Cardiff Giant

 

 

The "discovered" Cardiff Giant

 

October 16, 1869: A ten-foot, four-and-one-half inch tall petrified man is found on the farm of William C. “Stub” Newell in Cardiff, New York. George Hull, an avowed atheist, got into an argument with a fundamentalist preacher named Mr. Turk. The preacher claimed that giants once lived on earth because it said so in Genesis, a book of the Bible. Hull began to scheme.

Hull hired men to carve an 11 foot slab of gypsum from Fort Dodge, Iowa. His ostensible purpose was to carve a memorial to Abraham Lincoln in New York. He had the stone shipped as far as Chicago, Illinois where a German stonecutter carved it into a sculpture of a huge man and was then sworn to secrecy. Knitting needles were embedded into boards and beat against the surface of the statue in order to achieve the appearance of skin with pores. Stains and acids were employed to make the statue look ancient.

The statue was transported to New York where it was buried on Newell’s farm. Newell was Hull’s cousin. So far the statue had cost Hull $2,600. The statue was left buried for a year. Then Newell asked for workers to dig a well and they amazingly discovered this huge, petrified man. A tent was set up and people were charged twenty-five cents to view the fantastic discovery. Within a few days, the price doubled to fifty cents.

Scholars immediately declared the petrified giant to be a fake, however fundamentalist Christian preachers were highly vocal in their support of the giant’s veracity. Hull sold his interest in the Cardiff Giant for $37,500. P.T. Barnum tried to buy and then rent the Giant for $60,000. When that failed, he created a copy of the fake giant and sold admission to the “real” giant, claiming that the original fake was the copy while his copy was the original. David Hannum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute” in reference to the people paying to see Barnum’s statue.

“I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!”. – one of the well diggers, upon discovering the Cardiff Giant

“There are no fools so troublesome as those that have wit.” – Benjamin Franklin

“A fool and his money are soon parted.” – James Howell

“A fool and his money are soon spotted.” – Kin Hubbard

“It is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money.” – “Canada Bill” Jones

Also on this day, in 1843 William R. Hamilton defined quaternions, a tricky math thing needed by all of us today.