Houdini: A Life Worth Reading by Higher Read

Investigator
     
    By 1924, Houdini was becoming recognized nationally as an investigator and educator on the subject of fraudulent techniques used by mediums. He toured the United States, giving lectures at universities about the history of Spiritualism and the ways that fraudulent mediums produced their effects. Houdini also “tested” mediums. Most famously, he reproduced the powers of a renowned Spanish medium who called himself Argamasilla, who claimed to be able to see through metal. He also duplicated mediums’ use of telepathy, organizing a test at his house in which he went into another room while his guests selected topics at random, returning to the room to explain (correctly) what he had “telepathically received” from them while in the other room. He jokingly performed a “teleportation” of a writer to a benefit held by the Society of American Magicians, pretending that the speaker was communicating via radio, but concealing the man in the banquet hall, who emerged after announcing he was teleporting in for the event. During his push to expose fraud among mediums, Houdini wrote and published a book called A Magician Among the Spirits.
     

The Scientific American Committee
     
    Houdini’s most longstanding battle in his fight against fraudulent Spiritualist mediums began in January of 1924, when he was nominated to an investigative committee put together by the magazine Scientific American . The purpose of the committee was to determine who, if anyone, would be the winner of two cash prizes offered to the first two individuals who produced a psychic object or photograph while working under the committee’s strictly controlled test conditions. The other members of the committee were largely academics and scientists, including two individuals from the Society of Psychical Research (the SPR), a United Kingdom-based nonprofit dedicated to objectively researching paranormal phenomena. J. Malcolm Bird, an editor at Scientific American , served as the secretary for the committee.
     
    With his large ego and longstanding need to prove himself as an intellectual, Houdini began clashing with his fellow committee members almost immediately. After the committee had tested a medium named George Valentine and found evidence of fraud, Houdini immediately told the press about the committee’s discoveries. Other committee members, especially Bird, objected to Houdini’s violation of the bylaw that none of the members speak to the press individually, for fear of discouraging future candidates from coming forward to compete for the prizes.
     
    Due either to Houdini’s indiscretion or to some other reason, no other viable medium came forth to try for the prize for six more months, until Nino Pecoraro, a young Italian medium, volunteered. Pecoraro was interesting to the committee because he claimed to be channeling the famous deceased medium Eusapia Palladino. Bird, perhaps intentionally, failed to tell Houdini about the first two test séances that the committee held with Pecoraro. However, by the third, Houdini had caught wind of the tests and arrived to evaluate Pecoraro. During his séances, Pecoraro seemed to make things appear and sounds occur while bound tightly. Houdini showed Pecoraro what it really meant to be bound, tying him intricately and knowledgably from his own years of experience as an escape artist. Bound thusly, Pecoraro was unable to produce the same effects as he had during the first two “tests,” proving that he himself, and not a spiritual force, had produced the noises and images in the prior séances.
     
    After Pecoraro, the committee took on the testing of a medium who called herself Margery. Margery’s real name was Mina Crandon, and she was the young, well-to-do wife of a surgeon and Harvard professor named Dr. Crandon. The aristocratic pair lived in beautiful four-story house on Beacon Hill in Boston and enjoyed an educated and cultured circle of friends and colleagues. Margery