He escaped handcuffs, milk cans, and water tanks for 30 years. On Halloween 1926 he died after a few unexpected punches to the stomach.
Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz in Budapest on March 24, 1874, the son of a rabbi. The family emigrated to the United States in 1878 and settled in Appleton, Wisconsin. He took his stage name from the French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, whose autobiography he read in 1890.
He built his fame on handcuff escapes and challenges to local police. On March 17, 1904, at London's Hippodrome, he took on special handcuffs said to have taken a locksmith five years to make, and he got free after one hour and ten minutes in front of about 4,000 spectators.
His Milk Can Escape debuted in 1908 with posters warning "Failure Means A Drowning Death." In 1912, at Circus Busch in Berlin, he unveiled the Chinese Water Torture Cell: feet locked in stocks, lowered upside down into a water-filled glass-fronted cell. He kept performing it until he died.
His stunts stopped traffic. He escaped straitjackets while dangling from cranes, and on July 7, 1912, he freed himself from a crate weighted with 200 pounds of lead and lowered into New York's East River, in 57 seconds. In 1910 he also became the first man to fly a powered aircraft in Australia.
In the 1920s he crusaded against fraudulent spiritualist mediums who preyed on the grieving. A Scientific American committee offered a cash prize to any medium who could prove real powers, and no one ever claimed it. The crusade ended his friendship with Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle, a devout believer.
On October 22, 1926, in Montreal, a McGill University student named J. Gordon Whitehead asked whether it was true that Houdini could withstand any punch to the stomach, then struck him hard several times before he could brace, while Houdini was resting with a recently broken ankle. Houdini kept performing through days of pain and a fever of 104°F, reportedly passing out on stage in Detroit.
Houdini died of peritonitis at Grace Hospital in Detroit on October 31, 1926, at age 52. Doctors think appendicitis was the cause, and whether the punches played a role is still debated. His insurance company treated the death as an accident and paid double indemnity.
Houdini and his wife Bess had agreed on a secret code, "Rosabelle believe," to prove any message from beyond the grave was real. Bess held a séance every Halloween for ten years and ended it in 1936, saying "ten years is long enough to wait for any man." Houdini séances are still held every Halloween around the world.