Famed magician Harry Houdini was one of the 20th century’s biggest celebrities, and remains a global household name to this day. His impossible feats of death-defying escape, otherworldly mystique and the popular legends woven around him have inspired hundreds of books, movies, TV shows and comics, and even pinballs and videogames, plus countless other appearances and mentions.
Houdini’s daring reputation, along with his muscular physique and real-life adventures exposing con artists, made him more myth than man, and an important evolutionary milestone in the idea of the superhuman.
In honor of his 150th birthday, here’s a look at the man behind the legend, fact vs. fiction (the former being stranger, in his case) and how he helped inspire the idea of the superhero.
Houdini’s Long Shadow
There are quite a few events and tribute shows planned for Houdini’s 150th around the world, but perhaps the most interesting is the book launch of Houdini’s Last Handcuffs, a fantasy novel by Charlie and Cheryl Young inspired by their childhood in 1950s New York.
Their father, Morris Young, was a magic enthusiast who as a teenager had seen Houdini perform and met him. In 1961, he coauthored with Walter B. Gibson the highly influential Houdini’s Fabulous Magic, now in its fourth edition.
The same Walter B. Gibson, a magician in his own right, had ghostwritten for Houdini himself. In 1921 the experience inspired him to create, under the penname Maxwell Grant, a pulp magazine adventurer who had “Houdini’s penchant for escapes, with the hypnotic power of Tibetan mystics”—the Shadow.
The Shadow, in turn, helped inspire a number of superheroes, most notably Batman. Batman’s cocreator Bill Finger was also inspired by Houdini, making the master magician both a direct and indirect influence on the caped crusader.
The Origin Story
Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz on March 24, 1874, in Budapest, Hungary (then the Austro-Hungarian Empire). When he was four, the family emigrated to the US, to Appleton, Wisconsin, where his father was a rabbi. Not long after they moved to New York City, where his father worked in the garment industry. They were poor, and often went hungry.
He changed his name to Ehrich Weiss—explained by some as an anglicized name change but really more of a spelling convention—though he usually went by the nickname Harry.
Young Harry was fascinated with stage magic, especially the famous French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin. When he embarked on his own magic career in 1891, at age 17, he changed his name to Harry Houdini—likewise often explained as an homage, but given the conventions of the time, more likely an attempt to capitalize on Houdin’s fame, the “i” connoting he was “Houdin-like” or a “lil’ Houdin.”
Touring around the country, mostly with circuses, Houdini became a skilled prestidigitator (old-timey word for sleight-of-hand artist) and contortionist. As a funambulist (tightrope walker) and aerialist (trapeze artist), he often went by “Eric, Prince of the Air.”
He was also an innovative illusionist, but what he eventually became famous for was his uncanny ability to pick any lock and break out of any confinement. He came to be known as the “King of Handcuffs” and later on an “escapologist”—a term he likely coined that’s now a dictionary word.
Escapes and Escapades
Over the course of his career, Houdini escaped from handcuffs and leg irons; prison cells; bank safes; iron boilers riveted shut; airtight cans filed with water; padlocked and chained boxes drowned in water; coffins buried six-feet under; and straightjackets while hanging upside-down off tall roofs.
His most famous trick was “The Chinese Water Torture Cell,” where his feet were locked into a frame and he was lowered upside down into a glass water tank, which he had to escape in full view of the audience.
Just as masterful at self-promotion, he often performed these feats in public, drawing large crowds and press. He regularly embellished his exploits—how high he hung, how long he held his breath—which reporters were all too happy to oblige.
His impossible acts of escape from all manner of deathtraps, often several at once, often while submerged (or appearing to be) longer than humanly possible, gave him an almost supernatural lore, and many people did believe he possessed paranormal abilities.
But what he really was, aside from athletic and dexterous, was a gifted engineer. He invented many ingenious magic contraptions, though he patented few to keep his secrets. He also invented a toy and a diving suit.
As Houdini became one of the world’s most famous entertainers, he was invited to appear before gentry and royalty across Europe. He often performed in a tuxedo, a look that set him apart from other circus-style performers. He wasn’t the first magician in a tux—that may have been Robert-Houdin— but he became associated with the look, and set the standard for decades to come. It was as much his costume as any superhero’s, and following magicians also added capes.
Several early superheroes, like Mandrake and Zatara, adopted the look. When a new Zatara was introduced in DC’s Kingdom Come #2 (June 1996), he was modeled after a young Houdini.
For many of Houdini’s escapes, however, he stripped down to his underwear or was completely naked, exposing a muscular physique that wouldn’t shame an MCU actor today. He was short but considered handsome for the time, and the cuffs and ropes added a touch of bondage kink. It was a sex appeal he cannily promoted in his posters and press photos, turning him into one of the first male sex symbols.
His heroic image was bolstered during World War I, when he was called upon to teach U.S. infantrymen how to free themselves from restraints if captured and how to escape sinking ships.
He could even fly; he was one of the first private pilots in history, owning his own biplane. On March 18, 1910, he made the first engine-powered flight in Australia, generating international headlines.
He also became a movie star, starring in several blockbusters. He usually played thinly veiled versions of himself, further blurring the line between fantasy and reality. In 1922’s The Man From Beyond, he played a man found frozen in arctic ice and awakened a century after his time. It’s very possible that this is where Stan Lee and Jack Kirby got the idea for Captain America being frozen in ice for Avengers #4 (March 1964). The film also features a character named Dr. Strange.
Houdini the Crimefighter
Spiritualism was all the rage in the 1920s, and Houdini brought his training in magic to bear in debunking spiritualists, especially those that scientists and academics failed to. He held mediums, psychics, astrologers, palm readers, fortune tellers and other mystics who claimed to be more than entertainers in contempt, calling them “human leeches.”
His crusade—to throw off the shackles of old-world superstition, if you will—took him all over the country, where he’d sometimes attend séances in elaborate disguises, then interrupt them by revealing himself and exposing the trickery behind them. Reporters were usually present.
In 1926 he testified before Congress in favor of a proposed bill to outlaw paid spiritualists. When one called his trustworthiness into question because he was Jewish, Houdini, ever the showman, answered, “Jesus was a Jew, and he did not charge $2 a visit.”
He already had an image as a crimefighter, following his 1906 book, The Right Way to Do Wrong: An Expose of Successful Criminals. In 1924 he chronicled his “supernatural” crimefighting in the book A Magician Among the Spirits, which only added to his legend.
In 1926 he even hired H. P. Lovecraft, whom he previously collaborated with on a number of projects (ironic, given Lovecraft’s virulent antisemitism), to ghostwrite another book, The Cancer of Superstition, though it was never completed. It was lost to the ages, until the manuscript was discovered in 2016 among memorabilia from a closed magic shop.
Man vs. Myth
Houdini was a man of mystery, intentionally enigmatic, and legends about him abounded: He had true psychic powers; he helped the police when they were stumped; he was secretly a spy.
The CIA has conceded that he may have been an intelligence source, but never an agent. They also acknowledged that his tricks inspired some espionage techniques, going back to the CIA’s predecessor, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services). Two training manuals for clandestine operations borrowed directly from him, and the now-cliché of using a hollow shoe heel to hide things may have been his invention.
The 2007 book The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero implied that he was indeed a spy, and leaned into the conspiracy theory that his death was ordered by spiritualists, according to The Hollywood Reporter, but these claims are unsupported .
Rumors around Houdini’s supposedly mysterious death started almost immediately, but what he really died from was appendicitis and peritonitis. On October 22, 1926, he invited some college students to his dressing room after a show in Montreal, Canada. One asked if the claims that he could withstand any punch to his stomach were true. When he said yes, the student sucker-punched him several times in rapid succession.
Houdini dismissed the pain and continued on his tour to Detroit, where he collapsed and was rushed to a hospital. He was diagnosed with a burst appendix, likely having preexisting appendicitis. He clung to life until October 31, dying somewhat fittingly on Halloween, at age 52.
The Escapologist and the Escapist
Author Michael Chabon was perhaps the first to posit Houdini as an overlooked source of the superhero idea, in his 2000 Pulitzer-winning book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (a must-read for any true comic book fan).
The book’s protagonists, Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier, are composite characters loosely based on Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (Chabon denied basing them on anyone, though the parallels are obvious). It opens with Clay saying, “To me, Clark Kent in a phone booth and Houdini in a packing crate, they were one and the same… You weren’t the same person when you came out as when you went in. Houdini’s first magic act… was called ‘Metamorphosis.’ It was never just a question of escape. It was also a question of transformation.”
“Metamorphosis” was Houdini’s first major illusion, and one of his most famous. His assistant would tie him up in a sack, lock it in a trunk, then bind it with rope. A curtain would conceal them for three seconds and when it was drawn, Houdini would be standing onstage and the assistant would be in the sack.
Houdini’s trick predates Franz Kafka’s famous 1915 novella The Metamorphosis by more than 20 years, but from a today’s vantage it’s inescapably evocative, and both were responses to modernism. Kafka’s surrealist story about Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect, reflected an increasingly inhospitable, dehumanizing world (a view coined as “Kafkaesque”).
The world was fast becoming outsized, depriving the everyman of a sense of order and control, creating the desire for a superman. An inverse of Kafka, Siegel and Shuster gave their hero the proportionate great strength of an insect in the opening page of Action Comics #1 (June 1938).
Superman, and the superhero idea in general, is a fantasy of metamorphosis from what is to what should be, transformed not by cruel fate into an insect but by strength and virtue into something greater than man. Before superheroes, Houdini embodied the same fantasy.
He was the ultimate wish fulfillment, a poor immigrant boy who’d remade himself into a rich and celebrated man. That he mockingly defied symbols of authority, escaping police handcuffs and jail cells, only enhanced the symbolism and added to his appeal in a nation full of immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution. (That so many of his tricks involved emerging from water can also be seen as a rebirth metaphor, a baptism, a transformation.)
More directly, Houdini is also the inspiration for Kavalier & Clay’s fictional Golden Age superhero, the Escapist, a Nazi-smasher who can escape any deathtrap.
Joe Kavalier is an apprentice magician and escape artist in Prague who manages to escape the Nazis by hiding in a coffin, representing the urgent and all too real need of Jews to escape fate. In America, Joe creates the Escapist with his cousin Samuel Klayman, who goes by Sam Clay and desperately wants to escape being Jewish. Both see in Houdini a fulfillment of their respective fantasies.
It’s this desire to transcend the constraints and oppressive forces each of us contends with in our lives that helps to explain the allure of the superhero idea, and before that of Houdini, whether it traces directly back to him or not.
Houdini’s Legacy
The 2018 graphic novel After Houdini imagined what it would be like if he really did have magic powers and was a spy. The 2021 movie Eternals hinted that Houdini’s tricks were made possible by Sprite’s illusion-casting. And most recently, 2023’s Understanding Superhero Comic Books (which features a foreword by Jim Steranko) posits Houdini as an early super-human, a theatrical persona that provided audiences with escapism, both literal and figurative.
Harry Houdini’s uncanny escapes, powers of stage magic, muscular body and larger-than-life personality, the legends surrounding him, and his crusade against charlatans, all make him a precursor to superheroes.
His influence today, nearly a century after his death, it still felt. He made people believe in the impossible, even when they knew better. That was his real superpower.
Roy Schwartz is a pop culture historian and critic. His work has appeared in CNN.com, New York Daily News, The Forward, Literary Hub, and Philosophy Now, among others. His latest book is the Diagram Prize-winning Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @RealRoySchwartz and at royschwartz.com.