He certainly did not divulge that he was born in Hungary as Eric Weisz, the son of a Rabbi who emigrated to the United States in 1878, when Houdini was four. His notes on the meeting-stored in box 32 of Hrdlička’s papers at the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian-suggest that Houdini made no admission that he was born anywhere but Appleton, Wisconsin. Yet in submitting to the measurements, Houdini confounded the physical anthropologist thrice over.įirst, Hrdlička peppered the magician with questions regarding his ancestry. Hrdlička had examined another escape artist and, “ found this man more or less abnormal physically … he expected to find these abnormalities even more marked in the case of Houdini,” Washington’s Evening Star reported on November 2, 1926. It was to that end that he had invited Houdini to his third-floor chambers in the National Museum.
Although the darker extensions of physical anthropology in Europe and the Americas are clear-for example, the correlation of supposedly stable physical traits with inheritable psychological characteristics as “race” and, most notoriously, their application by Nazi doctors-Hrdlička also studied the history of migration in the Americas and documented variation in bodies over time. Hrdlička had institutionalized Physical Anthropology at the Smithsonian with his arrival in 1904, and under his tenure the National Museum’s collection of human remains-of Americans of indigenous, European, African, and Asian descent-had multiplied several times over. Aleš Hrdlička, the Smithsonian’s Bohemian-born curator of Physical Anthropology. The spring before, during what became Houdini’s last visit to Washington, DC, the fifty-two-year-old escape artist had paid a visit to the laboratory of Dr. Read Part II here.Īfter Harry Houdini died in November of 1926, laid low by a ruptured appendix, the world’s most famous magician performed one final escape-from neither handcuffs, nor his famed “ Chinese Water Torture Cell,” but a trap far more permanent: the anatomical collection of the Smithsonian Institution.
This is the first in a series of two posts about Houdini at the Smithsonian.
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