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.

In the 1953 movie “Houdini”, Janet Leigh (playing Bess) convinces Tony Curtis’ forelorn, nobody-loves-me Harry to take a job in a lock factory after their early treks across America fail to generate any success.

On the job he tests deadbolts and fantasises about escaping from one of the firm’s huge safes. Eventually he takes his chance and climbs inside one, but he’s struggling to get out for so long that the foreman orders the safe blown open.

Then he gives Harry the boot.

A bit of fanciful cinema, of course (see more about the flick here), but Houdini certainly deserved his billing as the Handcuff King.

There’s an excellent analysis of the shackles he used on Joseph W Lauher’s terrific website on vintage restraints, Handcuffs.org, and specifically the ones depicted in this promotional poster.

“It appears that Houdini is wearing seven pairs of handcuffs,” the site says. “The outermost pair, closest to Houdini’s hands, is the famous Russian manacle.”

The Russian beast is pictured here. The site then goes on to assess the Darby, Bean Cobb, Romer and Berliner handcuffs. Great stuff for the technically minded and would-be escapologists everywhere.

Dubbed (for some reason I don’t know) “the most mysterious handcuff in all of the Houdini photographs”, the five-pound, brass and steel Russian manacle was in Harry’s luggage went he returned home from Europe in 1904. Quite the souvenir.

Handcuffs.org has a great write-up by Mark Lyons about the October 2004 auction of the Sidney Radner Collection at the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas. It’s accompanied by photos by John Bushey, of which the above is a sample.

Lyons reported that a coveted poster of the Water Torture Cell — “in fantastic shape” that belied its almost 100 years — sold for more than $59,000. One of the actual cells, which Teller of Penn and Teller “photographed from top to bottom”, went for $300,000, quite likely to David Copperfield. A Milk Can brought $37,000.

Around 100 punters at the museum and another 200 bidding online scrabbled over photos, keys, posters and cuffs, with keys fetching on average $100 and cuffs selling for anywhere from $2,000 to $15,000 — for a German folding cuff.

Lyons noted “provenance problems” with some of the items, saying the auctioneers acknowledged that pieces that had been formally authenticated as Houdini’s possessions had turned out not to be. Handcuffs.org, Lyons said, deserved credit for raising the alarm about dubious items in the sale.