The most famous escape artist in the history of stage magic. He is also the key figure in the conjuring profession’s long history of antagonism to spiritualism’s claims to demonstrate spirit contact. Born Ehrich Weiss on March 24, 1874, he grew up in Wisconsin, joined the circus, and began adult life as a trapeze artist, but was really interested in stage magic, especially escape tricks. He took his stage name from Robert Houdin, a 19th-century French magician who had also had a history of exposing performers who worked fake miracles.
Houdini grew up in the era of what was termed physical mediumship. Many spiritualist mediums claimed that the messages they facilitated from the spirit world were accompanied by a wide variety of extraordinary phenomena, materializations, apports, floating trumpets, and disembodied voices. Some mediums claimed feats equal to Houdini’s stage illusions.