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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History class, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V Wilson.

So Tracy the name Robert Udan came up on the show recently. It was on our classic episode that we ran about Harry Houdini.

Yep, because he's sometimes just called Udan that's wrong and we'll talk about it in a minute, but because he was the magician that Houdini named himself after and then debunked that's kind of part of why he showed up in that episode, but also that's part of the lore of kind of magic culture.

As a note though here, Robert Udan is his last name both words together. His first name was not Robert. Robert had been his last name at birth, but then he hyphenated when he got married and we're going to talk about all of that and a lot more so much more that this became a two-parter.

And that's even pairing down an awful lot of his story because there's a lot written about him. This is interesting because Robert Udan's story is actually kind of tricky to pin down.

He wrote an autobiography his memoirs, which is probably ghost written confidence, don't propose the digital in the late 1860s after he retired from his stage career.

But that was definitely a book that was written to be more of an entertainment than an accurate history and some parts of it are probably entirely fabricated. We'll talk about some of those.

Almost 40 years after that, Houdini wrote a book called The Unmasking of Robert Udan in which he goes point by point through his once heroes book to show what was not factual. He also is basically saying, hey, this guy didn't invent all the stuff he claimed he invented.

We'll talk about some of those in specifics. However, Houdini's work in The Unmasking doesn't really dissect the early part of Robert Udan's life. Houdini wrote of it quote, because of his supreme egotism, his obvious desire to make his autobiography picture ask and interesting rather than historically correct.

And his utter indifference to dates, exact names of places, theaters, books, etc. It is extremely hard to present logical and consistent statements regarding his life.

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