On 29th April 1913, Christopher Clayton Hutton, who earned his pay manufacturing boxes, wrote a letter to Harry Houdini, who earned his own by getting out of them.
Clayton Hutton was 20 at the time, a self-confident, ingenious, and perhaps rather eccentric young man working at his uncle’s lumber yard in Saltley in the West Midlands. He loved games and showmanship and magic, but he was also somewhat sceptical by nature – possessed of an engineering mentality that sought to understand how things worked and to separate the possible from the impossible. He’d seen Houdini perform an escape act in Birmingham several years previously, and he was struck that the packing crate the magician triumphantly broke free of at the climax of the evening had been in his possession for two whole days before the show. Clayton Hutton’s letter was a challenge. Would Houdini attempt an escape from one of the lumber yard’s packing crates the next time he was in town – a crate that would be constructed live on stage, by Clayton Hutton’s colleagues, in the middle of the performance?
Houdini received this sort of letter every day, but Clayton Hutton’s was different. was different. By accepting his challenge – by promising Clayton Hutton the considerable sum of £100 if the packing case in question defeated him – Houdini set in motion a strange chain of events that would, in a wonderfully mad and circuitous manner, impact the course of a vast global conflict that was at the time still 26 years away.
And Houdini did accept the challenge – but with one condition. He would visit the lumber yard before the show to meet the carpenter charged with the case’s construction. Clayton Hutton was still an innocent, but he was hardly an idiot, and as the magician emerged from his hansom cab outside the facilities, wearing a fur-lined coat and gaudy carpet slippers, the 20-year-old dimly suspected some kind of mischief.
He was right to: the following morning revealed that Houdini, with one eye on the till, had come back at night to paste a showbill advertising the big event on a wall outside the factory. This was the beginning rather than the end of his wiliness, however. He had also bribed Clayton Hutton’s carpenter £3 to fit the crate’s nails in such a way that a crucial panel could be popped out from the inside with little in the way of a struggle.