Houdini looks bound to captivate us forever

Give thanks to the person who invented Venetian blinds, they say, or it would be curtains for us all. Curtains is mostly what people got at a Houdini show. He’d come on stage, be locked up or sealed in or tied down, and then the curtains would descend. They could stay drawn for an hour or more.

Ostensibly this was to ensure that nobody saw him effect his escape, but in reality it was to heighten the drama. Houdini was usually free within a couple of minutes, but he knew audiences didn’t want things to be too simple for him. As he put it:

The easiest way to attract a crowd is to let it be known that at a given time and a given place someone is going to attempt something that in the event of failure will mean sudden death.

Before the curtains went up again he’d splash himself with water so as to look sweaty from his labours.

Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, Houdini was one of the great hucksters. Had he been around today he’d have been a PR big shot. Whenever he jumped into a river handcuffed, he did so from a bridge situated near the local newspaper office. If no reporter showed up, he’d file his own copy — usually working in a paragraph to discredit a rival. He knew how to ring the changes on a story too. When his ability to bust out of a prison cell began to look passé, he took to releasing real prisoners and putting them back in different cells.

For many of these stunts Houdini wore nothing but the briefest of loincloths. If he was going to be searched, he argued, he might as well have stripped off in advance.