Many watched the film Forrest Gump, which tells the life story of a mentally disabled but lucky guy who managed to become a successful businessman. It turns out that he had a real prototype - Timothy Dexter.
This eccentric businessman may not have been as charming and harmless as Forrest Gump, but he was just as foolish, naive and trusting. The most ridiculous and seemingly 100% doomed enterprises brought him substantial profits. No wonder he was called "America's luckiest fool."
He was born on January 22, 1748 in Malden, Massachusetts, a few miles from Boston, in a family of farmers Nathan and Esther Dexter. He grew up, like all farm children, enjoying all the delights of rural freedom. Timothy did not go to school, and remained an uneducated redneck. From the age of eight he already helped his father on the farm.
Then his parents decided to make a man out of him and sent him to Charleston as an apprentice to a leatherworking master. And although this profession was considered profitable, a year later Timothy got tired of taking cuffs from a strict teacher, and he fled to Boston. And since his pockets were empty, Timothy made his first deal - he sold a single suit to a wandering merchant for $ 8.20.
The proceeds did not last long. I had to deal with odd jobs: he loaded coal, traded in some kind of junk. Six years passed like this.
In 1769 a decently dressed and handsome fellow, alas, penniless, arrived in Newburyport. And here fate smiled at him for the first time. Timothy managed to fool the wealthy widow of glassmaker Benjamin Frotingham, Mrs. Elizabeth Frotingham. The 32-year-old woman had four children, but this misalliance did not bother the 22-year-old adventurer.
Timothy Dexter
Even before the wedding, he squeezed out a certain amount from the widow, enough to buy a land plot in the very center of the city. His new neighbors were successful businessmen who belonged to the cream of American society. Naturally, they point-blank did not notice the village upstart, who married of convenience.
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Dexter imagined that he could win the favor of these guys if he got a solid position in the civil service. Bombarding the city authorities with dozens of letters, he got so tired of everyone that a new position was invented for him - a deer controller. Timothy had to observe the deer population living in the surrounding forests. But since the last deer had been seen there 19 years earlier, Dexter's position was pure sinecure.
In his new position, Timothy famously began to multiply his wife's fortune. But he did it in rather strange ways.
In 1775, before the outbreak of the War of Independence, the Second Continental Congress, representing the interests of 13 states, issued the first American currency, the continental dollar. In essence, these were paper bonds for small amounts. By the end of the war, the continental dollar had completely depreciated: in 1779, its value was 1/25 of its original value.
Nobody but Dexter wanted to deal with these pieces of paper. Not understanding complicated financial matters, but only pursuing cheapness, he bought up continental dollars in bundles, and for hard currency - silver and gold coins, spending all his wife's savings on this.
50 continental dollars
Businessmen made fun of the simpleton, twisted their fingers to their temples. Timothy's actions looked as if in our time someone decided to buy Zimbabwean dollars, hoping to get rich on this scam.
But fools, as you know, are lucky. After the end of the war, the value of the continental dollar rose astronomically, and Dexter increased his fortune, invested in these "pieces of paper," 15 times. The most interesting thing is that besides him, no one in the country won a cent on them. However, Dexter was also lucky with stocks. He bought the cheapest ones - and soon, for no reason at all, they began to rise in price.
The wealthy Dexter built a splendid castle overlooking the sea and bought several merchant ships. But good relations with neighbors did not work out in any way: his bad manners, bad character and inability to keep his mouth shut.
Wanting to survive the impudent upstart from the city, and at the same time mock the rustic eccentric, local merchants vied with each other began to give him "harmful" advice, which Timothy took at face value.
One of the "well-wishers" advised Dexter to sell heating pads (as in those days were called wide copper pots with long handles used to warm the bed), as well as mittens in the West Indies. Unaware that this overseas territory is famous for its hot climate, Timothy bought 42,000 heating pads, the same number of pairs of mittens, loaded it all on nine ships and set sail, accompanied by the ridicule of his advisers.
Timothy Dexter's house
Upon reaching the West Indies, Dexter was surprised to learn that his product was absolutely not in demand here. For the time being. And then sugar plantation owners discovered that these heating pads could easily be converted into molasses buckets. The product went with a bang. Having sold all the buckets at a 79 percent mark-up, Dexter returned home with the firm belief that trading was his calling.
There was also a buyer for the mittens. By a lucky coincidence, Russian merchant ships came to the shores of the West Indies at this time. Finding a commodity so much needed in the harsh northern climate, sold at a reasonable price, Russian merchants bought up the entire batch of mittens. And Timothy was again profitable.
Another time, someone whispered to him that in India, colonized by the British at that time, Bibles were in great demand (in fact, they were needed there like a cow's saddle). And what? A few days after the cargo arrived in India, Christian preachers appeared on the ship, who were just unfolding missionary work among the natives, and they were sorely lacking Bibles. They took the entire shipment of books, and Timothy made a 300 percent profit.
The ill-wishers still could not calm down. Wanting to finally ruin this lucky fool, they advised him to send a huge shipment of coal to Newcastle. Timothy had no idea that this English city is the largest center for coal mining. Actually, the expression selling coal to Newcastle in English is an idiom meaning something like “to sell a refrigerator to the Chukchee”.
But when his ship arrived in the coal city, it turned out that all the local miners went on a long strike, demanding better working conditions. And it turned out that there is no coal either in Newcastle or in other English cities. Dexter sold his wares for a huge profit, becoming twice as rich.
Timothy had a very high opinion of himself. He said so: "I was born to become great." In support of his words, Dexter once undertook to write a book that "could compete with the works of Shakespeare and Milton." He called his memoirs "Nonsense for wise men, or the Pure truth in a rough dress."
The book had 8,847 words and 33,864 letters - and not a single punctuation mark. From start to finish, it was one long and incoherent sentence with a horrifying amount of spelling mistakes. In this landmark work, Dexter spoke not only about himself and his wife, but also about great politicians and philosophers.
By modern standards, the book looks like a normal medium-sized story, but Timothy has published it in a separate illustrated volume. Thousands of copies, shipped to different cities, sold out with a bang. Encouraged by the success, Dexter released the second edition, in which an additional 13 pages appeared with periods, commas, exclamation points. That is, just with punctuation marks, without words. The reader was asked to arrange them in the main text to his liking.
In total, the book went through eight reprints, for which famous book publishers fought - so well sold out the memoirs of an eccentric rich man.
Dexter really wanted to understand how others really treated him. Therefore, in 1803, he faked his own death. He built a mausoleum on his estate, hired the best cabinetmaker in all of Massachusetts to build a coffin for him. The finished product was so comfortable that Dexter slept in it instead of a bed for several weeks. Then he announced his own death.
Three thousand people attended the fake funeral, with which the "newly departed" was very pleased. And in the midst of the commemoration, a smiling "dead man" appeared in front of the stunned guests and noisily joined in the celebration of his "resurrection".
Dexter truly died in 1806. But he was not buried in a mausoleum, but in a modest cemetery in Newburyport. On the rickety gravestone, you can still read words of gratitude for the good deeds to which this Forrest Gump of the 18th century was generous in the last years of his life.
