He's a pretend famous magician. All right. So Judini wasn't born Harry Judini, though, of course he 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 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 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 campus the study of my English and now it's they have a tough, a tough life early on. Um. So they end up moving from Appleton to Milwaukee, and the young Eric shines shoes and sells newspapers and does little odds and end 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 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 a 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 in the kitchen trying to steal baked goods from from his mom while his mom wasn't looking as good as start as any to 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 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 ragmuffin boy and takes him in, gives him a bath and a bed and food, 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 presence 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 to help the family. He's a messenger boy for a while and just trying to ustry for a little bit of money. And uh. He starts performing in vaudeville shows, but he's not terribly successful. For 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 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 d who's the father of modern magic, and um, he likes the name so much that he decides to take it on himself for his stage name. Right. A 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, very cool, and Houdini also accepted Udan'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 audience isn't going to lives lives the life exactly um. But by Judini's father died and even though that makes financial, uh, 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 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 have some publicity. They're just not making much money, right, and part of that is because Houdini 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 audio. 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, 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 up right de fence And but the act changes in around because Judini meets 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 be married after three weeks, and they're very poor 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 too. She said she sold her virginity to Houdini for an orange, just as an idea of just howful they were. So Houdini replaces THEO with Bess, and she's a tiny 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, swallowing all all things that will come into his show later on. Right. I imagine if you couldn't work with your toes that well would be very helpful for helping with getting out of knocks and street jack it. And he also learned a trick where he would swallow a bunch of needles and then a piece of thread and then you could look inside his mouth. Nothing there, of course, and then somehow he'd 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, you know, dislocate your shoulders or 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 actually live on rabbits for a few weeks with a quarter they borrowed. It wasn't even their own money. So they get into seyance is 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 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 deaths, right, so they could use that information later or 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 Houdini felt terrible about that. Yeah, he's he's pretty superstitious as his best and the deception and the seances really bothers them. And this will come up a little bit later, but first we'll get to Hudini's fame when he becomes someone who makes something like forty five tho 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 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 start, right, And nineteen hundred is when the fame really hits. He gets this reputation for these death defying escapes from shackles and 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. 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 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 live. And he writes a book on the history of magic around this time too, where he turns on ROBERTA. 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 Jodini's great escapes because I'm sure all your 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 Guiteau, who was the assassin of President Garfield. So, as you can imagine, that got a lot of press escaping from the assassin's cell. And in 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 cam 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'd tell 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 end cuffed several times and then go back into the milk can and somehow get out. And of course you can imagine Whodini has a lot of imitators. One guy Janasta dies while trying to do the milk can escape, and Hudini was trying to discourage a lot of imitators. He would say, you know, the showmanship stuff, the death defying 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 really hard on the body. The water can stuff and things like the straight jacket. At some point he bursts the blood vessel trying to get out of chains. He's in chronic pain for the rest of his life. These aren't eas easy on the body to do. Uh. By March thirty to April four of nineteen o eight, he performed at the Hammerstein's Theater in New York in the 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 Morganto of the Sun, and he also jumps off Queensbridge in Australia. Is one of the best. One so gross. It's over kind of a a nasty, muddy river. And when he came up from his jump, there were two figures and the crowd is sitting there looking at 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 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 Dare Double mystique because flying was extremely dangerous at the time. While his very first flight crashed, He's lucky he ended up not being hurt, but there were several casual to these when it all first started. So the fact that he was so into it and so willing to do it so something 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. I would 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? You can't. He's also in a lot of motion pictures from nineteen sixteen to nine three, but surprisingly these don't do well. The switch to motion pictures was just one 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 path hours and got pretty into it. It was a crusade almost for him, right, because a lot of these people 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 to say the least, so a little guilt from his own own experiences as a charlattan early in his career, and then just trying to shine the light on this shady industry that's really thriving. And his main target is a woman named Mina Crandon who's known in her medium life as Marjorie, who did a lot of seances and she's championed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who it's a very good friend of Houdini's until all of this business kind of starts up and they 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 and a magician among spirits, and he even combines this exposing the Charlatans into his own act. He does sort of triumvirate of Houdini m 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 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 nine, Houdini 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 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 that he was punched in the abdomen by a college student and then dies of a rupture appendix 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, it wouldn't hurt his organs. So this college student comes up to him when he's relaxing on this 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 student starts punching away, and so it's thought 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 it certainly 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, 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 poison 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 least a little tiny bit of evidence to go off of. So the authors 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 as Marjorie would have to 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, 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 and I also realized that a lot of our podcasts involve exhuming a body. That seems to be a theme lately of us telling you to dig up to and that's come up with Houdin e. 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 you won't find anything about it since then. If you do, please email us because I'm really curious about that. I say, publicity stunt. So Whodini to be proud by the button? Yeah. By the guys who wrote The Secret Life of Houdini side note also from the book, these guys had suggested that Houdini was a secret agent before World War One with the United 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 a double side note on that. Melville 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 Sidney Riley, who is believed to be the template of James Bond. So I really like the idea that maybe British intelligence services used some of Houdini's tricks when training their secret agent, and he was interested, really interested in stuff like Chris photography 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 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 his tomb. Yeah, in nineteen the original marble bust of Houdini 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 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 buckle up and goes to a secret like it. It's kept permanently in a secret location maintained by a Brooklyn dentists. But one of the one of the stolen busts reappeared just a few years ago in a closet in a cardboard box. So pretty 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 his crack pipe, So thanks a lot crack pipe smoking Burglardini 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 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 switchero between Houdini and Beatrice. And there was a lot of controversy over this exhibit because it revealed the secret to the trick, which some magicians thought breaked the magician's code right, But Kudini 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 trick being told. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old house stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. You can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. One of our upcoming episodes this week is Harry Houdini Adjacent So Today's Saturday Classic is an episode on Houdini from way back in the show's earliest years. It came out on December seventh, two thousand and nine, from previous hosts Katie and Sarah, and toward the end of the episode, uh Sarah and Katie talk about a two thousand and eight request to exhume Houdini's remains that exhamation never happened. They also talked about ongoing issues with vandalism at Houdini's grave. In the last few years, the Society of American Magicians has been working to restore the Houdini family grave site and to fund it's ongoing upkeep. Most recently, replica gravestones were installed for Houdini's brother and sister, Leopold and Gladys, with funding from the Houdini Museum and magicians Dick Brooks and Dorothy Dietrich. So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History ass a production of My Heart Radio. 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 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 hope, or Joe Bluth. Maybe, well, he does illusions. He's a pretend famous magician. All right. So Judini wasn't born Harry Judini, though, of course he 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 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 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 campus the study of my English and now it's they have a tough, a tough life early on. Um. So they end up moving from Appleton to Milwaukee, and the young Eric shines shoes and sells newspapers and does little odds and end 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 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 a 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 in the kitchen trying to steal baked goods from from his mom while his mom wasn't looking as good as start as any to 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 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 ragmuffin boy and takes him in, gives him a bath and a bed and food, 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 presence 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 to help the family. He's a messenger boy for a while and just trying to ustry for a little bit of money. And uh. He starts performing in vaudeville shows, but he's not terribly successful. For 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 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 d who's the father of modern magic, and um, he likes the name so much that he decides to take it on himself for his stage name. Right. A 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, very cool, and Houdini also accepted Udan'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 audience isn't going to lives lives the life exactly um. But by Judini's father died and even though that makes financial, uh, 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 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 have some publicity. They're just not making much money, right, and part of that is because Houdini 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 audio. 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, 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 up right de fence And but the act changes in around because Judini meets 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 be married after three weeks, and they're very poor 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 too. She said she sold her virginity to Houdini for an orange, just as an idea of just howful they were. So Houdini replaces THEO with Bess, and she's a tiny 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, swallowing all all things that will come into his show later on. Right. I imagine if you couldn't work with your toes that well would be very helpful for helping with getting out of knocks and street jack it. And he also learned a trick where he would swallow a bunch of needles and then a piece of thread and then you could look inside his mouth. Nothing there, of course, and then somehow he'd 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, you know, dislocate your shoulders or 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 actually live on rabbits for a few weeks with a quarter they borrowed. It wasn't even their own money. So they get into seyance is 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 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 deaths, right, so they could use that information later or 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 Houdini felt terrible about that. Yeah, he's he's pretty superstitious as his best and the deception and the seances really bothers them. And this will come up a little bit later, but first we'll get to Hudini's fame when he becomes someone who makes something like forty five tho 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 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 start, right, And nineteen hundred is when the fame really hits. He gets this reputation for these death defying escapes from shackles and 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. 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 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 live. And he writes a book on the history of magic around this time too, where he turns on ROBERTA. 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 Jodini's great escapes because I'm sure all your 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 Guiteau, who was the assassin of President Garfield. So, as you can imagine, that got a lot of press escaping from the assassin's cell. And in 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 cam 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'd tell 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 end cuffed several times and then go back into the milk can and somehow get out. And of course you can imagine Whodini has a lot of imitators. One guy Janasta dies while trying to do the milk can escape, and Hudini was trying to discourage a lot of imitators. He would say, you know, the showmanship stuff, the death defying 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 really hard on the body. The water can stuff and things like the straight jacket. At some point he bursts the blood vessel trying to get out of chains. He's in chronic pain for the rest of his life. These aren't eas easy on the body to do. Uh. By March thirty to April four of nineteen o eight, he performed at the Hammerstein's Theater in New York in the 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 Morganto of the Sun, and he also jumps off Queensbridge in Australia. Is one of the best. One so gross. It's over kind of a a nasty, muddy river. And when he came up from his jump, there were two figures and the crowd is sitting there looking at 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 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 Dare Double mystique because flying was extremely dangerous at the time. While his very first flight crashed, He's lucky he ended up not being hurt, but there were several casual to these when it all first started. So the fact that he was so into it and so willing to do it so something 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. I would 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? You can't. He's also in a lot of motion pictures from nineteen sixteen to nine three, but surprisingly these don't do well. The switch to motion pictures was just one 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 path hours and got pretty into it. It was a crusade almost for him, right, because a lot of these people 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 to say the least, so a little guilt from his own own experiences as a charlattan early in his career, and then just trying to shine the light on this shady industry that's really thriving. And his main target is a woman named Mina Crandon who's known in her medium life as Marjorie, who did a lot of seances and she's championed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who it's a very good friend of Houdini's until all of this business kind of starts up and they 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 and a magician among spirits, and he even combines this exposing the Charlatans into his own act. He does sort of triumvirate of Houdini m 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 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 nine, Houdini 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 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 that he was punched in the abdomen by a college student and then dies of a rupture appendix 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, it wouldn't hurt his organs. So this college student comes up to him when he's relaxing on this 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 student starts punching away, and so it's thought 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 it certainly 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, 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 poison 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 least a little tiny bit of evidence to go off of. So the authors 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 as Marjorie would have to 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, 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 and I also realized that a lot of our podcasts involve exhuming a body. That seems to be a theme lately of us telling you to dig up to and that's come up with Houdin e. 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 you won't find anything about it since then. If you do, please email us because I'm really curious about that. I say, publicity stunt. So Whodini to be proud by the button? Yeah. By the guys who wrote The Secret Life of Houdini side note also from the book, these guys had suggested that Houdini was a secret agent before World War One with the United 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 a double side note on that. Melville 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 Sidney Riley, who is believed to be the template of James Bond. So I really like the idea that maybe British intelligence services used some of Houdini's tricks when training their secret agent, and he was interested, really interested in stuff like Chris photography 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 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 his tomb. Yeah, in nineteen the original marble bust of Houdini 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 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 buckle up and goes to a secret like it. It's kept permanently in a secret location maintained by a Brooklyn dentists. But one of the one of the stolen busts reappeared just a few years ago in a closet in a cardboard box. So pretty 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 his crack pipe, So thanks a lot crack pipe smoking Burglardini 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 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 switchero between Houdini and Beatrice. And there was a lot of controversy over this exhibit because it revealed the secret to the trick, which some magicians thought breaked the magician's code right, But Kudini 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 trick being told. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at I heart radio dot com. Our old house stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. You can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. 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