HOUDINI'S SECRET CODES

Our friend John Cox has a fascinating piece on his Wild About Harry site commemorating the 100th anniversary of the message seen in the photo. As John notes, it was inscribed in a thesaurus and passed on as a secret code between Harry and his friend William Hilliar, magic editor of Billboard, the show business weekly.

Houdini distributed more than a dozen such codes to friends and family, telling each that if indeed it were possible to communicate from the world beyond he would use their personal code to verify that any spirit message was really from him. Each code was different, as far as we know. 

There is some speculation on John's blog that perhaps "Semper Idem" was not really the code phrase, but that the thesaurus itself contained another code. Indeed, Harry was fond of using "Semper Idem" in many of his letters, probably to show off that even with his fourth-grade schooling he was no slouch at Latin.

In any case, Harry was a great aficionado of codes and ciphers. He writes that he was once stranded for five long hours in a telegraph office in Chetopa, Kansas, waiting for money to be wired. He chanced to see the following message pass into the operator's hands. 

"XNTQLZCXHM FOKDZRDQDS TQMZRJGDO SNSN QFHUDE ZSGDQ."

"If you're a real magician, you can tell me what that means," the telegrapher said. 

Houdini writes:

"I managed, after some worry, to solve the message and very few things in after life gave me as much pleasure as did the unraveling of that code."