Harry Houdini

Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz in Budapest and grew up in Wisconsin, where he made his first public appearance at nine, doing a trick as a trapeze artist in a suit of tights. His mother called him Harry; the stage name came from a French magician he had read about.

He started with card tricks and found that nobody paid for them. What paid was escape. He let a city handcuff him, chain him, nail him into a crate and drop him into a river, and he came out of all of it, breath held, fingers working. The Milk Can Escape, the Chinese Water Torture Cell, the straitjacket hung from a skyscraper: he built a career on getting out of things in front of witnesses.

He explained that every trick was practice and misdirection, and he hated seeing people fooled. When his mother died, he turned to spiritualism and found mediums claiming to carry messages from the dead, often for money. He spent his last years in theatres and courtrooms, reproducing their tricks and naming them as frauds.

He left a secret phrase with his wife, to be spoken by any medium who could really reach him. None ever did. He died in Detroit in 1926, on Halloween, after a student punched him in the dressing room to test a story he had told about his stomach.