Harry Houdini

He was born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, the son of a Jewish rabbi. When Erik was four, the family left Hungary for the United States, escaping the antisemitism of the old country, and settled first in Wisconsin and later in New York. They were poor — desperately so. As a boy, Erik sold newspapers and shined shoes to help feed his brothers and sisters, and he never forgot the feeling of having nothing.

At sixteen he read the autobiography of a famous French magician, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, and something caught fire in him. He took the name "Houdini" in tribute, paired it with "Harry," and set out to make magic his life. The early years were brutal: cheap circuses, dime museums, half-empty halls. For a long time the audiences were thin and the money was thinner.

Then he found the trick that would change everything. Ordinary card tricks bored the crowds, but the moment Houdini began escaping from handcuffs — challenging local police to lock him up and failing every time to keep him locked — people leaned forward in their seats. He had stumbled onto something powerful: real danger, real chains, and a man who always, somehow, got free.

By the early 1900s, "Harry Handcuff Houdini" was touring Europe, and the act had grown into a worldwide sensation. He walked into police stations and dared the officers to chain him; they bolted on their heaviest shackles, and minutes later he stepped out free. In London in 1904, a newspaper had special handcuffs made that were supposed to be impossible to open. Houdini struggled with them on stage for over an hour while thousands watched in agony — and then, at last, held the open cuffs above his head as the hall erupted.

He understood, better than any performer of his age, that the secret ingredient was not the trick but the fear. So he made the stunts ever more deadly. In the Milk Can escape, he was locked inside a giant can filled to the brim with water; the lid was padlocked shut, a curtain was drawn, and the audience counted the seconds, certain he was about to drown. Even more famous was the Chinese Water Torture Cell: hung upside down by the ankles, he was submerged in a glass tank of water and locked in, in full view of the crowd, with only a curtain between life and a watery death.

He was, above all, a master showman. He flew an aeroplane — becoming the first person to make a powered flight in Australia. He hung from cranes high above city streets, wrapped in a straitjacket, and wriggled free as traffic stopped below. Every poster, every interview, every escape was built to make ordinary people believe that this small, fierce man was simply unkillable.

In his later years, Houdini took on a new mission. After the First World War, grieving families flocked to "mediums" who claimed to contact the dead — for a fee. Houdini, who knew every trick of deception from the inside, was furious that frauds were preying on the bereaved. He began attending séances in disguise, sometimes with a reporter or a police officer beside him, and then standing up to expose the hidden wires, the secret compartments, the sleight of hand. He joined a magazine committee that offered a cash prize to any medium who could prove genuine powers under proper conditions. No one ever claimed it. His most famous target was a celebrated Boston medium known as "Margery," whom he publicly debunked.

Then, in October 1926, came the strange chain of events that no one could have scripted. In Montreal, a student visiting his dressing room asked whether Houdini could really take a punch to the stomach without harm. Before the performer was ready, the young man struck him several hard blows. Houdini was already unwell, and the pain grew worse, but — true to character — he refused to stop performing. He travelled on to Detroit and went on stage with a high fever.

What he did not know was that his appendix had burst, flooding his body with infection. On 31 October 1926 — Halloween — Harry Houdini died of peritonitis, aged fifty-two. The man who had escaped every chain, can, cell and torture device ever built for him could not escape this. Nearly a century later, he remains the most famous magician who ever lived, the immigrant boy who turned the fear of death into the greatest show on Earth.