Libri GmbH The Cardiff Giant Hoax: A Beginner's Guide to America's Most Notorious Petrified Man and the Ten-Foot Fake That Fooled a Nation

In 1869, a New York farmer struck something with a shovel that would draw thousands of paying visitors to his backyard -- and it was never what anyone thought it was.On October 16, 1869, well diggers on William Newell's farm outside Cardiff, New York, uncovered a ten-foot stone giant, lying on its back as though it had died mid-motion. Within days, newspapers were calling it a fossilized man from an older, mightier age of the earth. Within weeks, thousands of visitors a week were paying fifty cents apiece for a fifteen-minute look, and the sleepy hamlet of Cardiff had become a national sensation.It was, from the very beginning, an elaborate fake -- carved from a block of Iowa gypsum by Chicago stonecutters working behind hung quilts, aged with sand, steel needles, and acid, and buried on a cousin's farm for nearly a year before anyone ever picked up a shovel. The man behind it, a Binghamton tobacconist named George Hull, had built the whole scheme to win an argument about the Bible -- and then watched it spiral into one of the strangest business sagas in American history, complete with a rival fake giant from P.T. Barnum himself and a lawsuit so absurd the court couldn't even rule on it.The Cardiff Giant Hoax tells the whole story: how the giant was built and buried, the scientists who called it a "most decided humbug" within weeks, the tent-city economy that grew up around a hole in a farmer's field, Barnum's audacious plaster knockoff and the "sucker born every minute" line he never actually said, George Hull's eventual confession and his failed second attempt at the same trick in Colorado, and the giant's long, quiet afterlife -- from a rich man's coffee table to its permanent home at the Farmers Museum in Cooperstown, New York, where it still lies on its back today.Written in the same clear, fully sourced style as this author's account of the Piltdown Man forgery, The Cardiff Giant Hoax is for readers who love a true story of American showmanship and audacious deception, and for anyone who has ever wondered just how far a good story can travel before anyone stops to ask if it's true.