| Billing himself as "The White Mahatma"and changing his name to Samri, Baldwin created the mentalism act in which unspoken audience questions are answered by the mystic performer (commonly called a "question and answer" act). Of course, this routine was already in use in private seance rooms by spiritualists, but Baldwin is the one who first built the routine into a stage act. To achieve this, he invented the wax impression method of transferring messages to a clipboard, a method still used by mentalists today. He coined the phrase "somnomency" or trance-talking, to describe his act, which he called "Rosicrucian Somnomency". Though Baldwin was careful to declare himself a magician and not a medium, he was nonetheless regarded by many in his audiences as a psychic.
His professional career began as an imitator of the famous Davenport Brothers, with an exposure-type demonstration of spiritism and the Spirit Cabinet, but soon evolved into a two-person mentalism act featuring his first wife Clara Baldwin , then later his second wife, Kitty Baldwin. The act had a number of very successful world tours.
Most of the time, the Baldwins' act was promoted as a vigorous exposé of the methods used by the popular fraudulent mediums of the day. However, there were times that the women (especially Kitty) were performing more as mediums themselves.
For some reason, Baldwin decided to abandon show business in 1899 and go into the mercantile business. It was a bad decision; by 1904, he was financially forced to resurrect the mentalism act, and in 1906 Kitty divorced him. The divorce proved to be the downfall of the act. By 1920, Baldwin was working as a technical consultant on the Thurston show. Interestingly, he also did "personal readings" at this time, answering questions from the "spirit world" in exchange for a modest contribution from an interested sitter. Apparently, he taught his daughter, Shadow, the "tricks of the trade" as well.
At the end of his life, Baldwin actually began to believe in Spiritualism as a religion, and joined the San Francisco Spiritualist Church shortly before he died.
Financially, Samri Baldwin was a poor investor. By the time of his death, any money he had earned was long gone. His daughter, Shadow, used some of his stage tricks in her occupation as a professional psychic, but her career was greatly damaged by Harry Houdini's exposure of spirit mediums in the 1920s.
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