5 Famous People from History Who Pulled Off Devious Cons
We have a game for you today. We’re going to tell you a series of hoaxes and cons from history, and we’ll pause for a second in the middle of each so you can try to guess which historical figure was responsible.
Some of these will be easier than others. If we tell you this is about someone who was a politician during the Civil War, there are only so many famous names we could be referring to. Still, we’re confident a couple of them will take you by surprise.
The Balloon That (Didn’t) Cross the Atlantic
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The Hoax: You might have heard that the first person to fly across the Atlantic Ocean was Charles Lindbergh in 1927. That’s not true. His was the first solo crossing, while the first nonstop crossing happened in 1919, when an airship carried 31 people across. In 1844, long before either of those, readers of New York’s The Sun were surprised to learn that a balloonist named Thomas Monck Mason had traveled from England to South Carolina by hot air balloon.
The Sun wasn’t a tabloid that invented stories every day, and editors printed this one while believing it was true. Two days later, they issued a retraction. After initially reporting the story, they had reached out to South Carolina for confirmation and had failed to get it. Their correspondent had described the event “with a minuteness and scientific ability calculated to obtain credit everywhere,” and The Sun continued to believe such a balloon flight might be possible, but they conceded now that this exact event hadn’t occurred.
The Culprit: The correspondent who wrote that report for the Sun was Edgar Allan Poe. He had been the editor of several literary magazines, so though he wasn’t a reporter, he sounded like someone who knew how to write. He’d written the hoax “knowing the extravagant gullibility of the age,” he said, and he wrote it to mock people’s obsession with progress.
In the story, he described the flight as “unquestionably the most stupendous, the most interesting and the most important undertaking ever accomplished or even attempted by man.” But when he talked sincerely, he’d tell people, “Man is now only more active, not wiser, nor more happy, than he was 6,000 years ago.”
We’re not going to say he’s right about that, but we do admit that people remain very gullible on the subject of objects that fly in the sky.
The Quack Doctor Slinging Nitrous
The Hoax: In 1832, there arrived in Cincinnati a man calling himself “The Celebrated Dr. Coult of New York, London and Calcutta.” He was demoing a new discovery called laughing gas, which you might know better as nitrous oxide. He started by hosting lectures to talk about the anesthetic, but when that didn’t entertain people, he kicked it up a notch. He carved a bunch of sculptures from wax of demons and mummies, and at the end of the exhibition, he set off fireworks.
Now, this was something people could believe in. People now trusted Dr. Coult so much that they enlisted him to use his gas to cure a plague of cholera that struck passengers aboard a riverboat. Laughing gas has no power to treat bacterial infections, but Dr. Coult was happy to cater to this demand.
via Wiki Commons
The Culprit: We actually already told you the name of this quack doctor, though he spelled it a little differently here. It was Colt, Samuel Colt, inventor of the classic single-action revolver. He’d built his first gun out of wood when he was just a kid, and he’d wanted to go into gunsmithing as a career, but one early gun exploded into bits, so his father refused to finance his endeavors.
His laughing gas tour proved a great alternate source of funds for his dream. And if his guns now misfired and blew the wrong body parts off anyone, he had the perfect way to ease anyone’s pain.
The Flirtation with the German King
The Hoax: Ludwig II of Bavaria became king at 18. Like many youngsters that age, he had a crush on a musician, and since he was king, he was able to reach out to the object of his affections. Wonderfully enough, it turned out that the musician liked him, too.
Strangely, this romance never quite progressed to the physical stage. In fact, the musician now fathered a child out of wedlock, casting doubt on whether he liked men at all. But Ludwig let himself believe that this was all going somewhere. He used royal money to pay off the guy’s massive debts, and he continued as his patron, staging several large operas.
The Culprit: The idol in question was composer Richard Wagner, who was 32 years older than Ludwig. Conveniently, he may well be the only German composer you’ve heard of. It was thanks to the fake seduction of Ludwig that the world ever got to see The Ring, which includes the famous “Ride of the Valkyries”:
Wagner gained plenty from pretending to reciprocate Ludwig's feelings. Ludwig didn’t gain so much. Thanks to his extravagances (which included the operas as well as various other expenses), a group of conspirators ended up declaring him insane. They removed him from the throne, and he was found dead in a lake shortly thereafter.
The Thousand-Year-Old Relic
The Hoax: Here’s someone else who received a leadership title at a young age: Raffaele Riario became cardinal in 1477, when he was just 16. It would be another three years before he even was officially a priest, because when he became cardinal, he was still a student.
In 1496, now a few decades into the job, Riario bought a sculpture of the sleeping god Cupid. He bought this, not because it was related to his own religion but because it was a valuable historical artifact. It appeared to be at least a thousand years old. Then he discovered it wasn’t old at all. It had been carved that very year by some 21-year-old. Now he was stuck with a statue of a fat baby that wasn’t worth much of anything.
The Culprit: The statue had been carved by Michelangelo, an artist who was at the time totally unknown. Riario now demanded his money back, and Michelangelo said that this would mean Riario should also return the statue, of course. “Hold on now,” said Riario, “let’s not be hasty,” because the sculpture may have been practically worthless, but it was still impressive.
Riario offered a counter-suggestion: Michelangelo would now carve him another sculpture inspired by Greek mythology. Michelangelo went through with it, sculpting Bacchus:
via Wiki Commons
Riario now refused to accept this, because it was too sexy.
The Professor’s Personals Ad
The Hoax: In the 1920s, at Eton, there was a master named John Crace. A master was someone of some authority (like a headmaster, except he wasn’t the head one), and Crace had a reputation for favoring some boys over others.
Warner Bros.
On April Fools’ Day in 1920, someone placed a personals ad in a college magazine. “A.R.D. — After rooms — Janney,” it read. “Janney” evidently meant John Crace, while “A.R.D.” were the initials of Crace’s current teacher’s pet. The ad was saying that Crace was surreptitiously inviting the boy to his rooms, presumably for a bit of buggery.
The Culprit: That ad had been placed by a student, a young George Orwell. Orwell and his friends regularly made fun of Crace (one composed a song about how Crace looked like a toad and farted a lot), but this went a little further than that. Crace didn’t launch an investigation into who smeared him, only because that would draw unnecessary attention.
When repeating this story, biographers talk about the time Orwell ran a hoax that falsely accused a master of misconduct. Though, we should mention that the original accounts don’t say outright that the accusation was false. One refers to Crace being “overfond” of some boys, which could be a euphemism for the very thing the fake ad suggested.
See, this is why we should strive for clarity. If only there were a word for when someone uses vague language to mislead us.
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