When he heard the magician’s muse calling and hit the road again, this time professionally, Ehrich Weiss sweated out the small time as “the King of Cards” (see more about Harry and his cards at the bottom of this post) and, first with a pal and then with his brother Theo, who everybody called Dash, as half of the Houdini Brothers. The name was lifted from the celebrated French illusionist Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin and given an Italian twist at the tail. Houdin, already long deceased, was going to have more than his name stolen before the brash American upstart was finished with him.

In November 1892 the Houdini Brothers — Harry was still only 18 — played Milwaukee’s Wonderland Theater, a dime museum, as the popular entertainment venues of the day were called, and impressed the crowd with their Mystery Box trick. Harry’s hands were tied behind his back and he climbed into a sack, which was then sealed. He was hefted into a large box and it was locked and bound with ropes. A curtain was raised around it, three seconds elapsed, the curtain dropped, and there stood Harry next to the box, free as a sparrow. The trunk was reopened and, yes, Theo was bound up inside.

The following year they made hay in Chicago, both at the World’s Fair and Kohl & Middleton’s celebrated dime museum — 20 shows a day for $12 a week. Harry was by now doing his handcuff escapes as well, and learning about stage presentation in the museum’s Hall of Freaks and Miracle Workers.

In the summer of 1894 the Houdini Brothers were performing at Coney Island and Harry met Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, who with her sister had a singing act. After a three-week courtship and a little sleight of hand as far as her mother was concerned, they married on June 22, and “Bess”, as she was known, replaced Theo in the magic act the next month, still on Coney Island.

(Bess’ preferred version of events, as laid out in Harry Kellock’s 1928 biography of Houdini, removed her from the grime of showbiz altogether. She primly claimed she met Harry when he came to her high school to perform, and even then she had to talk her mother into letting her attend the show — as long as Mom came along!)

Bess and Harry began touring dime museums and sideshows as “The Great Houdinis”, pairing up for a slice of scam mind-reading, memorable mostly because of the mnemonics they used. Years later they optimistically fashioned a phrase from the same secret code so they could stay in touch after one of them was finally beyond the grave.

Also in their stage act, Harry did his Needle Trick, swallowing dozens of needles and yards of thread and then regurgitating them back up all strung together.

It was impressive, and he never stopped doing the stunt — eventually ingesting 200 needles and 120 feet of thread and, with helpers, stringing them out clear across huge stages — but back then, the Houdinis were still getting nowhere fast. By 1896 Harry was ready to pack it in, and advertised in a newspaper that all of his tricks were for sale. Fortunately no one thought they were worth the $20 asking price, and he was stuck in the profession for a while longer.

In April 2008, Ring 362 of the International Brotherhood of Magicians based in Bangor, Maine, hosted the third Elliott Card Challenge, which annually honours James William Elliott (1874-1920), a native of Rumford in that state and the man acknowledged — even by Houdini — as the Champion Card Manipulator of the World and “The King of Kards”.

As reported in the Sun-Journal of Lewiston, Maine, the Boston physician toured for five years with the Leroy, Talma and Bosco magic act and, in the process, “wowed Houdini with his card skill. Houdini, never known for his modesty, declared Elliott to be his peer in skill at cards.”

On sale at Amazon.com and here is the 1923 book “Elliott’s Last Legacy”, so-named because, although he wrote most of it, with buyers keen to find out his secrets, Elliott died before it was finished. Harry and Clinton Burgess stepped in to complete the work, using Elliott’s notes and offering some explanations — but not all. Houdini wrote the foreword and Burgess profiled the author.

As well as card tricks, the book covers stunts with balls, bottles, boxes, chairs and tables, coins, glasses, handkerchiefs, rabbits, rings, slates, telepathy, Japanese and “Hindoo” effects and even witches’ brooms and walking on water.

According to one reliable source, Houdini was enjoying a successful run at Mellini’s Theatre in Hanover, Germany, in early 1903 when he set out to make another Houdini vanish. It’s an amazing angle to the odd tale of “the Brothers Houdini”.

Another source confirms that there was a Mellini’s Theatre in Hanover, but it opened in 1910. This source says it was a 1,700-seat variety and operetta theatre on Artilleriestrasse, but I’ve found no Artilleriestrasse in Hanover, only in other German cities. The proprietor was evidently Hermann Mellini (1843-1923), a magician whose real name was Hermann Mehl. (Was he also Leon Hermann?
I don’t know, but what a great picture!) He’d inherited the Basch magic shop from his father-in-law, Ernst Basch, in 1908 and renamed it the Basch-Mellini Magic Shop.

Interestingly, there’s a Mehlstrasse close to the city’s old quarter, and just to the east of it, near the Opera House, is the Central Hotel Kaiserhof. This place dates from 1915, but Harry once recalled staying at “the Zum Kaiserhof in Hanover” in 1902.

“The place caught on fire,” he said. “I opened the doors of 14 rooms. I could do it quicker than the people inside could turn the keys in the locks. The proprietor said that if I ever came to Hanover again and stopped at any place but his there would be trouble.”

Truth or another tall tale? Who knows? Anyway, it was apparently in Hanover where Harry heard the news that Jacob Hyman, his original partner in the Houdini Brothers (before his real brother Theo chimed in), was doing well with his own magic act back in the States, and that Hyman was still calling himself Houdini. Brotherhood suddenly went out the window.

Yet Hyman may have been more Houdini than Houdini. Benjamin Filene, curator of the Houdini Historical Center in Appleton, Wisconsin, wrote a fine essay on the subject in 1995 for the centre’s magazine, The Mystifier. Harry had met Jacob when they were teenagers working at the H Richter & Sons tie factory in New York. Pooling their passion for magic, they started touring in 1891 as the Brothers Houdini, Jake modifying his own name to Jack Hayman.

“According to some accounts,” Filene writes, “it was Hyman who coined the Houdini name … Ehrich became Harry Houdini, and Hyman became JH Houdini.”

Filene then cites an article in Genii magazine that claimed Harry and Jacob performed in the New York area for two years, then toured the Midwest for a few months, including a stint on the Midway at the 1893 World’s Fair. They parted ways quarrelling the following year, and Jack saw off their last few bookings with his own brother, Joe. But “Hyman seems to have used the Houdini name sporadically in the decade after,” Filene says. “In 1896 Hyman billed himself as ‘Houdini, Oriental Conjurer and Mysterious Juggler’.”

Harry was evidently unconcerned about being one of two touring Houdinis until he became famous in his own right. In early 1903 Jacob was getting rave reviews in Massachusetts at the same time Harry was headlining in Hanover. The latter decided it was time for a showdown. That same month Hyman found himself unable to get loose from a pair of handcuffs submitted in response to his usual challenge. The cuffs had come, it turned out, from Leopold Weiss, Harry’s brother.

In March Harry cabled the New York Dramatic Mirror: “Having worked for years to make my name famous, I trust managers during my absence will not advertise the unprofessional performer who is using my name. If he has brains enough to act, let him make a name for himself.”

Apparently Jacob decided to let the better man win and gave up the name Houdini, then vanished from show business altogether and became a physician.