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By Root 5105 0

the spiritual claims of clairvoyants and mediums. In his early days with the Welsh Brothers Circus in Pennsylvania he had himself exploited the gullibility of rubes by claiming transcendental powers for his tricks. Blindfolded he would tell a confederate what item had been held for identification by someone in the audience. What is this, Mr. Houdini, the confederate would say, and he’d know. It was all done by code. Sometimes he would claim to speak with the dead and give some poor sucker whose name and circumstances they had managed to figure out a message from a loved one who had passed on. So he knew what spiritual fraud was. He could recognize it. Spiritual fraud had been rampant in the United States since 1848 when two sisters, Margaretta and Kate Fox, invited neighbors to hear the mysterious rappings in their house in Hydesville, New York. But it was the very fact of his expertise that persuaded him now to consider the possibility of finding someone who had genuine gifts as a medium. If it was possible to communicate with the dead he would find out. He could recognize and unmask any fake act in the world. Therefore if he found the real thing he would know it. He wanted to see his mother Cecelia’s tiny figure and feel her hands touch his face. But since that could not be, he decided to see if it was really possible to speak with her.

And at this time in our history communication with the dead was not as far-fetched an idea as it had once been. America was in the dawn of the Twentieth Century, a nation of steam shovels, locomotives, airships, combustion engines, telephones and twenty-five-story buildings. But there was an interesting susceptibility to occult ideas of the most famous pragmatists in the land. Of course it was all very hush-hush. A rumor in certain circles had it that Pierpont Morgan and Henry Ford had formed a secret society. And he knew that the horticultural wizard Luther Burbank, who crossbred and developed hybrids with increased crop yields, talked secretly to plants and believed they could understand him. The great Edison himself, the man who invented the Twentieth Century, had theorized that irreducible particles of life-charged matter, which he called swarms, subsisted after death and could never be destroyed. Houdini tried to get in touch with Edison. He asked for an interview. But the great man was too busy. He was working on an invention so secret that there was frequent speculation in the press as to what it might be. One news story came out claiming the new invention was something called a vacuum tube by which Edison hoped to receive messages from dead people. Houdini desperately sent off telegrams begging and pleading for an interview. He was rebuffed. He offered money to help fund the work. He was rebuffed. He swore to himself that he would invent his own instrument, just as he had learned to fly his own aeroplane. Whatever Edison began with came from the storehouse of technology available to everyone. Houdini bought books and began a study of mechanical physics and the principles of the storage battery. He vowed that by whatever medium, mechanical or human, if there was life after death he would discover it.

His passion in no time at all came to the attention of various people who kept abreast of such things. He met a man from Buffalo, New York, who claimed to have worked at one time with Steinmetz, the dwarf immigrant genius of the General Electric Company. Physicists all over the world were discovering waves, the man told him. There was a tremendously important theory from abroad in which it was supposed matter and energy were but two aspects of the same primal force. That is my idea too, the man told Houdini. He was a physicist with a university degree from Transylvania. All he needed was to devise the properly sensitive instrument, and primal waves could be detected and decoded that nobody as yet knew anything about. Houdini signed an agreement with him giving him two thousand dollars for the exclusive rights to his research. Another man, a chemist, he established in the basement of