Harry Houdini

Harry Houdini (1874–1926), born Erik Weisz in Budapest and raised in Appleton, Wisconsin, and New York as the son of a rabbi, became the most famous magician and escape artist in the world. After years in sideshows and dime museums he found his act around 1899: escaping from handcuffs, straitjackets, prison cells, milk cans and the Chinese water torture cell, often while hanging upside down above a crowd. In his later years he campaigned against fraudulent spiritualist mediums, wrote A Magician Among the Spirits and Miracle Mongers and Their Methods, and quarreled publicly with Arthur Conan Doyle. He died on Halloween of peritonitis after a blow to the abdomen.