There is a story told about an incident in the life of Harry Houdini, and I have heard three different stories about how thei ncident ended. The matter in question was the time during a performance that Houdini offered to escape from handcuffs provided by the audience, and someone slipped him cuffs whose locking mechanism was fileld with buckshot, preventing them from being unlocked.
A book on Houdini’s life claimed the master of escape fell for the trick, couldn’t get the cuffs off and (true to the owner’s brag) had to take them off with a hacksaw. Then, of all entities, Reader’s Digest claimed ole Harry knew something was funny about the handcuffs and refused to put them on. And of course - no doubt spurred on by the movie with Tony Curtis - there is the story where Houdini put on the doctored cuffs and escaped from them anyway.
So which story is the right one? Or is the whole matter just a wild fabrication?
Well, it’s late, so I’m not going to pore over my three biographies of Houdini for every reference to handcuffs. Fortunately, the following incident, found in Ruth Brandon’s The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, relates a case that seems to answer your query.
Early in Houdini’s career, in 1899, a Sergeant Waldron of the Chicago police locked Houdini in a set of “special cuffs” that Houdini couldn’t get out of for more than an hour. When everyone had left except Waldron, he confessed he had dropped a lead slug in the mechanism so they couldn’t be unlocked. They were sawn off. From then on, Houdini carefully examined all cuffs before he put them on, and insisted as a condition of the test that the cuffs be shown to work properly before he put them on.
So your first story is unequivocally right. The second may not be referring to the same incident, but to a later one in which he avoided a rigged set of cuffs, so it could also be correct. But the film biography is chock full of factual errors and shouldn’t be relied on at all. It probably took a germ of truth and spun it into an amazing story without regard to the truth.