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the magician was deeply grieved and had difficulty recovering.
Illusions: Houdini used these tricks, which were growing in popularity, in astonishing ways.
     

 
    Starting in 1910, Houdini announced that he would no longer do handcuff tricks . To replace these stunts, Houdini turned to even more daring and complex acts: the Underwater Box Escape, the Crazy-Crib, and the Chinese Water Torture Cell. In a forever-famous incident, Houdini scheduled an underwater escape in the East River of New York. However, the police prevented him from performing, so Houdini had a tugboat bring him out to federal waters. Once there, he was shackled and placed inside a thick pine box, with holes that allowed water and air to get in. The box was thrown over the side of the boat. Houdini managed to get out of the box and the shackles, climbing into the boat to great cheers. Houdini repeated this stunt in New York in 1914 in the waters off Battery Park, to great fanfare.
     
    Houdini also performed escapes from restraints used to confine criminally insane individuals, including “crazy-cribs,” which were lightweight beds with extensive straps. He invited more “one-time-only” challenges from the public, which lead to his escape from ropes in which he dangled from the Heidelberg Tower’s roof in New York City. He also escaped from the belly of a huge sea creature found in Cape Cod, which was brought to a stage and chained closed after Houdini climbed inside.
     
    Houdini additionally introduced escapes from torture chambers brought from around the world, including the Chinese sanguaw, the Scottish gibbet, and the German iron maiden torture chest. Houdini devised yet another, more complex torture chamber for himself: the Chinese Water Torture Cell, or the Upside Down (USD). In this device, Houdini was shackled upside down with his feet in stocks and lowered into a vat of water. The stocks were then closed with padlocks. Many people at the time believed that Houdini was only able to escape from the cell by using supernatural abilities to dematerialize and re-materialize. Only a few people in the world know how Houdini actually did this trick.
     
    Houdini’s years of constant, physical performances took a strain on his body. In 1911 he suffered his first lasting injury, a broken blood vessel in a kidney sustained when he was tied too tightly in one of his public challenges. The doctor told Houdini that he needed to stop his contortionist activities for good, but Houdini refused. He tore a ligament in his side soon after.
     
    Houdini began to need help lugging around his huge amount of equipment. But he risked exposure of his secrets by employing assistants. He carefully selected helpers, whom he paid well and made take oaths of secrecy about what they learned about his magic. Even still, the assistants were never told the whole story behind any trick, just in case one were to betray him. Likely Dash and Bess were the only two people who knew how Houdini really pulled off his tricks.
     
    In July of 1913 Houdini left for Europe again. He got word of his mother Cecilia’s grave illness soon after arriving and headed straight back to her bedside. Unfortunately, Cecilia passed away before Houdini arrived, and Houdini returned to his European tour with a grieving heart.
     
    In Nuremberg, Germany, he defied a court order that forbid him from performing the Chinese Water Torture Cell under the waters of a lake near Nuremberg; he was prosecuted by the police and won the case. Houdini was the only one who didn’t seem to take pleasure in the ridiculous proceedings; he sat lost in grief in the courtroom. Houdini saw that his black mood was having a negative effect on Bess’s health and resolved to bounce back. He took Bess on a vacation in the French Riviera but indulged in a morbid fascination with a cemetery there.
     
    Houdini tried starting a new show based solely on illusions instead of on escape tricks, including an illusion invented by