The most famous hoaxes in history
All people are divided, perhaps, into two groups. Some love a variety of scandals and sensations, while others make money on this human weakness. It is for this reason that in most cases the most incredible hoaxes appear. In our review, we will talk about some of them.
1. Fairies from Cottingley
The deception was revealed after 50 years.
In 1917, two girls cousins named Elsie and Francis took a photo in their garden of the fairies dancing around one of the girls. A little later, a second photo appeared, in which a gnome was playing with another girl. Elsie's mother showed the photographs to several experts who recognized them as genuine. In 1920, these photos were seen by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and a famous lover of everything paranormal. At his request, the girls took three more photographs with fairies. These five photographs became known as The Fairies of Cottingley.
Thanks mainly to Arthur Conan Doyle, photographs have spread all over England and have become extremely popular with people who believe in the paranormal. They considered the photo to be irrefutable proof of the existence of fairies. Of course, it was all a hoax and the fairies were nothing more than cardboard clippings from a children's book. But the deception was revealed only after 50 years.
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2. Redheffer's perpetual motion machine
A perpetual motion machine is a common scam.
There is a very fine line between deception and scam. As a rule, a scam is a situation in which people intend to make a profit, and the deception can be done just for fun and laughter. Therefore, the perpetual motion machine of Charles Redhoeffer should be viewed more as a scam.
The laws of thermodynamics forbid the existence of perpetual motion machines, but at the beginning of the 19th century, almost no one knew about this. Therefore, when a man came to Philadelphia in 1812 and claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine, it became a sensation. Not only did Redheffer charge people to showcase his device, he applied for a city budget to build a larger version of his car. Before the allocation of funds, a special commission arrived to check the performance of the machine. Despite all the efforts of Redheffer, who tried to hide the mechanism of his "perpetual motion machine", it was revealed that the device was powered by a second machine.
After Redheffer's hoax was discovered, the “inventor” fled to New York, where he started from scratch again. This time Redheffer did a different thing: his "perpetual motion machine" was set in motion by means of a system of levers and pulleys, which was controlled by an old man hidden in the attic above the room where the "perpetual motion machine" was displayed.
3. Giant potatoes
Maggie Murphy's potato weighing 39.3 kg.
In 1894, the first ever fake viral photos in history appeared. As you can see in the photo, a farmer named Swan Loveland from Colorado proudly displays his 39.3 kg "Maggie Murphy" potato.
It's easy to guess that this potato is a fake. It was the brainchild of a local newspaper editor who wanted to advertise Loveland's farm. The farmer denied for a long time that this was all just a publicity stunt, but in the end he got tired of all the explanations and simply stated that the potato had been stolen.
4. Disumbrationism
Fictitious art movement.
Disumbrationism is a fictitious art movement invented in the early 20th century by the writer Paul Jordan-Smith.
Smith resented some art critics who criticized his wife's realistic still lifes and admired contemporary art. In order to show their pretentious snobbery, in 1924, under the pseudonym Pavel Zherdanovich, Smith announced the founding of a new school of art, which he called disumbrationism. Smith, who had never painted anything before, made a very rough picture of a savage holding a banana. He gave the picture a pompous title "Delight" and came up with an unusual description (the picture was allegedly "the destruction of the shackles of femininity"). As expected, critics were enthusiastic about the picture.
After several similar experiments (which invariably received top marks from critics), the fictitious artist Zherdanovich began to be compared to Cézanne. In 1927, Smith exposed his deception in the Los Angeles Times, shaming all critics.
5. Baths in the USA
75th anniversary of the introduction of the bath in the United States.
Henry Mencken is a well-known journalist and social critic of the early 20th century who specifically demonstrated how the media can be used to make people believe anything and deceive them. Given how much Mencken has written about this before, people should have been much more wary of his article on the history of the bath in the United States … but everyone believed it.
This article was published in the New York Evening Mail on December 28, 1917, and claimed that December 20 marked the 75th anniversary of the bath's appearance in the United States. Mencken told the "detailed story" of the invention of bathtubs and how they were "reluctantly introduced into the United States, recognizing as harmful to health." He also argued that bathtubs in fact appeared in the United States thanks to President Millard Fillmore, who first installed this invention in the White House in 1851.
The story sounded pretty nice, there was only one problem - Mencken invented everything from the first word to the last. But that didn’t stop all the readers from believing him.