Houdini by Tom Lalicki

Author:Tom Lalicki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 1999-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

After the Davenport Brothers and their assistant (center) were locked in the cabinet and the theater was darkened, instruments appeared to fly about and play themselves. Audiences thought the brothers were in contact with spirits, but the brothers styled themselves “performers.”

Houdini, who had read minds and conducted séances years earlier, got the truth from Ira Davenport: "Strange how people imagine things in the dark! Why, the musical instruments never left our hands, yet many spectators would have taken an oath that they heard them flying over their heads." Ira also showed him the secret "Davenport rope ties" that let the brothers untie and retie themselves almost instantaneously.

By the 1870s, Spiritualist mediums were submitting to "challenges" to prove that they were really in touch with the supernatural world. Some were examined naked to prove they were not hiding tools. Some were bound by handcuffs and ropes to prove that they were not manipulating objects in the dark. Spiritualists claimed that they could not escape from their fetters and that things flew about because spirits had made them fly. In fact, Spiritualists surreptitiously used mechanical escape trickery to convince audiences that they possessed genuine supernatural powers.

Houdini knew better. He turned Spiritualist tricks upside down. He wasn't a medium and didn't contact the dead—he made escaping the entertainment. More times than he wanted to, Houdini made this point: "Everything I do is accomplished by material means, humanly possible, no matter how baffling it is to the layman."

Preparing his most baffling, most frightening, most thrilling stage illusion

was the next item on Houdini's agenda. In 1910, Houdini hired James Collins, a British carpenter. Collins helped him build an illusion that Houdini had planned for three years. Costing over ten thousand dollars, the trick was kept a secret until September 12, 1912, when, at the Circus Busch in Berlin, Houdini introduced "the greatest sensational mystery ever attempted in this or any age”—the Chinese Water-Torture Cell.

Center-stage was a narrow glass box with wooden corners that looked like a telephone booth. While Houdini was offstage changing into a swimsuit, music played and the tank, or cell, was filled with water. Houdini returned and lay on the stage while the cell's top, which had holes for his feet, was snapped around his ankles.

A winch pulled Houdini into the air directly above the water-torture cell. Slowly he was lowered, upside down, into the cell. Houdini was completely submerged in the glass cell with his shoulders touching the glass, his hands probing, his hair floating in the water.

The assistants slammed the lid's padlocks and drew the curtain closed. Trick or not, it was clear to an audience that this was scary business.

An assistant stood by with an ax, ready to smash the glass. A giant stopwatch over the cell clicked away the seconds. An orchestra played a song called ''Asleep in the Deep." Then suddenly, Houdini startled the crowd by bounding out from behind the curtain, dripping wet and struggling for air. The cell was still locked and filled with water; the floor around it was dry.

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