Harry Houdini a boarding house on East 79th Street. He was joined by the rest of the family once Rabbi Weiss found permanent housing. As a child, Ehrich Weiss took several jobs, making his public début as a 9-year-old trapeze artist, calling himself "Ehrich, the Prince of the Air". He was also a champion cross country runner in his youth. When Weiss became a professional magician he began calling himself "Harry Houdini", after the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, after reading Robert-Houdin's autobiography in 1890. Weiss incorrectly believed that an "i" at the end of a name meant "like" in French. In
Louis R. Ehrich Sporburg Ehrich. He attended Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven, CT before graduating from Yale University in 1869. He went on to study at the University of Berlin, and divided his time between New York and Europe for much of the 1870s and 1880s, studying the Renaissance and Baroque paintings that would become his livelihood. After graduating from Yale, Ehrich helped his brother William run the Ehrich Brothers Dry Goods Store (est. 1857). Telling the New York Tribune that the stress of retail had left William with a "shattered constitution," Louis resigned from his own position in 1886. His health