In 1904 at the Swansea Empire Theatre in Wales, Dash's attempt with the escape was met with skepticism. I would imagine like most things that Houdini did, the audience totally bought it. I don't see any records that say Houdini's escape was boring or suspect. Hidden from view, Houdini did his escape. My guess is he used the Metamorphosis cabinet to do the escape.

When he added it to the stage show Houdini would be strapped in the straightjacket and then placed inside a curtained cabinet. Both times he was placed in a private room to work his escape hidden from prying eyes. He repeated the escape a few days later at a hospital. The first official straight jacket escape however took place in San Francisco not in front of a theatre audience but instead at a police station. True or not, escaping from a straight jacket was a great idea and one Houdini profited from both financially and through publicity. So perhaps, the story was indeed fictional. Interestingly, in the May 1918 issue of Ladies Home Journal, Houdini says that the asylum was actually in Europe. Harold Wright, a historian in New Brunswick claimed the story was a myth made up by Houdini. In August 2011, John Cox wrote a great article on his blog WildAboutHarry, about an apparent dispute over that story being accurate. The Ken Silverman HOUDINI biography speculates that Houdini may have presented the straight jacket escape in New Brunswick theatres at that time.

He also claimed to have asked a doctor for a jacket and worked on it for a week, no doubt practicing and improving his time. John Asylum in New Brunswick in 1896 and saw an inmate there struggling inside a straight jacket and this struggling gave him an idea for both an escape and the method. The escape from a straight jacket was original with Houdini.

Harry houdini water tank