Word: houdini
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...greatest escape artist in history, and for Harry Houdini, existence itself was a search for escape. First he had to break away from his family; life on Manhattan's East Side as Ehrich Weiss, son of scholarly Rabbi Mayer Weiss, was not for him. So he studied the memoirs of French Magician Robert Houdin, changed his own name to Houdini, learned a little clumsy sleight of hand, and started to play the dime museums and carnivals that flourished in the late 19th century. He was a flop, and he had to break out of that situation, too. He concentrated...
...Houdini knew that most of the handcuffs then manufactured could be opened with the same key, and he kept one hidden on his person. Others could be opened by rapping them on a hard surface; so when he challenged an audience to put him in cuffs, there was always a convenient piece of metal strapped to his thigh. When he conned Scotland Yard detectives into trying their "darbies" (handcuffs), they locked Houdini's arms around a stone pillar and left him to suffer. The great escapist simply banged the darbies on the pillar and walked...
...zinc floor of his cage; they were passed to him, mouth to mouth, when his wife kissed him in tearful "farewell" before the carette was hidden in the corner of the prison yard. Doctors who examined him later did not find the "gaffs." An old carny hand had taught Houdini the trick of retroperistal-sis-swallowing small objects, stopping them halfway down the esophagus and spitting them up at leisure...
Back in the U.S., Houdini bolstered his mounting publicity by breaking out of still more jails. Onstage, he walked through brick walls, even though the walls were set on a carpet and volunteers stood on the carpet's edges to prove that it stayed in place and did not hide a trap door. (There actually was a trap door. When it was opened, the carpet sagged, despite the volunteers, and Houdini inched beneath the wall. This part of the act was hidden from both volunteers and audience by a screen.) He was soldered into a coffin made of galvanized...
...successful were these illusions and escapes that many of Houdini's vast audience actually believed he could communicate with spirits, that he had supernatural powers. But as the movies began to edge vaudeville into the wings, the master escapist earned most of his headlines by proving that anyone who claimed such magic was a fake. While he tilted with the table rappers and spook producers, he continued to produce new stunts for the stage. He was still at it in the fall of 1926, when he let a college boxer test his vaunted toughness by punching...