The Day Harry Houdini Flew
Remembering Australia’s centenary of flight
In the swirling fields outside the small farming town of Diggers Rest, Victoria lies an Australian monument to the centenary of flight, the aviator’s name was Harry Houdini.
The first successful aviator in Australia, was not Kingsford-Smith but Hungarian-born American illusionist, Harry Houdini. In 1900, aircraft pioneers and test flights were still in their infancy and flying was still a life and death adventure, which attracted the world famous escape artist to the thrill of flying an aircraft.
Houdini was an aviation enthusiast and had followed the early testing of Orville and Wilbur Wright’s successful Wright Flyer flight at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903.
At 7 o’clock in the morning Friday on March 18, 1910, Harry Houdini made the first powered, controlled, sustained flight of an aircraft in Australia at Plumpton Paddock, Diggers Rest, 33 kilometres north west of Melbourne, becoming only the 25th person in history to fly solo.
Thirty-six year old magician arrived in Melbourne on February 6, 1910, accompanied by his stage wife of sixteen years Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner, better known as Bess. Houdini’s first program on his Australian itinerary tour included sold out performances at the new opera house and Princess Street theatre.
His was part of a long program of songs, dances and comedy act routines. Houdini performed his portmanteau substitution trick, fully tied, escaping from a sack, which was put in a trunk, nailed and sealed. Afterwards, he performed his famous straitjacket escape to enthralled audiences.
On February 16, he changed his itinerary following a reception held by the Mayor of Melbourne, James Burston at Government House. With Burston’s approval, city officials agreed to Houdini’s proposed jump of 30 metres from the top of Queens Bridge into Melbourne’s Yarra River. The day later, Houdini pencil dived into the Yarra River padlocked and chained with a huge crowd of 20,000 onlookers and triumphantly resurfaced holding the chains and smiling in one hand, was awarded keys to the city.
Back at the Hotel Windsor, Harry received news of the arrival of his French made Voisin Biplane to Melbourne. He was instructed on improvements by engineers in a series of test flights at Hamburg-Wandsbeck airfield in Germany, during an 8-minute exercise of 60 feet.
Houdini had purchased the Voisin Biplane for $25,000 Francs from Sanchez Bess and Eduardo Bello and hired a full-time mechanic Antonio Brassac. The Voisin was equipped with a standard 60 hp engine and was transported and stored in a make-shift hangar on private land adjoining Plumpton Dam.
The Voisin was the first successful powered aircraft designed by aeronautical engineer and manufacturer Gabriel Voisin. Powered by a 60 hp V8 Antoinette engine, it was a pusher configuration two-bay biplane with a wingspan of 10 m (33 ft). A biplane elevator was carried in front of the wings on the end of a short nacelle and a boxkite-like biplane empennage of half the span of the with three vertical surfaces each carrying a trailing-edge rudder was carried on booms behind the wings.
The undercarriage consisted of a pair of wheels on v-struts under the trailing edge of the wings and small wheels mounted at the ends of the lower tail booms. There was no provision for direct lateral or roll control, pioneered by the Wright brothers.
Although some short flights in a Wright modified Kitty Flyer had been made by Colin Defries in December 1909, Houdini’s flights are credited with being the first sustained and controlled flight in Australia recognized by the Aerial League of Australia as the first official flight in Australia.
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