Who On Earth Was Harry Houdini? The Man Who Turned Escaping Into an Art Form? #885016

At its most superficial level, Harry Houdini was what we think of as a magician. A performer who wriggled out of handcuffs, leapt from water tanks, and dared audiences to lock him in anything and everything from mailbags to milk cans.
He was the one who would not be quo’d. But Houdini’s story, like most extraordinary lives, is less about what he did and more about why he did it.
And the story of that legacy starts in an unlikely place: with a man named Ehrich Weiss, the scion of a rabbi, born Ehrich Weiss in Budapest, raised in Wisconsin — obsessed not with magic but with control.
You see, Houdini’s greatness wasn’t in his tricks. It was in his timing. He rose in a moment when the world itself was shifting: the 20th century was waking up.
Steamships gave way to airplanes. Spiritualism crept into drawing rooms. Technology brought both wonder and anxiety. And amid this confusion, people were looking for someone, or something, to control the chaos.
And then Houdini walked up and was like, “Lock me up. I’ll show you there’s always a way out.”