HOUDINI, HARRY

HOUDINI, HARRY (originally Eric Weisz, 1874–1926), U.S. magician and escape artist. The grandson of a rabbi, Houdini was born in Budapest and taken to the United States, where his father became religious leader of a Jewish congregation in Appleton, Wisconsin. Houdini began his career at the age of nine as a trapeze artist in a five-cent circus. When his family moved to New York he changed his name to Harry (from "Eri") Houdini, in admiration of the great French magician Robert-Houdin. His extraordinary achievements as a magician included making a live elephant disappear before the eyes of a baffled audience (for the first time in the New York Hippodrome in 1918). He repeatedly escaped from shackles, ropes, chains, and handcuffs while suspended head down in a tank of water, buried alive, or thrown into a half-frozen river. The highest paid and most popular performer of his time, he appeared in theaters in Europe and America, and demonstrated his skills to members of Scotland Yard and the Moscow Police Department, breaking out of a Russian "escape-proof " prison van in 1903. He starred as an escape artist in many adventure films and was a pioneer pilot, making the first sustained flight over the continent of Australia on March 16, 1910, near Melbourne. Houdini constantly attacked the charlatanism of so-called mind readers and mediums. Two of his many books, Miracle Mongers and Their Methods (1920) and Magicianamong the Spirits (1924), were devoted to this purpose, and he offered a standing $10,000 reward for any "supernatural" manifestation he could not duplicate. He died in Detroit. His library on magic, spirits, and witchcraft was bequeathed to the Library of Congress, Washington. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: J.F. Rinn, Searchlight on Psychical Research (1954); W.L. Gresham, Houdini; the Man Who Walked Through Walls (1960), incl. bibl.; M. Christopher, Houdini; the Untold Story (1969), incl. bibl.