Artistic License History / Houdini & Doyle

• The series opens in 1901, with Adelaide as a constable in the Metropolitan Police Service (Scotland Yard), and she is identified several times as Scotland Yard's first female constable. Women officers were not admitted to the MPS until 1919. Also Doyle and Houdini never solved crimes together of course. In fact, they didn't even meet until 1920.
• The real Houdini didn't debut his signature "Chinese Water Torture Cell" feat until 1913.
• Thomas Edison actually did try to invent a machine for communicating with the dead, but it was in the late 1920s shortly before he died.
• Houdini's mother, Cecilia Steiner Weiss, actually died in 1913, not 1901. It also happened in New York, not London.
• Instead of being shot by Leon Czolgosc, US President William McKinley is almost killed by another anarchist whom Doyle manages to stop at the last moment though he's shot himself in the process. Perhaps the show has gone into full-blown Alternate History now, since it's at the same location and time the real McKinley was shot.
• Houdini is portrayed as not believing in God or an afterlife. The real man stated he was a religious Jew, with his skepticism being toward the alleged scientific proof of an afterlife. He believed in it on faith nonetheless.
• Charles Doyle was institutionalized, but not in Bedlam. Furthermore, the series suggests that he hated his son's writing career; in real life, he drew illustrations for the first edition of A Study in Scarlet.

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