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another magician, the Expanding Cube . Houdini performed this illusion by telling the audience that his wife was inside a small die, and then “making” the die expand, removing the enlarged item to reveal Bess, sitting on the platform. However, other performers also used this trick, and audiences wanted Houdini to perform his trademark escapes, not other magicians’ illusions.
     
    On a boat trip back to the United States, Houdini performed for an amazed President Theodore Roosevelt. A photograph of the president and eight men from the ship, including Houdini, was taken. Houdini had the other men in the picture airbrushed out and presented the photo of himself and Roosevelt to the public as the original photograph.
     
    Houdini’s next tour abroad was delayed by the breakout of World War I. He turned back to touring in the United States, still struggling with grief over the loss of his mother. He leased the house in Harlem that his mother had lived in for the last years of her life and turned to new tricks: walking through a brick wall, being buried alive, and, most famously, the Suspended Straitjacket Escape. His “walking through a brick wall” trick, in which he literally seemed to do what the trick’s title indicates, made a big sensation but was quickly discarded by Houdini as too easy to replicate and too hard to orchestrate (one had to build a genuine brick wall for each show). In Los Angeles, he agreed to escape a six-foot deep grave, shackled by handcuffs. He reported later that he panicked and nearly died.
     
    Houdini’s crowning escapade of this era was being hung, upside down and straitjacketed, from tall buildings, far from the ground. Houdini first did this trick in Minneapolis from the building of the city newspaper, and he repeated it on skyscrapers in Omaha, San Antonio, New Orleans, New York, and Providence, among others. Huge crowds turned out to see this breathtaking stunt. This trick was as dangerous as it was attention grabbing. Several other performers died trying to replicate the feat; safety hazards lay in tangled ropes, fractures of ankles and necks from the upside-down position and heavy pulleys, and the risk of catching overhead wires or hitting a wall while struggling to get free. While performing in Oakland, Houdini met the famous writer Jack London and his wife Charmian, which produced another photo opportunity for Houdini to pose with a famous person and circulate the picture among friends and family.
     
    In the fall of 1918, Houdini starred in a new variety show at the Hippodrome, called “Everything.” Having shown himself to be very proud of being American at the break-out of the first world war, he continued his patriotic theme by buying an eagle named Young Abe, which he produced out of nowhere in a spectacular opening number. Houdini also performed his upside-down straitjacket escape, suspended high over the Hippodrome stage by wire.
     

 
Illusions
     
    In his later career, Houdini introduced a new kind of magic, illusions. Houdini’s illusion acts differed from his past stunts which showcased his physical prowess and mental skill at beating locks, chains, and all sorts of restraints, with the exception that Houdini had briefly introduced an illusion in which he appeared to walk through a brick wall. Like everything Houdini did, he did illusions in a big way. He procured an elephant named Jenny, who was reportedly the daughter of P.T. Barnum’s circus elephant Jumbo.
     
    Jenny weighed between four thousand and ten thousand pounds. Houdini made her disappear onstage during an eight-minute act in which the elephant appeared onstage, gave Houdini an elephant kiss, and was concealed briefly behind a screen. When the screen was lifted, two seconds later, Jenny had disappeared. Houdini purchased the international rights for this trick from its inventor, a British magician named Charles Morritt. This trick made huge news even though in actuality, only a small section of the