yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The History of Magic | StarTalk


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

What's this with Escape artists? I never was as enchanted by that as others have been. When you're talking about a escape artist, you're really talking about Houdini and then a lot of knockoffs after that. Houdini, in the early 20th century, a man born in Budapest who claimed to be born in Appleton, Wisconsin, which is about all you need to know. That tells the whole story.

He takes a straight jacket and says, as his tagline, "I defy the jails of the world to hold me." The early part of the 20th century, and then he hangs upside down in a straight jacket way up high over a sea of people in Times Square, many of whom are immigrants. This man, self-made man by any definition you want, casts off the chains of anything that any corporation or government put on him.

I'm getting all deep on this. This is all metaphorical. Well, that's the answer though, isn't it? And you know that was an idea of its time; that was an idea of its time as important as Bob Dylan singing before Martin Luther King. I had not thought of it in that way. I mean, it's really, really important.

And then other guys come along and say, "I got fake cuffs, boom, here we go!" But that's not what was going on there. We celebrate Houdini because he grabbed the heart of America. In some ways, he was the first modern star. He's the first celebrity to appear nearly nude in public. He's the first celebrity to have descriptions of his shows be more important than his shows.

Houdini is in the dictionary. You know, to pull a Houdini means to disappear. Oh, you become a verb! And if we walk out on the street right now, if you walk out there and say to people, "Name a magician," and you ask 10 people, at least one of them and maybe seven of them will name Houdini.

Pretty heavy, you know? It's been 100 years, and that's because he was speaking for America's heart. I mean, just say to yourself again, "I defy the jails of the world to hold me." That's about as heavy as you can lay on somebody, huh?

More Articles

View All
Unboxing my new $20,000 watch
What’s up guys? It’s Graham here. So yes, the title you read is correct. I just went and spent twenty thousand dollars to go and buy a watch. I realize that goes against pretty much everything I talk about here on the channel—saving as much money as you c…
12 MORE Amazing Free Games! -- DONG!
Hello Vsauce. Michael here, and I’ve got a dozen DONGs for you today. These are things you can do online now, guys. In the “I of It,” you play not as a super action hero, but rather as the actual letter ‘I.’ You elongate and shrink yourself to grab onto …
Profit maximization worked example Free Response Question | Microeconomics | Khan Academy
We’re told corn is used as food and as an input in the production of ethanol and alternative fuel. Assume corn is produced in a perfectly competitive market. Draw correctly labeled side-by-side graphs for the corn market and a representative corn farmer o…
The water cycle | Ecology | Khan Academy
Let’s talk a little bit about the water cycle, which we’re all familiar with. In fact, we’re all part of the water cycle every moment of our lives. We might not fully appreciate it, so let’s just jump into the cycle. I’ll start with evaporation. So, we c…
Understanding hourly vs salary pay conversion | Employment | Financial Literacy | Khan Academy
Let’s say that you just got two job offers, and these jobs are pretty identical to each other except for how they gave you the offer. So, the first job, they tell you that it is $30 an hour, and they’re going to expect you to be there 40 hours per week. T…
Will Mars Be a World Without Laws? | MARS
Law works because it’s effectively backed up by a state, and that kind of breaks down in space a little bit. The whole legality of who owns what is going to fill volumes. There are international treaties that relate to space. The UN Outer Space Treaty 196…