After many years of success with other entertaining hoaxes, in the fall of 1869 the “Prince of Humbugs” [Barunum] discovered someone competing for his crown. His name was George Hull, and the fraud he perpetrated rivaled any Barnum had ever produced. Hull buried a huge figure of a man carved out of gypsum on his cousin’s farm in upstate New York. He was inspired, he said, by an argument he had with an evangelical preacher who maintained that giant men once roamed the earth because the Bible said they did. The statue was a sensation when Hull arranged for its “discovery” a year after its burial. Huge crowds came to see the “Cardiff Giant,” as it was called, and paid handsomely for the privilege. “As one looked upon it he could not help feeling that he was in the presence of a great and superior being,” wrote one reporter. “The crowd as they gathered around it seemed almost spellbound. There was no levity.” But there was controversy. Some said the figure was a fossilized human thousands of years old. Others claimed that it was an ancient statue. Then there were those who dismissed it as a total fraud.
Word of the discovery quickly reached Barnum, who was always on the lookout for curiosities that generated cash. He knew the Cardiff giant was a winner, and offered a generous sum to buy it. (Hull had by then sold the giant to new owners.) He was rebuffed, but not deterred. Instead of walking away from such a potential bonanza, Barnum simply had another statue carved and called it the real Cardiff Giant. He displayed it at Wood’s Museum in New York at the same time the original was in town, and often outdrew his competitors. They filed for an injunction, but a circuit court judge refused to stop Barnum from essentially out-hoaxing his rivals. When one of the investors in the original fraud observed the lines of people waiting to see Barnum’s copy, he reportedly remarked, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Ironically enough, Barnum stole credit for that memorable line, too.
Source:
Farquhar, Michael. “Super-Dupers.” A Treasury of Deception: Liars, Misleaders, Hoodwinkers, and the Extraordinary True Stories of History's Greatest Hoaxes, Fakes and Frauds. Penguin, 2005. 9, 10. Print.
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