There are thousands of magicians in the world, but none of them have the creativity or smarts like Harry Houdini. He performed many different stunts in front of many different audiences. His magic had the eye of the nation in awe. Magic was relatively new during this time. Most people thought magic was actually real. He tricked every audience that he performed in front of, until his last performance.
Harry Houdini was born on April 6, 1874. He lived in Appleton, Wisconsin with his father, Dr. May Samud Weiss, which at this time received at this time $750 a year. He had six siblings that he now could not feed. He was fired because of old age, from Wisconsin. They all moved to Milwaukee.
His first stage appearance was on October 28, 1883. He started out as a trapeze artist and contortionist. He stayed with the circus for a while, but his family wanted him to stay home. He had many different jobs over the years. Such as a locksmith, cutter, photographer, and an electric driller. His locksmithing abilities had a big impact on helping him with his famous handcuff tricks.
One incident in the locksmith shop changed this soon to be magician's life. A young man was arrested, while attempting to take his handcuffs off, the key broke off inside of the key hole. He was broght to the shop where Houdini worked to have the hand cuffs opened or cut off of his wrist. While the master locksmith was working on getting the cuffs off the whistle blew for dining hour. The locksmith and the officer went to eat and left Harry to finish the job himself. He went through about a dozen saw blades before trying to even pick the lock and when he finally tried the cuffs were off in the first five minutes.
Harry Houdini is infamous for his many different tricks and escapes. A few of them are his straight jacket escapes, hand cuff escapes, jail escapes, box escapes and the escape that ended up taking his life, the underwater box escape.
