LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Harry Houdini: Straitjackets
built 648 days ago
Beginning in 1915, Houdini thrilled huge crowds with his suspended straitjacket escape. In this "outside stunt" Houdini was bound in a straitjacket and a rope was tied around his ankles. He was then hoisted high above the crowd and suspended from a beam that projected from a window in a tall building. In a 1916 performance in Washington, D.C., an estimated 15,000 spectators watched Houdini free himself from this terrifying predicament.
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Houdini made his first movie for Pathé in 1901. Titled Merveilleux Exploits du Célébre Houdini à Paris, it featured a loose narrative meant to showcase several of Houdini's famous escapes, including his straitjacket escape. Houdini returned to film in 1916 when he served as special-effects consultant on the Pathé thriller, The Mysteries of Myra. That same year, he got an offer to star as Captain Nemo in a silent version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, but the project never made it into production.[15]
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Did you know that for someone who could escape from submerged locked boxes and from dangling upside down in a straitjacket, Houdini was scared of being in confined places? He once made a call from a phone booth which became stuck when he was trying to leave. After several minutes of frantically trying to get out of the booth, passerbys were able to extricate him. Houdini was only confident in getting out of escape mechanisms that he himself had designed in some way. The phone booth presented something that he had no control over which panicked him. This incident presents a fascinating element to the psychological makeup of this legendary daredevil.
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