August 5: Houdini Escapes the Coffin

Harry Houdini performed his last public escape on this date in 1926 after spending 91 minutes in a 700-pound coffin submerged in a swimming pool in the Hotel Shelton in New York. A month earlier, Egyptian magician Rahman Bey had enclosed himself in a metal box and remained underwater in a different New York hotel for an hour, setting a record for an underwater burial. Houdini, determined to beat Bey’s record, practiced twice in private and then summoned the journalists to attend. “After one hour and twenty-eight minutes,” he would write, “I commenced to see yellow lights and carefully watched myself not to go to sleep.” That evening, Houdini wrote a letter giving advice to Dr. W.J. McConnell, a psychologist who worked with the U.S. Bureau of Mines and was studying how to increase the survival rate of miners trapped in shafts with limited oxygen. “There is no doubt in my mind that had this test been where fresh air could have gotten into the galvanized iron coffin as I was put in same, I could have readily stayed fifteen or thirty minutes longer,” wrote Houdini. He would die two months later from a ruptured appendix after a McGill University student punched him in a test of his abdominal strength. To see a photo gallery while hearing a 1936 “seance” effort led by Bess, Houdini’s beloved wife, to contact her husband’s spirit, click here.
“The important thing is to believe that you are safe, don’t breathe deeply and don’t make any unnecessary movements.” —Harry Houdini