Question: How did "Master Mystifier" Harry Houdini manage to stay in an airtight coffin for an hour and a half?
Answer: Very scientifically! Earlier in 1926, 26-year-old Rahman Bey had stayed encoffined in a swimming pool for 60 minutes, says Massimo Polidoro in "Secrets of the Psychics: Investigating Paranormal Claims." What galled Houdini was Bey's claim of doing this while in a "cataleptic trance."
No trance was needed and he'd prove it, said physically conditioned debunker Houdini, whose self-designed casket held 26,428 cubic inches of air, minus the space taken by his body and a telephone. After a light breakfast, he stripped to shirt and trunks and entered the coffin, which was then lowered into the pool. "It took about 700 pounds of iron and eight swimmers standing on top of the casket to keep it level and beneath the waterline," says Polidoro.
Houdini lay motionless, breathing shallow breaths to conserve oxygen. Even just talking left him gasping. Soon he was told he'd made it to an hour. He wanted more. He pressed his soaked hanky to his lips. At 1-hour-28 he started seeing yellow lights. He moved onto the broad of his back to take weight off his lungs, then lay sideways, ear on the phone receiver to avoid having to hold it.
At 1-hour-30, prearranged in case he might fall asleep, he was brought up and felt physical elation. His pulse had gone from 84 at entry to 142. An aide said he looked "deathly white," and opined that Houdini had shortened his life by this "endurance burial." One thing was sure, says Polidoro: "He had beaten the faker Bey at his own game!"
Question: Schoolkids today know mathematical pi as 3.14, possibly 3.14159 …, while computers have calculated pi to several billion decimal places. Going back 2,500 years to the Old Testament, did the ancients have an estimate for pi?
Answer: From 1 Kings 7:23 — "Also he made a molten sea of ten cubits from brim to brim, round in compass . . . and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about" — so pi was 3, says David Acheson in "1089 and All That: A Journey into Mathematics."
The earliest known estimate appears in the Rhind Papyrus, c. 1650 B.C.E., at 3.16 #8230;, but the crude 3 was used throughout much of the ancient world. Fascinatingly, pi is an "irrational number," not expressible as a ratio of two whole numbers, and so its decimal expansion goes on forever.
Finally a mnemonic riddle, with a piece of pi as prize: "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics!" Now can you remember pi to 14 places?
Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at strangetrue@compuserve.com