Houdini's Challenge Act consisted of him escaping from a pair of handcuffs produced by an audience member. Houdini finally hit the big-time when he was 24 years old with his Challenge Act in 1898, while he was making the rounds of vaudeville. In 1896, while visiting a doctor friend in Nova Scotia, he saw his first strait jacket, which gave him the idea of developing an act in which he would escape from it. While developing his act, Houdini was not above the old carny trick of posing as a spirit medium, making the rounds of the town clerk's office and nearby cemeteries in order to provide 'messages from beyond'. They married in secret, then again at a synagogue and in a Catholic church to please both of their families.

The marriage on Jcaused a conflict with his Jewish family as Bess was a Roman Catholic. Eventually, Theodore - billed as Hardeen - was replaced by Wilhemina Rahner (known as Bess), the woman 'Harry Houdini' would eventually marry. Weiss and Hayman specialized in the Crate Escape (eventually known as Metamorphosis or The Substitution Trunk), and Houdini's brother Theodore replaced Hayman when he became uninterested in the act.

Billing themselves as the 'Houdini Bros.' in tribute to French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, Erich Weiss became an entertainer, though it took him some seven years to catch on. Young Erich had been fascinated with magic since he was a young lad, when he was in the audience of a magic show put on by a traveling magician named Dr. His boyhood was spent in poverty and, when he was 17, he conjured up a magic act with his friend Jack Hayman, in order to escape the poverty and anonymity of manual labor which would likely have been his lot in life. One of five brothers and one daughter born to rabbi Samuel Weiss and his wife Cecilia, the future Houdini was four years old when his parents emigrated to the U.S., where Weiss, as 'Harry Houdini', became one of the major celebrities of the first age dominated by the mass media. The great American escape artist and magician Houdini (immortalized by a memorable performance by Tony Curtis in the eponymous 1953 film) was born Erich Weiss on Main Budapest, Hungary, though he often gave his birthplace as Appleton, Wisconsin, where he was raised.

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