Escape artist Harry Houdini was a genius inventor who just didn’t want anyone to know

On January 27, 1908, at the Columbia Theater in St. Louis, Harry Houdini was about to make his stage debut. The master of illusion walked into an oversized milk jug and poured gallons of water onto the stage. Houdini was about to do something that looked terrible.

The can has been poked, poked, and turned over to prove to the audience that there is no hole underneath the stage. Houdini was handcuffed in front of his face. His hair was parted in the middle and he had a serious look on his face. His blue swimsuit showed off his extraordinary physique. Holding his breath, he squeezed his entire body into the jar filled with water. The lid was secured and locked from the outside with six padlocks. A cabinet was pushed around the jar to hide it from view.

The time passed as the audience waited for Harry Houdini to drown.

Two minutes later, a panting and dripping Houdini emerged from behind the cabinet. The jar is still locked. During his lifetime, no one knew how he escaped.

Harry Houdini is most commonly remembered as an escape artist and magician. He was also an actor, a trailblazing pilot, an amateur historian and a businessman. In every role, he was an innovator and sometimes an inventor. But to protect his fantasy, he largely sidestepped the patent process, kept secrets, copyrighted his tricks, and otherwise hid his creativity. The Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery has a 1920 gelatin silver print by an unknown author. It depicts Houdini at his most dramatic, wearing makeup and facing the camera with a deliberately mysterious gaze.

The great magician, one half of the famous duo Penn and Teller, recently recalled how he discovered a Houdini at an auction in Los Angeles held by the late Sid Radner. Invented, he has one of the largest collections of Houdini material in the world.

"I got a big black wooden cross that I figured wouldn't fetch much at auction. I thought it would be a nice souvenir when I bought it," Taylor told me in a phone interview.

"After I bought it, Sid came up to me and said, 'Careful, there are no kids around this thing. ’ I said, ‘Why not? ’ He said, ‘You don’t want them to stick their fingers in here.’ It has holes, and you tie people to it and they try to escape. I didn't realize this was a complex mechanism. With a simple movement of your foot, you can cut all the ropes at the same time.

Houdini was born Eric Weiss in Budapest in 1874 to Jewish parents, but he grew up in the United States from the age of 4. He began performing magic tricks in vaudeville shows in the 1890s, escaping from handcuffs and locked boxes.

"His name pops up frequently in pop culture whenever someone does something sneaky or magical," says John Cox, author of the popular website Wild About Harry. "His magic is still magical. .*** Escape from prison remains an incredible feat. His story is both vivid and contemporary, Taylor said:

The act of escape was spiritual. History. In the mid-19th century, performers claimed they were connected to unseen spirits who could commune with the dead, or perform miracles. "In séances, mediums were usually restrained in some way. "At least tied up, sometimes with chains or handcuffs," he said. Houdini made no such supernatural claims.

"[Spiritual performers] would run away to do their performances and then be locked up again," Taylor said. "Houdini said, 'I'm just a smart guy who got out of it.' "This was a major shift.

Harry Houdini was part of a generation that worshiped a new kind of hero, inventor, and daredevil. As America entered the 20th century, automobiles, airplanes , Wax Cylinder, and the film Gusteau of 1911, which legally prohibits imitation but does not explain how the trick works.

"In fact, I looked closely at the waterboarding cell and it was. Very small," Taylor said. "You think of it as a towering thing.

But it's a deal, something that works.

The number of people who saw Houdini escape from his waterboarding cell was far fewer than the number of people around the world who awed him. Houdini was a master at using the media to cover his exploits.

"As an innovator, he was someone who knew how to use the media," Taylor said. "When you think back, he was the first big name you saw working with a company on promotions. If he was going to your town and your center was the beer industry, he would talk to the breweries and arrange something from A giant beer keg or something to escape from

"He was obsessed with being on the cutting edge of everything," Taylor said. Although Houdini had emerged from the vaudeville scene, he was adept at taking advantage of new technology. To maintain his celebrity status. He knew movies were the next big thing and he kind of did it with a lot of charisma.

In 1918, Woody. Nick began work on his first major film project, The Mysteries of the Master, a 15-part series with a complex plot in which an evil corporation tricks inventors into signing contracts that grant them exclusive marketing rights for their inventions. ; but companies are secretly killing these inventions for the benefit of existing patent holders. The film follows what may be the first robot villain to appear on camera, a metal robot with a human brain. . Harry Houdini's 1909 Voisin thruster biplane; marked with a small "X" is presumably Houdini (National Air and Space Museum Archives)

According to Silverman. According to reports, Houdini attempted to build a real robot for the film, describing it as "a figure controlled by a Solinoid system, similar to an aerial torpedo." To modern eyes, this statement is absurd. The "robot" was clearly a human actor walking around in a costume, and Houdini himself was often an unreliable source for his own work. He inadvertently confused dates and places. He deliberately exaggerated his own exploits and inventions. Taylor also believed that Houdini was "not very" reliable as a source for his own history. A writer and historian, but his job was to be a performer, that's who he was," Taylor said. "He was interested in the history of magic. He collected a lot of information, but I don't think he was a historian because historians have standards.

"No illusion is good in movies because we are simply using the camera trix and that is what it is," Houdini once said. While new technology in cinematography helped Houdini reach a wider audience, it may ultimately help end the phenomenon of professional escape artists. Under the camera, anyone can be portrayed as an escape artist. Special effects can make anything look real.

At the same time that movies captured the public imagination, aviation did the same. The Wright brothers proved that flight was possible. A group of brave, smart, and wealthy people around the world began buying or building their own airplanes and competing to set new aviation records. The highest flight, the longest flight, the first time along a particular route. Houdini decided to join. He bought a Voisin biplane in Europe for $5,000, equipped with bicycle wheels and a rear propeller. He also took out what he claimed was the world's first life insurance policy on an airplane accident. Houdini took the dismantled airplane, parts and insurance and set off for a tour in Australia, becoming the first person to fly an airplane on the Australian continent