“There’s a sucker born every minute.” Although it is generally attributed to the great showman P.T. Barnum, the quote actually comes from David Hannum, one of five investors who bought the now-infamous “Cardiff Giant”, acknowledged as one of the most outrageous hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American public. And like so many other growing things, the giant had its roots in Iowa.
In 1868, George Hull, a New York tobacconist, outspoken atheist and enthusiastic reader of Darwin’s theory of evolution, was visiting his sister in Iowa when he encountered the Reverend Turk, a traveling preacher. At the revival meeting, Hull argued that the Bible should not be taken literally and the Reverend countered that it absolutely should. Hull scoffed at the passage in Genesis that stated giants once lived on Earth but Turk insisted that if the Bible says there were giants, then it had to be so.
Mr. Hull was determined to prove his point. He traveled to Fort Dodge and paid for a five-ton block of gypsum with a barrel of beer, saying the stone would be used for a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln. He then shipped the gypsum to Chicago to Edward Burghardt, a German stone mason. Swearing him to secrecy, Hull instructed Burghardt to carve a figure of a man, taking care to make it look ancient, using acids and beating the soft stone with knitting needles to simulate pores in its “skin”.
When the giant was finished, it was 10 feet, 4 ½ inches long and weighed 2,990 pounds. Hull had his creation shipped to Cardiff, New York to the farm of his cousin, William Newell where it was buried in the dark of night and left for a year.
Under the pretense of digging a well, the giant was “discovered” and soon Newell had the site covered with a tent and was charging the hundreds of visitors 50 cents each to get a look at the “petrified man”.
As an exhibit, the Cardiff Giant made a fortune. When its investors refused P.T. Barnum’s offer of $50,000, he hired someone to secretly make a wax cast of the thing and made his own, claiming he had the original and Hull’s giant was the fake. The truth is, the Cardiff Giant was a pretty crude and unconvincing piece of work. Andrew White, the first president of Cornell University said it “was undoubtedly a hoax.” Yale paleontologist Othniel Marsh said it was “a most decided humbug.” Finally, on Dec. 10, 1869, Hull confessed, having proved his point, undoubtedly laughing all the way to the bank.
Hull’s giant was eventually purchased by Iowa publisher Gardner Cowles Jr. who used it as a coffee table, before finally selling it to the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York.
And just to show that suckers are still being born, last month, a picture went viral, purporting to be from 1901, depicting a bearded giant towering over a parade of normal men. The caption read, “The Last Neanderthal giant”. A Russian-language channel noted, “A lot of people seem to believe that there were once giants on Earth.” The “photo” of the giant was, of course, a hoax, created with Midjourney, an artificial intelligence program.
Never mind that Neanderthals were muscular but averaged only five feet, six inches tall and that they disappeared 50,000 years ago. Well, not technically. It seems that the “giants” had interbred with homo sapiens so that today, modern humans have about 2.5 % Neanderthal genes. So, maybe Hull was wrong after all and giants do still walk the Earth.