He usually (always) had a confederate.
No other reason is needed. It’s not like he was MAGICAL, or anything.
Sorry if I ruined your fun, but take the time to figure out how you would do the “tricks” and you could be right, or right enough to fool the rubes in 1925.
ETC: Spelling only.
That’s all very well and good, but the question wasn’t “Can you figure out how the tricks may have been done?” It was about whether Houdini’s will included a provision that the secret to his tricks be revealed.
I’m sure any really good magician could speculate about Houdini’s methods and come up with some practical answers, but they wouldn’t be proof of how Houdini actually did what he did.
I love magic acts. I know how the vast majority of stunts are performed, including many of Houdini’s routines.
To me, what makes a magic show good is not that the magician sawed a woman in half, but the skill and showmanship behind the trick. And if I don’t know how the trick is done, then figuring it out is also part of the fun.
This is true about any magician doing large showy stage magic. This is not always true about magicians doing close-up magic, nor is it always true about magicians doing escape tricks.
It’s true that there always is a trick to it. But that’s as obvious as your big “reveal.” All good magicians know how to handle themselves in situations when their skills are being challenged and Houdini was the master of this because he always put himself in situations where his skills were being challenged.
Confederates are not the one and only answer. They are not in any way a meaningful answer. It’s like saying “it’s all done with mirrors.” Well, there was a time in the history of magic when most of the big stage illusions were indeed all done with mirrors. That slights the enormous skill and inventiveness that went into turning mirror tricks into illusions.
For a history of the difference between it’s just a trick and it’s a spectacular illusion I highly recommend Jim Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear. He has a chapter or two on Houdini and of course covers Houdini’s vanishing the elephant illusion. Steinmeyer is the best author on magic living and the inventor of many of the illusions that other magicians routinely use and knows the subject to perfection.
[quote=“Clothahump, post:4, topic:483187”]
I love magic acts. I know how the vast majority of stunts are performed, including many of Houdini’s routines.
QUOTE]
Well, please explain them and fight ignorance .
I’m no expert but I saw a Houdini special many years ago. No cite, so I’m going off recollection here. A collector had one of his padlocks he used in his escapes. The padlock itself was very big and had a hidden compartment wherein there were all kinds of lockpicking tools. This way his entire body could be examined for picks before the escape and spectators could bring in their own locks to use. So long as the faux lock was included along with those brought in by the spectators, he could pick his way out of pretty much anything. I guess nobody ever thought to inpect the locks for lockpicks.
With Houdini specifically, a lot of the things he did, he was doing exactly what it looked like he was doing; he was just much better at it than most folks. There’s no magic involved in picking a lock, just a skill that most people don’t have.
As a non-magician with only a passing interest in the history of the subject, I’ll strongly second the recommendation.
Plus he had a bunch of other, highly specialized skills that practically nobody had - tying knots with his toes, for instance. He popularized the strait jacket escape, which takes enormous strength and flexibility. Plus he was perhaps the greatest vaudeville showman of all time.
That was the point of his Challenge thing - the ability to defy (apparently) the world to come up with a trap he couldn’t escape.
I read a book about a guy who taught a style of karate, who chose Napolean and Houdini as examples of people who were willing to put in the effort to prepare themselves, and that was why they were successful. Houdini practiced holding his breath in icy water, because he wanted to do underwater stunts.
And the time he didn’t prepare was the time it killed him.
Regards,
Shodan
A lesson Batman was quick to learn.
I dated a woman whose father was an amateur magician. He told/showed me how he did one of the tricks. Y’know the trick with the pea under one shell, then they shuffle them around and you have to guess which one?
It isn’t a pea. It’s a piece of green foam rubber. As he moved them around, he released it from under a shell and “caught” it under a knuckle, pressing it to the table, and palming it. It happens in the blink of an eye and requires a lot of practice, I’m sure, to conceal from the audience. The reason you never guess correctly is because it’s under none of them.
A lot of “magic” seems to be perceptual. In the above case, you accept a premise that isn’t true (it’s a pea)—if they told you it was a piece of foam rubber, you might figure it out.
Yeah, Houdini’s wife passed him lock picks when they kissed but he knew how to use them. IIRC he could also dislocate at least one shoulder and he took baths in ice to prepare his body for some tricks. I don’t know if his audience was a bunch of rubes…but technology today is usually a few steps ahead of the masses so modern people may be just as fool-able.
The green foam rubber bit is from modern commercial “Amaze Your Friends” kits. A real magician can hide a pea without resorting to something so silly.
Yes, the standard pea under shells trick does use palming. Good sleight-of-hand magicians can palm an actual pea.
Part of me wants to read it, but the cocky bastard part of me prefers to figure it out on his own. 
I read once how he did the jail escape. They said that he parctised holding small items in the muscles of his throat. He could hold 3-4 lock picking tools that way. He went in naked and had a full cavity search, but they couldn’t see the tools he had half-swallowed.
That’s pretty much like saying you want to stare at your computer until you figure out how the insides work.
Well, that is something a cocky bastard might do.
-FrL-
Wikipedia thinks Houdini died of Appendicitis.
According to the article, there was an incident which exacerbated the appendicitis, which involved someone punching him in the stomach before he was prepared to take the blow. But (according to the article) this didn’t cause his death–he would have died anyway.
-FrL-
Sure is, except with a MUCH greater likelihood of success. It’s not like Houdini was working on the sub-atomic level.
And I read (no, no immediate cites) the wardens were in on his usual jail escapes, not literally helping, necessarily, but encouraging the guards to be less than vigilant. (thinking) Which is helping, isn’t it? I mean, Houdini was great. No doubt about it. But he was a showman first, and that meant he had to succeed every time. Any oopsies and it was a very public failure.