Members of the local police-with helmets reaching down around their ears and impressively ugly mustaches-stand to the side, looking like nothing so much as the baffled cops who harassed Charlie Chaplin a few years later. There is a photograph of the act in which Houdini’s unsmiling face sticks out above the can (his knees were pulled up to his chest). They filled it with water, the excess slopping over the sides as Houdini climbed in. Louis, Houdini and his assistants dragged onto the stage a sixty-gallon milk can, a larger version of the ones delivered to grocery stores. With a pack of cards in his hands, Houdini couldn’t kiss the hem of the late Ricky Jay’s rolled-up sleeve. As a mentalist, he would have been shamed by today’s master, Derren Brown.

Never a great illusionist, he lacked mystery and atmosphere his stagecraft was ordinary. But now, having spent most of the previous five years in Europe, he had to conquer America all over again.

He had conquered inspectors from Berlin and Scotland Yard, who chained him up and then watched, bewildered, as he broke free. Indeed, he was an affront to authorities everywhere. It was a time of intense anti-Semitism in Russia, and Houdini, who was Jewish, wanted to flummox the tsarist politsiya. In Europe, he had pulled off such stunts as escaping (in 1903) from the “Siberian Transport Cell,” a metal safe on wheels that was used to haul political renegades off to prison. As a beginner, he had performed with trained monkeys and fat ladies a few years later, he did his tricks in a tuxedo with a boutonnière. He had toured all over the United States, playing circus sideshows, vaudeville houses, and packed theatres of the Orpheum Circuit. He was thirty-four and had worked in show business for fifteen years. In 1908, Harry Houdini-“The World’s Handcuff King and Prison Breaker”-needed a new act.

The amazing harry houdini