Harry Houdini Accomplishments

“No performer should attempt to bite off red-hot iron unless he has a good set of teeth.” Harry Houdini, though at times a bit on the wild side, is no question the most famous magician ever. All of his tricks, from unlocking traps and other impossible situations led to his huge popularity. He was even called the Handcuff King for his amazing ability to escape any pair of handcuffs. He was a legend in his time, and in ours.

Harry Houdini was born as Erich Weisz in Budapest, Hungary, on March 24, 1874. He and his family later moved to Appleton, Wisconsin as a child, where he claimed he was born. He had six siblings, and was the son of a Jewish rabbi and his wife, Cecilia Steiner and Mayer Samuel Weiss (Grimm, 2014). When he was 13, he moved with his father to New York City, where they lived in abject poverty. Harry never had an education past the third grade, due to his need to help earn money. Here, in Ney York, Harry did lots of strange jobs to help earn money. He also lived in a boarding house until the rest of his family moved to New York. It was there, where he became interested in the Trapeze arts (Grimm, 2014). He would perform circus stunts in the yard. At one of his jobs, as a tie-cutter, he met a friend named Jacob Hyman, and they began a magic act together called “The Brother’s Houdini”. Harry’s brother later took the place of Jacob, but he kept performing as “Houdini late into the 1900s. While performing at Coney Island, he met a showgirl named Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, aka Bess, and married her after three weeks of dating each other.

In 1894, Erich Weisz started his career as a professional magician, and changed his name to Harry Houdini. Harry was for one of his childhood nicknames, “Ehrie”, and his last name was ...

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...think that one of the only things that he could actually do was escape from handcuffs. He even died trying to prove one of his “abilities”, that he could take any number of blows to the stomach no matter how hard or many, if he was prepared. If I could have shared one piece of advice with him, it would have been to get a reliable job because the Great Depression was about to hit.

In conclusion, Harry Houdini was one of the most successful magicians and escape artists of all time. He started from nothing, having moved to America from Hungary, and made it to the top. He lied at times, posing as fake mediums, performing fake magic, and escaping from rigged containers, but sometimes, he actually did do stuff truthfully. Those times, are when he was truly at his greatest. Although I wouldn’t have made the same decisions that Harry made, I think he was a great magician.