Houdini in his heyday.
Houdini in his heyday.
Harry Houdini died on October 31, 1926, at age
52 from peritonitis caused by a ruptured appendix.
A few days earlier in Montreal (on October 22, 1926), a college student named J. Gordon Whitehead punched Houdini in the stomach unexpectedly while Houdini was sitting down and unbraced.
Houdini was already suffering from abdominal pain and a fractured ankle, but he refused to go to the hospital and continued performing. After collapsing following a show in Detroit at the Garrick Theater, he was taken to Grace Hospital where he died on Halloween.
Medical consensus attributes the ruptured appendix to a medical coincidence rather than a direct result of the punch, though the blows may have masked or aggravated his symptoms.
All aviation records back in that era are sketchy but on 18 March 18 1910, Harry Houdini became one of if not THE first people to fly an airplane ... in Australia.
He’d bought the plane in Germany the year before. Then he taught himself to fly because back then there were no flight instructors. EVERYBODY who knew how to fly was self-taught. Those who didn’t catch on quick enough were dead.
Houdini shipped the plane to Oz, flew it 18 times and shipped it to the US but never flew it again. Where it went to remains a mystery.