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Harry Houdini: More than Magic · Stuff You Should Know

0:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff you should know, a production of I
0:04
Speaker 1: Heart Radio because I am, and welcome to the podcast.
0:13
Speaker 1: I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck, Brian over there,
0:17
Speaker 1: and Jerry's here. She's invisible but here. And this is
0:22
Speaker 1: the Mystery Magic Podcast hour a k A. Stuff you
0:26
Speaker 1: should know. I feel like we haven't covered much magic
0:31
Speaker 1: related stuff, have we not nearly enough? Oh? Yeah, you
0:34
Speaker 1: into it? Yeah? I find it interesting for sure. Um,
0:38
Speaker 1: and I think magicians are pretty cool people typically. Um. Yeah,
0:43
Speaker 1: you know Toby, our friend Toby he um he and
0:47
Speaker 1: I were talking about um working on a magic podcast,
0:52
Speaker 1: kind of like a magic skeptics podcast, a couple of
0:56
Speaker 1: his good friends, and they're just they're just cool dudes,
0:59
Speaker 1: chill people, interesting, very witty, sharp, not pink boys at all.
1:04
Speaker 1: You guys should totally do that. This is years and
1:07
Speaker 1: years ago, said that Chip. Well, he's a big movie producer. Now, yeah,
1:11
Speaker 1: that's magic podcast. No, thank you. Well, I'm glad to
1:16
Speaker 1: know that you found some cool magicians. Yeah, are you
1:19
Speaker 1: not familiar with cool magicians? No? I mean the magicians
1:23
Speaker 1: I know about are decidedly uncool. Oh, I see, like
1:27
Speaker 1: Ben Stiller and arrested Development instiller and arrested Development. Yeah
1:33
Speaker 1: he was Job's rival. Oh right, you know, I forgot
1:37
Speaker 1: about that kind of a white snake thing going on.
1:40
Speaker 1: I think I'm thinking mainly about the time I went
1:43
Speaker 1: to the Magic Castle in Los Angeles and I felt
1:46
Speaker 1: like one of the cooler people there, which is unusual. Okay,
1:49
Speaker 1: full of a lot of people. I don't mean like
1:51
Speaker 1: fonds cool. I mean cool in the in the fact
1:54
Speaker 1: that they're like interesting, they are sharp, they're quitted. Uh. Um,
2:00
Speaker 1: they will take your wallet from you if you're not careful.
2:04
Speaker 1: That kind of cool, you know what I mean? Okay?
2:07
Speaker 1: Was Judini cool? Uh? In a lot of ways? He
2:10
Speaker 1: was very cool? Um, the band in a lot. No,
2:13
Speaker 1: that's pretty they were very cool. Um in a lot
2:17
Speaker 1: of ways. I think he was cool in some other ways.
2:19
Speaker 1: He wasn't necessarily super cool. But I think overall you
2:23
Speaker 1: could say, yes, Houdini was cool in the sense that
2:27
Speaker 1: a good magician is cool. Yeah. This is one of
2:30
Speaker 1: those guys where I did a little digging to see
2:32
Speaker 1: if if we needed a like, see if he was
2:35
Speaker 1: some monster in his personal life. I didn't see anything
2:39
Speaker 1: like that. I think he was a pretty intense guy
2:42
Speaker 1: and maybe and I'm sure a man of the time,
2:44
Speaker 1: but I didn't see anything that jumped out at me. Uh.
2:48
Speaker 1: And we should mention big thanks to boy a bunch
2:51
Speaker 1: of things. History dot com, Smithsonian Magazine which is always great,
2:56
Speaker 1: PBS New Yorker, and of course the great Harry Houdini
3:00
Speaker 1: dot com. Yes, there's also a couple of other sites
3:03
Speaker 1: that I got some stuff from, like, um, wild About
3:05
Speaker 1: Harry is a good Houdini site, And there's this, Uh,
3:09
Speaker 1: there's this some documentary series by a site called Timeline,
3:14
Speaker 1: and the one I saw was hosted by Alan Davies.
3:16
Speaker 1: It's called Life and Magic of the Real Harry Houdin
3:19
Speaker 1: and Houdini and it was just like this, you know,
3:22
Speaker 1: hour long, pretty cool little documentary. I thought it was
3:25
Speaker 1: very neat. I got like good info from that too.
3:28
Speaker 1: It's on YouTube too. Well. I was, Uh, I was
3:31
Speaker 1: into Houdini when I was a kid for a short time,
3:34
Speaker 1: and I think that it was probably just because it
3:36
Speaker 1: was a short time where I was, And I think
3:38
Speaker 1: a lot of kids go through a magic phase, uh,
3:42
Speaker 1: whether it's going to a trick shop and getting a
3:44
Speaker 1: fake deck or learning your first dumb little card trick
3:48
Speaker 1: that's not very good, but you think it's awesome. It's
3:51
Speaker 1: just something that I feel like almost every kid goes
3:53
Speaker 1: through a brief little magic phase and sometimes it sticks
3:56
Speaker 1: and you become super cool. Evidently that's right, exactly. So there,
4:00
Speaker 1: I saw a couple of things that seemed to support
4:02
Speaker 1: that he wasn't a monster by the way, chuck Um.
4:05
Speaker 1: One of them was that he would go to like, um,
4:08
Speaker 1: the children's ward in hospitals and perform magic for the
4:11
Speaker 1: kids and beat them up take their money. Yeah. But
4:16
Speaker 1: I mean, like, if you think about it, that's not
4:17
Speaker 1: something that just anybody does, you know, Like that's that's
4:21
Speaker 1: time he could be do spending doing something else. Um.
4:24
Speaker 1: He was like almost almost pathologically devoted to his mother
4:31
Speaker 1: m making sure that she was well taken care of.
4:34
Speaker 1: I think also one of the I saw that that
4:36
Speaker 1: was like a possibly a driver of his ambition as well,
4:39
Speaker 1: that he wanted to be Mom's favorite, an impressor more
4:42
Speaker 1: than any of his siblings because he was one of six. Yeah,
4:45
Speaker 1: and also that his father was never much of his success,
4:50
Speaker 1: which will get to and I think I think those
4:52
Speaker 1: are definitely the big drivers. But he himself called himself
4:55
Speaker 1: a mom's boy, like he used those two words together. Yeah. Yeah.
4:58
Speaker 1: There's a famous picture of him with his his wife
5:00
Speaker 1: Bess and his mother and he's got like his arms
5:03
Speaker 1: around both of them and he calls them my two
5:06
Speaker 1: girls or my two sweethearts or something like that. So
5:09
Speaker 1: I mean, like, I know, hats off the best for
5:11
Speaker 1: being like, all right, let's go with it. We're gonna
5:14
Speaker 1: go with it. I'm definitely not gonna try to probably
5:16
Speaker 1: that one LuSE it's not gonna work. So we're just
5:18
Speaker 1: gonna go with it. And I say, good for her,
5:21
Speaker 1: all right, Well should we get into it. Yeah, let's
5:23
Speaker 1: because you said something about his father, and I think
5:25
Speaker 1: that that's an important thing to understand about Houdini um
5:29
Speaker 1: from the get go, is that he was essentially born
5:32
Speaker 1: into poverty and it just got worse as he got
5:35
Speaker 1: older because his father was a rabbi, and if there
5:38
Speaker 1: is such a thing, his father was a failed rabbi.
5:40
Speaker 1: He couldn't make it as a rabbi. I know that was.
5:44
Speaker 1: I was surprised to see that because all like everywhere
5:47
Speaker 1: I looked, it would continually say like, boy's dad just
5:50
Speaker 1: couldn't make the rabbi. Racket work, and I kind of,
5:54
Speaker 1: I don't know, I kind of naively assumed that if
5:56
Speaker 1: you were sort of giving up a life of trying
5:59
Speaker 1: to a make you know, money as a capitalist for
6:02
Speaker 1: a living by going to the church and being a
6:06
Speaker 1: steward of the church, then you would at least do Okay,
6:09
Speaker 1: you'd think so. But I think that means that he
6:11
Speaker 1: was so charmless he couldn't even muster up a congregation
6:15
Speaker 1: to to to surround him. So he was a hard
6:18
Speaker 1: luck kind of guy. And as a result, Harry uh
6:22
Speaker 1: was was raised in poverty, had to go to work
6:24
Speaker 1: from a very young age, and also like missed out
6:27
Speaker 1: on a formal education as a result too, And so
6:30
Speaker 1: those things kind of converge to also, I think kind
6:33
Speaker 1: of drive him to prove himself that yeah, maybe he
6:36
Speaker 1: didn't go to school and maybe he was born poor,
6:38
Speaker 1: but he could still be a superstar, he could still
6:40
Speaker 1: amaze people, he could still be um idolized. Basically. Yeah.
6:46
Speaker 1: His his dad's name was Meyer Weiss, his mom was
6:50
Speaker 1: Cecilia Steiner Wights, and he was born Eric E. H
6:55
Speaker 1: R I C. H Viights in March of eighteen seventy
6:59
Speaker 1: four in Hungary. Uh In Budapest, but he when he
7:03
Speaker 1: was four, he came over and joined the family in Wisconsin,
7:07
Speaker 1: and his dad did manage to have a small congregation
7:10
Speaker 1: in Wisconsin, I think in Appleton and Uh they changed
7:15
Speaker 1: immigration officers changed the name to Vice with two s
7:19
Speaker 1: is instead of an s z, and Eric went by
7:22
Speaker 1: Airy E h R I E. The only reason I
7:26
Speaker 1: mentioned Airy is because that comes into play later when
7:28
Speaker 1: he takes on the name Harry is sort of an
7:30
Speaker 1: Americanized version of that name. So that's where the Harry
7:34
Speaker 1: came from. Um. Yes, he uh, he was. He started
7:38
Speaker 1: working I think uh and when he was still single digits,
7:42
Speaker 1: but he started performing also around the same time too.
7:45
Speaker 1: When he was nine, he made his debut as a
7:47
Speaker 1: trap He's artist, Eric the Prince of the Air nice
7:52
Speaker 1: and he was always a rather short stature. I think
7:54
Speaker 1: he topped out at five point five ft five inches
7:59
Speaker 1: five point five um, but he was extremely fit. He
8:03
Speaker 1: decided early on that he wanted to be very athletic
8:07
Speaker 1: as much as he could be, so he really like
8:09
Speaker 1: he was doing things like you know, when he moved
8:11
Speaker 1: to New York a few years later. Um, he was
8:14
Speaker 1: doing things like running five miles around Central Park every day,
8:16
Speaker 1: which is super commonplace today, but you know in the
8:19
Speaker 1: eighteen late late nineteenth century, that was weird. Yeah. I mean,
8:23
Speaker 1: like god knows what kind of shoes he was wearing
8:26
Speaker 1: for that kind of thing, but he would do that
8:27
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. So he was short of stature, but
8:29
Speaker 1: also very athletic um self taught to Yeah. So, like
8:34
Speaker 1: you said, they eventually landed in New York um after
8:38
Speaker 1: you know, his again, Rabbi Weiss was not doing so well,
8:42
Speaker 1: so he was kind of always on the move trying
8:44
Speaker 1: to find somebody to listen to him, and they eventually
8:48
Speaker 1: get to New York and in eighteen nine one, which
8:51
Speaker 1: would have been uh, what's the math there? S sixteen
8:56
Speaker 1: is seventeen ish. We were trying to figure out before Ghostbusters,
9:00
Speaker 1: no no, I was trying to figure out how old
9:02
Speaker 1: he was. Uh, he's like sixty or seventeen when he
9:05
Speaker 1: teamed up with this buddy, Jacob Himan. I'm sorry him,
9:09
Speaker 1: himman him, Why did that look weird on the paper?
9:14
Speaker 1: You may be having a stroke. I hope not. The
9:18
Speaker 1: brothers Houdini is what they called themselves, and Harry again
9:22
Speaker 1: is what he went by because of Airy and then
9:25
Speaker 1: as far as Judini goes, his favorite French magician's last
9:29
Speaker 1: name was Robert Houdin, so he threw an eye on there,
9:33
Speaker 1: and all of a sudden, he's Harry Hudini for evermore. Yeah,
9:38
Speaker 1: I think so. I saw in that documentary that somebody
9:40
Speaker 1: told him that adding an eye to a name in
9:42
Speaker 1: French means that you're saying you're like that person. So
9:45
Speaker 1: he was saying Hohodini, like he's like Hudin Houdin hudan
9:49
Speaker 1: Um who was his idol for at least while he's
9:52
Speaker 1: growing up. And then apparently later on he kind of
9:54
Speaker 1: turned on him and exposed all of his secrets after
9:56
Speaker 1: the guy had died, which was actually not cool. It
10:00
Speaker 1: not cool. And there I think there was also a
10:02
Speaker 1: tradition of the eye name on those kind of acts
10:05
Speaker 1: like yes, but I think he may have started that.
10:09
Speaker 1: Oh really, I'm not sure, but he was the blond
10:11
Speaker 1: niece and right right, um, I think as far as
10:14
Speaker 1: magic goes, he may have been the the originator of
10:18
Speaker 1: that because I saw some of like one of his
10:20
Speaker 1: other um uh contemporaries who who helped kind of train
10:24
Speaker 1: him was last name Heller. There was a haller like
10:28
Speaker 1: there was no other eyes that I saw interesting. Yeah, alright,
10:32
Speaker 1: so he kicked off the big eye crazy that's still
10:35
Speaker 1: going crazy today. It is the iPhone. Um. So he
10:39
Speaker 1: I think his dad died in Uh. Harry is eighteen
10:44
Speaker 1: at this point, and he does a very unusual thing
10:47
Speaker 1: and that he actually leaves his mom behind along with
10:51
Speaker 1: his brothers, which was a big deal for him, like
10:52
Speaker 1: you said, because he was a self professed mama's boy.
10:55
Speaker 1: And he took off on the road doing his act
10:58
Speaker 1: kind of through New York, through the mid West. I
11:01
Speaker 1: was doing okay, he was performing kind of all around.
11:03
Speaker 1: It was a bit of a grind, uh with with
11:06
Speaker 1: Hyman still sounds weird and not because of what you think. Uh.
11:10
Speaker 1: And then eighteen ninety four, his younger brother replaced him
11:14
Speaker 1: in just for a short while, because later that year
11:18
Speaker 1: he would meet eighteen year old Brooklyn Knight to name
11:21
Speaker 1: the villamina Beatrice Ronner or Bess, and she became his
11:26
Speaker 1: magic partner. And you know, they called him assistants. She
11:29
Speaker 1: would have been the one on stage, you know, looking
11:33
Speaker 1: pretty and doing all the flourishes. And it's a tradition
11:37
Speaker 1: and magic that I know, I don't want to use
11:41
Speaker 1: word problematic, but it has changed in more recent years. Yeah,
11:45
Speaker 1: but this is at the time when a magician's assistant
11:48
Speaker 1: was a lady in a bathing suit. Yeah, basically, and
11:52
Speaker 1: and Best was no exception to that, although if you
11:54
Speaker 1: read some of the descriptions of some of the illusions
11:57
Speaker 1: and tricks that they did together, she was just as
12:00
Speaker 1: much a magician in her own right as he was. Um,
12:03
Speaker 1: she definitely got her training from him. I think he
12:06
Speaker 1: discovered her in a singing troupe. Um. But like like
12:10
Speaker 1: she grew to be just as adapt at magic and
12:13
Speaker 1: sleight of hand as her husband, which is pretty cool. Yeah.
12:16
Speaker 1: It's interesting the things that have become boys clubs over
12:19
Speaker 1: the years, and like magic is definitely one of them.
12:23
Speaker 1: It's I mean that's changed a lot over the years,
12:25
Speaker 1: but it always I mean, going to the Magic Castle
12:27
Speaker 1: and you're in, you're mainly going to see male performers
12:30
Speaker 1: and a bunch of old man dressed in suits. Uh,
12:34
Speaker 1: it's just a fund It odd that it's something that
12:37
Speaker 1: maybe just appeals to young boys. I don't know. My
12:40
Speaker 1: sister wasn't into magic, and my brother and I were so,
12:42
Speaker 1: but there's something too much of that is just like
12:44
Speaker 1: the gender norms and expectations of society where it wasn't
12:49
Speaker 1: like presented to your sister in a way that it's like, hey,
12:52
Speaker 1: isn't this interesting? Like everything else. Yeah, there was a
12:55
Speaker 1: documentary I saw. I'm sure I mentioned it before, um
12:58
Speaker 1: years ago, about these like up and coming teenage magicians
13:02
Speaker 1: who are all trying to make their way through competitions
13:05
Speaker 1: to the Magic Castle to like a grand showcase, and
13:09
Speaker 1: they follow these ones. There were there was at least
13:12
Speaker 1: one girl that I remember, and she was good. Um,
13:15
Speaker 1: but I mean she must have been thirteen fourteen at
13:17
Speaker 1: the time and have been into it for years. So
13:19
Speaker 1: clearly there's something you know that appeals to some girls too,
13:23
Speaker 1: even if it's not directed towards them. He has a
13:27
Speaker 1: great documentary. You gotta see it. And by the way,
13:29
Speaker 1: since we're speaking of documentaries, you have of course seen
13:33
Speaker 1: Love on the Spectrum, have you not? No, you recommended
13:36
Speaker 1: that a few weeks ago. Just we'll just stop. I'm
13:40
Speaker 1: gonna I'll give you about six hours. Okay, you just
13:43
Speaker 1: go watch and we'll come back and finish recording. Okay,
13:46
Speaker 1: all right, Well, then another three weeks you can bring
13:48
Speaker 1: it up again. You you just have to see it. Okay,
13:51
Speaker 1: I'll see it. It's like again, I'm giving you a
13:53
Speaker 1: gift here. Oh did you make it? No? No, just
13:57
Speaker 1: telling you about it as a gift as what I'm
14:00
Speaker 1: and say. It's that sweet. Alright, well everyone watch Love
14:03
Speaker 1: on the Spectrum and we're going to take a break
14:05
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about Houdini's eventual success right
14:08
Speaker 1: after this. Alright, so we got Houdini, we got best together,
14:32
Speaker 1: and now things can begin in earnest and they kind
14:34
Speaker 1: of pick up together where what Houdini had started, which
14:38
Speaker 1: was very small little venues, sometimes a side show UM,
14:45
Speaker 1: sometimes a museum like a P. T. Barnum type museum.
14:48
Speaker 1: If they were lucky, um, they were just kind of
14:51
Speaker 1: there almost part of the woodwork or the furniture um
14:54
Speaker 1: with other stuff going on. They weren't doing actual shows.
14:57
Speaker 1: And if they were doing a show, it was a
14:59
Speaker 1: small act in a larger circus. And it was a
15:03
Speaker 1: grind from what I understand. Yeah, I mean travel back
15:07
Speaker 1: then was not as still a grind, but it definitely
15:11
Speaker 1: wasn't fun and they were on the road all the time.
15:14
Speaker 1: And then finally in they met a man named Martin
15:19
Speaker 1: Beck who was a big name and a big up
15:22
Speaker 1: and comer in the vaudeville scene, which at the time,
15:26
Speaker 1: I mean you think of vaudeville now is like these
15:28
Speaker 1: kind of little shows, But at the time that was
15:31
Speaker 1: kind of the peak of the touring world and the
15:33
Speaker 1: live theater world. If you were doing vaudeville, that was
15:36
Speaker 1: that was sort of top of the pops. And he
15:39
Speaker 1: saw them perform in St. Paul, Minnesota and was really
15:42
Speaker 1: knocked out. He did this one of his handcuff escapes.
15:45
Speaker 1: And he also took these challenges. He was very famous
15:48
Speaker 1: for people saying, hey, can you do this? Can you
15:50
Speaker 1: get out of the ease? And uh it really you know.
15:53
Speaker 1: He would do this in public and it would help
15:55
Speaker 1: like promote his brand basically and get a lot of press.
15:59
Speaker 1: And he was challenged with a pair of handcuffs from
16:01
Speaker 1: Beck and he got out of those and Beck said, kid,
16:05
Speaker 1: you got it being Omaha in March, and I'll pay
16:09
Speaker 1: sixty bucks, which is about eighteen hundred dollars today. So
16:14
Speaker 1: it was good money. And all of a sudden they
16:18
Speaker 1: are killing it on the vaudeville circuit. Yeah, his his
16:21
Speaker 1: um his cable to them said, I might proposition you
16:25
Speaker 1: for all next season as well. So it was like
16:28
Speaker 1: it was a big, big deal. It wasn't just that
16:30
Speaker 1: one show. Was like, Okay, you've just made it to
16:32
Speaker 1: the big time. And so all of a sudden they're
16:35
Speaker 1: in with with Martin Beck, who basically is the king
16:38
Speaker 1: of the Western Circuit of the Vaudeville of vaudeville, and
16:43
Speaker 1: they're playing all over the place, making a lot more
16:46
Speaker 1: money than they were before, playing fewer shows, um, putting
16:50
Speaker 1: in fewer hours on stage, and getting compensated better for it.
16:55
Speaker 1: They're like, all right, this is this is pretty great.
16:57
Speaker 1: I can I can go with this? Yeah, And he
17:00
Speaker 1: you know, I mentioned that when he would go to
17:01
Speaker 1: these towns, he would do these challenges and stunts for
17:05
Speaker 1: the public and the press. And one of the things
17:07
Speaker 1: he did that would later come back to buy him
17:09
Speaker 1: a little bit was he would always like the cops
17:11
Speaker 1: would come out and he would you know, he would
17:14
Speaker 1: have the cops lock them up and put him in
17:16
Speaker 1: handcuffs and do all this stuff, which was great press
17:19
Speaker 1: of course, but um, as we'll see later on in Germany,
17:22
Speaker 1: that didn't go over so well with the cops. But
17:24
Speaker 1: he he was known because of this is uh, the
17:27
Speaker 1: king of handcuffs and also the celebrated police battler. Yeah,
17:32
Speaker 1: I mean, and and not only did it kind of
17:34
Speaker 1: drum up like attention in a new town where they
17:37
Speaker 1: may not have heard of him. This guy shows up
17:39
Speaker 1: to a police station, says, put me in jail, and
17:41
Speaker 1: then gets out like in five minutes or something like that. Um.
17:45
Speaker 1: But also the cops end up talking to the press
17:48
Speaker 1: and they say, we have no idea how he did it.
17:50
Speaker 1: So now you have an official endorsement that you just
17:54
Speaker 1: got for free out of like the cops and the
17:57
Speaker 1: local police, you know. So it was like it was
18:00
Speaker 1: a very smart thing to do. And he would do
18:02
Speaker 1: that from town to town to like you said, drum
18:03
Speaker 1: up publicity and also to sell tickets. Like this would
18:07
Speaker 1: be a way that his shows would go from you know,
18:09
Speaker 1: moving ho home and then to sell out with one
18:12
Speaker 1: of his publicity stunts. So he was really good at
18:15
Speaker 1: that kind of thing, alright. So he's making all this dough.
18:18
Speaker 1: He tries to get a tour together with Beck to
18:21
Speaker 1: go to Europe because if you know, if you really
18:24
Speaker 1: back then it wasn't if you can make it in
18:26
Speaker 1: New York, you can make it. Make it anywhere. It
18:28
Speaker 1: was if you could make it in Europe, you could
18:30
Speaker 1: make it anywhere. And Beck was sort of, um, not
18:33
Speaker 1: too high on that idea. So I think they had
18:35
Speaker 1: a falling out, and Houdini put him, uh, put a
18:39
Speaker 1: tour together for he invests for themselves to go kind
18:42
Speaker 1: of run their own show, and they did. They went
18:45
Speaker 1: to Europe and were equally as successful all over Europe
18:48
Speaker 1: and the UK performing this you know, these feats of escape. Yeah,
18:53
Speaker 1: and Russia too. He basically did a world tour over
18:56
Speaker 1: the course of five years. He invested they just like
19:00
Speaker 1: they still listen to it. We're gonna we're gonna try
19:02
Speaker 1: to really kind of make this to the next level.
19:05
Speaker 1: And he he took the same kind of um like
19:08
Speaker 1: publicity chasing stuff from town to town that he did
19:11
Speaker 1: in the US that served him so well. He did
19:13
Speaker 1: the same thing in Europe too, and um he uh
19:18
Speaker 1: he in bests like really kind of up the act
19:22
Speaker 1: around that time, like they started coming with more and
19:24
Speaker 1: more like grander illusions and tricks and stagecraft, and um,
19:30
Speaker 1: the the European thing was a huge success in it
19:33
Speaker 1: That's what catapulted him into like superstar and he became
19:36
Speaker 1: an international star thanks to that, that five year tour. Yeah,
19:40
Speaker 1: and that was in Germany. How I mentioned earlier, the
19:43
Speaker 1: police there, I don't think liked the fact. You know,
19:46
Speaker 1: the German police aren't known for their senses of humor,
19:49
Speaker 1: and I don't think they thought it was super cool
19:51
Speaker 1: that he would go over there and sort of uh,
19:54
Speaker 1: not making fool of them, but I think they may
19:55
Speaker 1: have some of them may have taken it that way.
19:58
Speaker 1: So they police officer in Cologne, Germany accused him of
20:03
Speaker 1: fraud at one point Houdini fired back that that is slander. Uh.
20:08
Speaker 1: And then I think he had to go to court
20:11
Speaker 1: and expose some of his tricks, which he wasn't too
20:14
Speaker 1: wild about, but he had in order to get out
20:16
Speaker 1: of it. He had to kind of expose how he
20:18
Speaker 1: did some of these tricks. But it did work and
20:20
Speaker 1: he did get out of it. Yeah, and now he
20:22
Speaker 1: had an official court endorsement that he was no fraud,
20:25
Speaker 1: he was an actual true magician. So and it was
20:29
Speaker 1: a big deal too because Germany at the time was
20:31
Speaker 1: under the Kaiser who ruled it with an authoritarian state,
20:34
Speaker 1: or ruled an authoritarian state, and um to take on
20:38
Speaker 1: Germany and then prevail like it took. It took khutzpah,
20:42
Speaker 1: as his dad might have said, you know so. Um.
20:45
Speaker 1: After that, they kind of go back to America. I
20:48
Speaker 1: think in nineteen o five, after five years of touring
20:51
Speaker 1: Europe a lot of money, yeah, a lot of money,
20:54
Speaker 1: a lot more stardom. Um. This could have been a
20:57
Speaker 1: really like easy time for he Best to just settle
21:01
Speaker 1: down and say, you know what, we we've made it.
21:03
Speaker 1: We're rich, we're good, we can retire forever. Um, let's
21:07
Speaker 1: just live the good life. And they made some attempts
21:11
Speaker 1: to that. I think Best really was ready to settle down,
21:13
Speaker 1: and I think Houdini was like saying he would. So
21:17
Speaker 1: they bought a brownstone at Harlem. There was a farm
21:19
Speaker 1: in Connecticut they bought. Mom moved in with them, and
21:23
Speaker 1: he was making the gestures of settling down, and then
21:27
Speaker 1: he said, you know what, I've gotta I've gotta get
21:28
Speaker 1: back out there. I'm getting stale. Yeah. I mean, I
21:32
Speaker 1: think one of my big takeaways from reading about his
21:35
Speaker 1: life it was that. And we'll get into some of
21:36
Speaker 1: his inventions later, but he was really an innovator and
21:39
Speaker 1: he was never content to um to just sort of
21:44
Speaker 1: sit back and do the same old tricks. I think
21:46
Speaker 1: he always wanted to invent new stuff, new gadgets and
21:49
Speaker 1: new tricks to do for people. And I think it
21:52
Speaker 1: was in nineteen o eight, uh that he had his
21:56
Speaker 1: he developed his milk can escape, one of his more
21:58
Speaker 1: famous uh because this is you know, he did a
22:02
Speaker 1: couple of things where basically he was like, I might
22:04
Speaker 1: die if this doesn't work, And those were always the
22:06
Speaker 1: biggest tricks. Yeah, And like in that one, it was
22:08
Speaker 1: a milk canon overside milk can, which is like a
22:11
Speaker 1: giant metal can that a human could conceivably fit into
22:14
Speaker 1: if they were very small and five ft five um
22:17
Speaker 1: and it was filled with water, and he would get
22:19
Speaker 1: in there and they would padlock the top and put
22:21
Speaker 1: a curtain behind, put it behind the curtain, and then
22:24
Speaker 1: you know, two minutes later he would ask, he would
22:26
Speaker 1: tell the audience like try to hold your breath along
22:29
Speaker 1: with me, and which just really raised the tension of
22:31
Speaker 1: the in the theater um. And then like two minutes
22:34
Speaker 1: later he would like come up from around the curtain
22:36
Speaker 1: like soaking wet and like out of breath, but triumphant,
22:39
Speaker 1: and everybody would just go nuts. Um. And then that
22:43
Speaker 1: milk can. I don't know if it was his originally
22:46
Speaker 1: or if he like innovated it from somebody else, But
22:49
Speaker 1: he found out later that there were imitators doing the
22:52
Speaker 1: same thing, and he hated that kind of stuff. He
22:55
Speaker 1: hated imitators, He hated people like using his work, whether
22:58
Speaker 1: they credited him or not. He just did not like
23:00
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. But then that would push him
23:02
Speaker 1: to innovate further. So he just abandoned the milk can altogether,
23:05
Speaker 1: which had brought him so much success, and moved on
23:08
Speaker 1: to like increasingly more dangerous things. Um. His greatest invention
23:14
Speaker 1: was the Chinese water torture cell, which is kind of
23:17
Speaker 1: similar to the milk can, but just even more nuts
23:20
Speaker 1: and even more dangerous. Yeah, that's easily his most famous trick.
23:24
Speaker 1: That's the one that you always see if you look
23:27
Speaker 1: up Houdini's greatest tricks. It's it's like you said, it's
23:31
Speaker 1: the same thing, but it's a clear tank of water.
23:34
Speaker 1: And he is lowered from his ankles, um, I think,
23:38
Speaker 1: sometimes cuffed, sometimes in a straight jacket, and uh, you know,
23:42
Speaker 1: you can see him, and of course then they raised
23:44
Speaker 1: the curtains so you can't see what's going on. Are
23:47
Speaker 1: we gonna tell people how they how he does some
23:48
Speaker 1: of this stuff? I'll tell you what. Since there's so
23:50
Speaker 1: much to say about him anyway, we probably don't have time.
23:53
Speaker 1: But there's a really great Gizmoto article It says like, um,
23:57
Speaker 1: the secrets behind Houdini's ten Greatest Tricks. That really does
24:01
Speaker 1: a great job of explaining it. I am. Oh, yeah,
24:05
Speaker 1: I mean, let's just say this. Judini was very good
24:07
Speaker 1: at things like getting out of handcuffs. He was a
24:10
Speaker 1: master of like locks and lock picking. So he did
24:13
Speaker 1: learn like tons and tons of skills. It's not to
24:15
Speaker 1: say that if a magician has a trick and you
24:18
Speaker 1: learn how to do it that they're not skilled. But
24:21
Speaker 1: when it comes to some you know, these contraptions, they're
24:23
Speaker 1: they're rigged. Of course it's not real magic. He didn't
24:26
Speaker 1: purport to be doing real magic. Uh. He just wanted
24:29
Speaker 1: to be a performer in de light audiences and he
24:31
Speaker 1: did that. Yeah, sometimes the answer is really simple, like oh,
24:34
Speaker 1: there's hinges or it's not really yeah exactly, like there's
24:39
Speaker 1: a there. Like when you find these explanations, you're like, oh,
24:41
Speaker 1: that's that's still pretty interesting that he was able to
24:44
Speaker 1: do this, and and a lot of times like he would,
24:47
Speaker 1: he would take longer purposefully than he needed to. He
24:50
Speaker 1: could get out of these things in a matter of seconds,
24:52
Speaker 1: but he might say, like take two minutes to appear, um,
24:56
Speaker 1: just to keep the tension ratcheted up, make it that
24:59
Speaker 1: much more amazing. But he also like some of the
25:02
Speaker 1: slight of hand that he and Best would do. Um.
25:05
Speaker 1: I read that his handcuff tricks. He was the guy
25:07
Speaker 1: who started handcuff tricks um, like escaping from handcuffs. Um.
25:12
Speaker 1: And when somebody came up and said, like, I had
25:14
Speaker 1: these cuffs specially made for you, and I want to
25:17
Speaker 1: see if you can get out of them, like he would,
25:20
Speaker 1: he would ask to examine them, asked to examine the key,
25:23
Speaker 1: and Best would just kind of be standing there looking too,
25:26
Speaker 1: and she'd she'd make note of what the key looked like,
25:28
Speaker 1: and then she'd slip away without anybody noticing, backstage to
25:32
Speaker 1: their huge giant ring oh keys, find a key that
25:36
Speaker 1: looks similar, and then like give Harry a kiss or
25:40
Speaker 1: like like something like that, and they would exchange keys,
25:42
Speaker 1: and then he would hand their key back to the
25:45
Speaker 1: person and palm the key that they had been letting
25:48
Speaker 1: him inspect and then managed to swap it out again
25:51
Speaker 1: later on. So like the sleight of hand, and like
25:53
Speaker 1: the trickery that was involved in and of itself, is
25:56
Speaker 1: is masterful. Like I don't like if you if you
26:00
Speaker 1: take actual magic out of the equation, I don't see
26:02
Speaker 1: how this could be any less impressive, you know what
26:05
Speaker 1: I mean? Yeah, I mean every time I've seen and
26:09
Speaker 1: I haven't been to many magic shows, but like at
26:11
Speaker 1: the Magic Castle, you want to be entertained and you
26:14
Speaker 1: want someone to perform a good trick, no one in
26:17
Speaker 1: the audience, I mean, you want the audience leaving going, boy,
26:20
Speaker 1: how did they do that? Not? Was it was that real?
26:23
Speaker 1: Were they conjuring the dark magic? Right? I enjoyed the
26:28
Speaker 1: you know, the Magic Castle. I know I told this
26:30
Speaker 1: on movie Crush. I don't know if I ever talked
26:31
Speaker 1: about it here, But they have all these small parlor rooms, uh,
26:34
Speaker 1: in addition to the big main room where the big
26:36
Speaker 1: show is exactly, But the little parlor rooms what is
26:45
Speaker 1: really what I enjoyed. They were very small, like not
26:48
Speaker 1: many people in there, and that was just like good
26:50
Speaker 1: old fashioned card tricks and stuff like that, where you're
26:53
Speaker 1: just so well practiced, and those were just always the
26:56
Speaker 1: most fun for me. The big shows. I could take
26:58
Speaker 1: it early bit. Well, you would have liked who Deni's
27:00
Speaker 1: early work because that's pretty much what it consisted of,
27:02
Speaker 1: close up magic and card tricks. Yeah, it's like David Blaine.
27:05
Speaker 1: I love all those early specials. But then when he
27:08
Speaker 1: was like, let me go stand on this thing for
27:10
Speaker 1: three years, and I didn't really care as much. You know,
27:15
Speaker 1: he didn't like his three year standing phase. So, um
27:19
Speaker 1: so he stood on a thing, right, Yeah, he stood
27:21
Speaker 1: on a big tall thing. He did. I think he
27:23
Speaker 1: was also frozen in a block of ice too. Maybe
27:26
Speaker 1: sure it was the thing. Um So, so who did?
27:30
Speaker 1: He's got like this whole he just keeps innovating and
27:33
Speaker 1: innovating and like just wowing the public more and more
27:36
Speaker 1: and he keeps going. Um but there's there's also like
27:40
Speaker 1: these other things happening at the same time. Like the
27:42
Speaker 1: earliest early twentieth century was like a really innovative time
27:45
Speaker 1: if you think about it. One of the things that
27:47
Speaker 1: came out of it was the beginning of movies, and
27:49
Speaker 1: so who didn't He was like the kind of person
27:51
Speaker 1: who was like, yes, I can use that to do magic.
27:54
Speaker 1: All I have to do is perform one trick. Once
27:57
Speaker 1: capturing on film, we can just show everybody in the film.
27:59
Speaker 1: It's gonna be great because I'm like forty three now
28:02
Speaker 1: and I'm I'm really starting to feel it, you know,
28:04
Speaker 1: hanging upside down in a straight jacket from a crane
28:08
Speaker 1: six stories up or underwater in a tank like that,
28:12
Speaker 1: that wears on a person having to do at night
28:14
Speaker 1: after night after night after night. Right, So he has
28:18
Speaker 1: people exactly, So he was really well sometimes thousands, Like
28:21
Speaker 1: he could draw a crowd, you know, at the height
28:23
Speaker 1: of his stardom for sure. Um, but he like he
28:27
Speaker 1: was very much drawn to film for that reason. One
28:30
Speaker 1: of the big problems was is he was like zero
28:32
Speaker 1: good at acting from whatever by all accounts, Yeah, he
28:36
Speaker 1: was like me, zero good at acting. I've seen you act.
28:40
Speaker 1: You took that beasting. I thought you actually got stung
28:42
Speaker 1: by a b I was that was one good. I
28:45
Speaker 1: wasn't zero good, Okay, if we're on a scale of
28:49
Speaker 1: one to I was one. But man, it was better
28:52
Speaker 1: than Houdini. Uh. But it was the beginning of movies,
28:55
Speaker 1: and people would go see anything that you put up
28:56
Speaker 1: on the silver screen. So he was a big star.
28:59
Speaker 1: He was like one of Hollywood's big first action heroes,
29:03
Speaker 1: and he, like everything he did, went at at full
29:06
Speaker 1: bore and said, all right, here's what i'm gonna do.
29:08
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start a production company and all these other
29:11
Speaker 1: movie ventures, and none of those were super successful, but
29:15
Speaker 1: he did have a brief stint as kind of the
29:18
Speaker 1: big action guy of the day. Um, and these are
29:21
Speaker 1: things that like, I think most people Judini aficionados of
29:24
Speaker 1: course know all this stuff, but if you just know
29:27
Speaker 1: Judini is a magician, you may not know that he
29:29
Speaker 1: was a movie star or that he was a pretty
29:33
Speaker 1: um advanced inventor. Because he's coming up with all of
29:37
Speaker 1: these contraptions and machines himself to do these tricks. And
29:41
Speaker 1: so he realized early on part of the problem with
29:45
Speaker 1: that was if you want to safeguard something, you would
29:49
Speaker 1: file a patent, But in order to file a patent,
29:51
Speaker 1: you have to explicitly show how the thing works. So
29:54
Speaker 1: he was caught in a between a rock and a
29:57
Speaker 1: hard place magician wise, because he hated being ripped off,
30:00
Speaker 1: but he didn't want to reveal these tricks to get
30:02
Speaker 1: a patent on these machines. A lot of them. If
30:05
Speaker 1: you look through his list of patents that he got
30:07
Speaker 1: a lot of them he never even ended up using
30:10
Speaker 1: or were abandoned kind of midway through the process of
30:13
Speaker 1: getting them patented. Um. But he found a loophole in
30:18
Speaker 1: performing these things on stage and getting them a copy
30:22
Speaker 1: written as a live act. Right, So with a patent
30:25
Speaker 1: you had to explain technically how the whole thing worked,
30:29
Speaker 1: not the case with the copyright. Now, you just you
30:32
Speaker 1: do a play and you copyright it and you're you're
30:36
Speaker 1: you're good to go. And that's essentially what he did
30:38
Speaker 1: with the Chinese water torture cell. He did a performance
30:41
Speaker 1: in front of legendarily, I don't know if it's true
30:44
Speaker 1: or not, but it's a pretty good story in front
30:46
Speaker 1: of one single person on live on stage as a
30:49
Speaker 1: one act play, and that enabled him to copyright it
30:52
Speaker 1: in England. Yeah. I think he also copyrighted maybe the Metamorphosis,
30:58
Speaker 1: um yeah, which was yeah, which he would just write
31:03
Speaker 1: a play and then in the play this trick would
31:05
Speaker 1: happen to describe the trick, but he didn't describe how
31:08
Speaker 1: the trick to work. He just described, say, from like
31:10
Speaker 1: the audience's vantage point, and then bam. It was copy written,
31:13
Speaker 1: and anybody who tried that same trick would be infringing
31:16
Speaker 1: on his copyright. Pretty smart. I think we gotta say
31:20
Speaker 1: talk about that metamorphosis for a second though. It's worth saying.
31:22
Speaker 1: So it was it turned himself into a butterfly. It was,
31:26
Speaker 1: you know, he turned himself into Franz Kafka. That's a
31:30
Speaker 1: very literary joke. UM. So he Best would be standing there,
31:35
Speaker 1: Um helping him get into a sack, would pull the
31:38
Speaker 1: drawstring at the top of the sack. He would get
31:40
Speaker 1: into a box. The box would be chain trust padlocked, um,
31:46
Speaker 1: and then Best would put a screen up, clap three times,
31:50
Speaker 1: and then on the third clap, the screen would come
31:54
Speaker 1: down and it would be Houdini standing there. He would
31:57
Speaker 1: unlock the box and open up the the giant mail
32:01
Speaker 1: bag and there was Best popped out. And we're talking
32:03
Speaker 1: in a matter of seconds, a matter of seconds, this
32:06
Speaker 1: thing happened, and that was the metamorphosis. And that was
32:09
Speaker 1: a really good example of how good bestcot because apparently
32:12
Speaker 1: they could trade places in reality with this trick. And
32:15
Speaker 1: you can find out how it worked at his Moto article. Um.
32:18
Speaker 1: But they had it down to where she could change
32:20
Speaker 1: places with him in three seconds. You're doing Gizmoto a
32:24
Speaker 1: big service here. Well, Gizmoto did the world a big
32:27
Speaker 1: service by writing that article. So I'm just I'm just
32:29
Speaker 1: paying it forward backward. I guess let's before we break,
32:34
Speaker 1: let's talk a little bit about his aviation career. Can
32:37
Speaker 1: we do that, because if you're thinking aviator Harry Judini,
32:43
Speaker 1: the answer is yes. Because he was such a driven man.
32:47
Speaker 1: He would uh in performer. The Wright brothers had proved
32:50
Speaker 1: that you could fly, so he was like, I need
32:52
Speaker 1: to get in on that, because what's better to draw
32:54
Speaker 1: a crowd out in public than to do something like flying.
32:58
Speaker 1: So he bought a by plane for about five grand
33:02
Speaker 1: in Europe, which is a lot of money back then,
33:05
Speaker 1: still a lot of money, but you know it's even
33:08
Speaker 1: more because it's modern times, because of inflation. Uh. And
33:13
Speaker 1: he took it to Australia, supposedly took out the first
33:17
Speaker 1: life insurance policy for an airplane accident in the history
33:21
Speaker 1: of the world, and uh toward Australia and was the
33:24
Speaker 1: very first person to fly an airplane on Australian soil. Yeah,
33:29
Speaker 1: that's pretty historic if you think about it. And that
33:32
Speaker 1: was like another good example of there was this new
33:34
Speaker 1: innovative thing going on and he wanted in on it,
33:36
Speaker 1: so he went and did it and then on until
33:39
Speaker 1: he didn't want to do it right once it became
33:40
Speaker 1: kind of common place, he's like, oh, I'm done flying.
33:43
Speaker 1: Yeah that was Houdini. Alright, So we'll take our last
33:47
Speaker 1: break here and we'll come back and talk about his
33:50
Speaker 1: battle with his spiritualists and his odd demise right after this. Okay, Chuck,
34:15
Speaker 1: you promised a battle with the spiritualists, and I want
34:18
Speaker 1: to hear about it. Even though I think we kind
34:20
Speaker 1: of talked a little bit about Houdini and our Spiritualism episode,
34:24
Speaker 1: and I know we definitely talked about yeah, there's just
34:27
Speaker 1: no way. And I know we talked about his death
34:30
Speaker 1: in our appendix episode. Not to give too much away, Yeah,
34:33
Speaker 1: he's kind of appeared a couple of times. So he
34:36
Speaker 1: hated the spiritualism movement. Uh. From the very beginning, it
34:41
Speaker 1: seemed like, um again, he was a performer and a
34:44
Speaker 1: magician who performed these really well thought out tricks, but
34:49
Speaker 1: he m The idea from him was never I'm really
34:54
Speaker 1: doing this stuff. It's I'm a I'm a master at
34:56
Speaker 1: performing these escapes. He was really rubbed by the spiritual
35:00
Speaker 1: us because he thought they were trying to con everybody
35:02
Speaker 1: because they were by saying we're really doing this stuff,
35:06
Speaker 1: and he's like, no, you're just performing like me. But
35:09
Speaker 1: you're saying you're really doing it, and I don't like that. Yeah,
35:12
Speaker 1: you're taking advantage of people's grief, probably fleecing money out
35:17
Speaker 1: of them. Like there's a lot wrong with what you're doing.
35:20
Speaker 1: And apparently so he was good friends for a brief
35:24
Speaker 1: time with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the guy who wrote
35:28
Speaker 1: the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries, who was at least as famous
35:31
Speaker 1: as Houdini by this time we're talking the early nineteen twenties,
35:34
Speaker 1: if not more famous because of Sherlock Holmes. Um and
35:38
Speaker 1: Doyle was a huge adherent of spiritualism, enormous, one of
35:44
Speaker 1: the most gullible, smart people who ever lived. Um and
35:50
Speaker 1: Judini really wanted to be friends with him, so he
35:51
Speaker 1: kind of kept his sentiments about about spiritualism to himself,
35:56
Speaker 1: and the Doyle's invited Hudini you over for a seance
36:01
Speaker 1: because by this time Houdini's mom had died, and apparently
36:04
Speaker 1: he feigned dead away when he got the news, like
36:06
Speaker 1: he was in Europe at the time, and when he
36:09
Speaker 1: woke up, he's just sobbing uncontrollably. I'm sure he still
36:13
Speaker 1: went on stage. That was just what Houdini did, but
36:16
Speaker 1: he took it rather hard. So when the Doyles like
36:20
Speaker 1: invited him over for a seance, he went into it
36:22
Speaker 1: open minded, hoping, you know, beyond hope. He would have
36:25
Speaker 1: loved to have spoken to his mom. But also I
36:27
Speaker 1: think he was already had the kernels of skepticism, like
36:32
Speaker 1: in the modern sense of the word, growing inside of him,
36:36
Speaker 1: and he really it really rubbed him the wrong way.
36:40
Speaker 1: Like the whole thing started when his mother inhabited the
36:45
Speaker 1: body of Mrs Doyle, Lady Doyle um and and made
36:49
Speaker 1: the sign of the Cross, which a lifelong Jewish mother
36:53
Speaker 1: would never do. And apparently it went downhill from there
36:57
Speaker 1: and it really rubbed him the wrong way and he
36:59
Speaker 1: really resented it, and that led to the following out
37:03
Speaker 1: of his friendship with Doyle. But also like his all
37:05
Speaker 1: out just war on spiritualism and spiritualists. Yeah, I mean,
37:10
Speaker 1: he ended up in court. He testified in front of
37:13
Speaker 1: Congress in support of a bill that outlawed fortune telling
37:17
Speaker 1: in d c. H. And he specifically took on we
37:20
Speaker 1: took on a lot of people, but um, Marjorie the
37:23
Speaker 1: spiritualist Marjorie Mina Crandon was the wife of a Boston
37:27
Speaker 1: surgeon and and pretty big in that movement. And he
37:31
Speaker 1: got together with Scientific American magazine on a committee that
37:35
Speaker 1: they formed and exposed her basically and even put out
37:38
Speaker 1: a pamphlet forty page pamphlet called Houdini Exposes the trick
37:44
Speaker 1: used by the Boston medium Marjorie. Yeah, dude, it was
37:47
Speaker 1: a very specific title. It was a very public war
37:49
Speaker 1: between them. At one point they had dueling stage presentations
37:53
Speaker 1: in Boston which within days of each other. And Um,
37:57
Speaker 1: Houdini finally got um so that he was part of
38:02
Speaker 1: a committee for Scientific American who was looking to award
38:06
Speaker 1: Bucks for evidence of actual mediumship you know of I guess,
38:11
Speaker 1: um like actual information from the other side or whatever.
38:16
Speaker 1: And he he saw to it that she didn't get
38:19
Speaker 1: that she lost. But it was apparently a Harvard student
38:23
Speaker 1: who ended up unmasking or he just wrote that pamphlet
38:26
Speaker 1: suggesting how she was probably doing it. And then also
38:29
Speaker 1: he added he added an act to his larger act,
38:33
Speaker 1: which was kind of like a seance, and he would
38:35
Speaker 1: explain how this was all being done, which is pretty cool.
38:39
Speaker 1: It was cool. What wasn't cool was how he died.
38:45
Speaker 1: Yeah is that here to say? And I'm sure I've
38:48
Speaker 1: made fun of Jay Gordon Whitehead before, but I'll do
38:51
Speaker 1: it again. Yeah. So here's what happened. He um, he
38:57
Speaker 1: fractured his ankle in a performance doing the in thes
39:00
Speaker 1: water torture cell. And that kind of started this run
39:04
Speaker 1: of bad luck. Um, if you believe in that kind
39:06
Speaker 1: of thing. So he fractured his ankle, he's already a
39:08
Speaker 1: little bit hobbled. Um. His doctor said, you probably shouldn't
39:11
Speaker 1: be performing right now. He said, no, no, no, I'm
39:13
Speaker 1: gonna do it anyway. I'm on tour and he went
39:16
Speaker 1: to Montreal and gave a lecture at McGill University where, um,
39:21
Speaker 1: he invited these students backstage and you know the story
39:25
Speaker 1: you've heard is true, like the hey, can you take
39:28
Speaker 1: a punch to the stomach? I've heard you can? And
39:30
Speaker 1: Houdini is laid up on the couch because of this
39:33
Speaker 1: ankle says, yeah, I'm pretty good at that. And this guy,
39:36
Speaker 1: Jay Gordon whitehead. And this is a quote. It says
39:39
Speaker 1: abruptly delivered four or five terrible, terribly forcible, deliberate, well
39:44
Speaker 1: directed blows, like just started wailing on his stomach. Apparently, uh,
39:50
Speaker 1: he wasn't ready for it. He wasn't tightened up or
39:52
Speaker 1: you know, didn't have those abs rock solid. And it
39:56
Speaker 1: was decidedly uncool. Yeah, yes, not not just in cool,
40:00
Speaker 1: not funds cool, not cool by any definition. Apparently. Um,
40:05
Speaker 1: that same witness said that hoodin he was like, that'll
40:08
Speaker 1: do with his response to that, yeah, and he tried
40:11
Speaker 1: to play it off, you know, but he was like
40:14
Speaker 1: that really hurt. And it just kept getting worse too,
40:17
Speaker 1: like just that that. You know. Later that night he
40:19
Speaker 1: had stomach cramps. The next day he was racked with
40:22
Speaker 1: abdominal pain um and it was finally bad enough that
40:26
Speaker 1: he went to a doctor and his doctor was like,
40:29
Speaker 1: I think you might have appendicitis. You should go to
40:31
Speaker 1: a hospital, and whodin? He said, never, I have to
40:35
Speaker 1: perform tonight and went on stage in Detroit and gave
40:38
Speaker 1: what came ended up being his final final performance I think,
40:42
Speaker 1: on October nine. Because that doctor was absolutely right. It
40:48
Speaker 1: was appendicitis, and he was in big trouble. Yes, it
40:54
Speaker 1: was too late for him. Um, it was a rupture dependix.
40:58
Speaker 1: He died on Halloween on October three, be first, with
41:01
Speaker 1: Bess and a couple of his brothers at his bedside.
41:05
Speaker 1: And what's really what's what the debate is. You know,
41:10
Speaker 1: there was a lot of debate over the years about
41:12
Speaker 1: whether or not he was murdered uh and had been
41:16
Speaker 1: being poisoned by the Spiritualist, or whether the spiritual is
41:20
Speaker 1: hired this kid to go beat him up uh and
41:23
Speaker 1: wail on his stomach or whatever. Yeah, exactly, And I
41:28
Speaker 1: think most people that really know have come out and said,
41:32
Speaker 1: none of that stuff is really true. That's really probably
41:35
Speaker 1: all speculation. But what the real question is is whether
41:38
Speaker 1: or not it's possible and whether or not those punches
41:42
Speaker 1: to the stomach actually ruptured his appendix, or did he
41:45
Speaker 1: already have an appendicitis happening and this might have just
41:48
Speaker 1: brought it to light or exacerbated it, or just maybe
41:52
Speaker 1: maybe it was just ill timed all the way around. Yeah.
41:54
Speaker 1: I think in our Appendix episode we landed on the
41:57
Speaker 1: idea that no, it definitely didn't rupture his appendix. And
42:00
Speaker 1: apparently there's a study UM that looked at twenty years
42:03
Speaker 1: worth of pendicitis and could only find just a handful
42:07
Speaker 1: of UM appendixes that were ruptured from like violence or trauma.
42:13
Speaker 1: So it can't happen, but it's really rare. And even
42:16
Speaker 1: Jay Gordon Whitehead Biff probably didn't rupture UM Houdini's appendix.
42:22
Speaker 1: But what he did do was he gave Houdini a
42:25
Speaker 1: good reason why his his abdomen would hurt right there,
42:30
Speaker 1: and which would cause Hudini to just ignore it for
42:32
Speaker 1: longer than he otherwise might have had it had it
42:35
Speaker 1: been a mystery sensation that he couldn't attribute it to anything,
42:39
Speaker 1: And so Jay Gordon might had probably did and at
42:43
Speaker 1: least indirectly lead to Houdini's death. But it was a
42:46
Speaker 1: neglected appendix or appendicitis that finally got him, and he
42:50
Speaker 1: died of sebsis on Halloween in x in Detroit, of
42:55
Speaker 1: all places. Yet uh so the kind of to put
43:01
Speaker 1: a tag on the spiritualist thing UM. Before he died,
43:05
Speaker 1: he told best, he was like, hey, listen, I've got
43:07
Speaker 1: an opportunity here if I'm about to die, uh to
43:11
Speaker 1: really prove this this spiritualism thing is really bunk, Because
43:14
Speaker 1: I'm gonna try from the other side to get back
43:17
Speaker 1: in touch with you. And you're gonna have to have
43:19
Speaker 1: these seances and try and get in touch with me.
43:21
Speaker 1: And and this is going to prove it once and
43:24
Speaker 1: for all. And for about a decade after his death,
43:28
Speaker 1: Best did hold a seance. It never worked, of course,
43:32
Speaker 1: and she eventually quit. But the Magic Castle still has
43:37
Speaker 1: Houdini seances, I think every year. Uh. I don't know
43:42
Speaker 1: if you can just buy a special ticket or if
43:45
Speaker 1: you have to be invited to that. I know you
43:48
Speaker 1: have to be invited to get in period, but I
43:49
Speaker 1: don't know. I don't know how you get into that seance.
43:52
Speaker 1: You gotta know somebody who at least knows somebody who
43:55
Speaker 1: knows somebody probably, um, I want to make fun of
43:59
Speaker 1: the some that theory though one more time about spiritualism.
44:03
Speaker 1: So there was a book called The Secret Life of
44:06
Speaker 1: Houdini where the um the authors said that if one
44:11
Speaker 1: were just suspect Hudini, a victim of foul play, the
44:14
Speaker 1: section of organized crime that was composed of fraudulent spirit
44:17
Speaker 1: mediums must be considered likely suspects. It's like something off
44:23
Speaker 1: a history channel or something, you know. Yeah, and fun
44:26
Speaker 1: to make fun of. Yeah, you got anything else about Houdini?
44:31
Speaker 1: I got nothing else? All right? Well I don't have
44:34
Speaker 1: anything else either, But there's plenty more to learn. There's
44:36
Speaker 1: tons of websites dedicated to Houdini. There's like lots of
44:39
Speaker 1: documentaries out there and there it's pretty cool to go
44:42
Speaker 1: check them out. And also check out the gizmotor article.
44:45
Speaker 1: And since I missaid, misspoke Gizmoto, it's time for a listener, mayo.
44:52
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call this another correction. Okay, good they're rolling
44:55
Speaker 1: in lately, Yeah, we're rolling in them. Hey, guys, just
44:58
Speaker 1: listen to the latest episode on Mental Records. And we
45:01
Speaker 1: heard from quite a few people on this one, by
45:03
Speaker 1: the way. Uh, and as always it was great stuff. However,
45:05
Speaker 1: I think Josh provided a bit of unfortunate misinformation and
45:08
Speaker 1: claiming that sex offenders have the highest rate of recidivism.
45:13
Speaker 1: While this is a common claim, the evidence does not
45:15
Speaker 1: support it. Uh. There are as always a lot of
45:17
Speaker 1: different variables in the research on the topic. Notes that
45:20
Speaker 1: there are so many different factors here to consider, but
45:23
Speaker 1: the straight statement that sex offenders have been shown to
45:26
Speaker 1: have the highest recidivum rates of any criminal is not
45:29
Speaker 1: supported by the data anyway. There's a lot more research
45:32
Speaker 1: out there as well, but I think that the statement
45:34
Speaker 1: about recidivim rates reinforces the false belief among many that
45:38
Speaker 1: sex offenders are more likely to reoffend. Keep up the
45:41
Speaker 1: good work, Mike. Uh. And Mike's in a bunch of
45:44
Speaker 1: links uh that I went through and um it appears
45:48
Speaker 1: that as correct. Yeah, we got that one wrong. Huh.
45:51
Speaker 1: So thanks to Mike and everybody who wrote in to
45:54
Speaker 1: say it's not true, because we don't want to paint
45:57
Speaker 1: anybody in an unnecessarily bad light. Agreed. Okay, if you
46:04
Speaker 1: want to be like Mike, can get in touch of
46:06
Speaker 1: this with the correction, especially a vital correction. We love
46:08
Speaker 1: to hear those, and you can shoot us an email
46:11
Speaker 1: to stuff podcast at i heeart radio dot com. Stuff
46:17
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46:20
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46:29
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