Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader (28 page)

9.
Name the last two states to enter the Union.

10.
Why did the pilgrims come to America?

11.
Name the ship that brought them here.

12.
What is the minimum voting age in the U.S.?

13.
Which president is called the “Father of our Country”?

14.
Who meets in the U.S. Capitol building?

15.
Name the two houses of Congress.

16.
Name the two major political parties in the U.S.

17.
What is the national anthem of the United States?

18.
Who wrote it?

19.
In what month are presidential elections held?

20.
In what month are presidential inaugurations held?

21.
What holiday was celebrated for the first time by American colonists?

22.
Which American invented the electric light bulb?

23.
The Revolutionary War was fought to gain independence from which country?

How’d you do? Answers are on
page 515
; a slightly tougher quiz is on
page 334
.

North America’s first lighthouse: Boston Light (it was lit in 1716).

THE GREAT DIAMOND HOAX OF 1872, PART I

Most stories have the moral at the end. But we’ll put it right up front: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is
.

N
IGHT DEPOSIT

One evening in February 1871, George Roberts, a prominent San Francisco businessman, was working in his office when two men came to his door. One of them, Philip Arnold, had once worked for Roberts; the other was named John Slack. Arnold produced a small leather bag and explained that it contained something very valuable; as soon as the Bank of California opened in the morning, he was going to have them lock it in the vault for safekeeping.

Arnold and Slack made a show of not wanting to reveal what was in the bag, but eventually told Roberts that it contained “rough diamonds” they’d found while prospecting on a mesa somewhere in the West. They wouldn’t say where the mesa was, but they did say it was the richest mineral deposit they’d ever seen in their lives: The site was rich not only in diamonds, but also in sapphires, emeralds, rubies, and other precious stones.

The story sounded too good to be true, but when Arnold dumped the contents of the bag onto Roberts’s desk, out spilled dozens of uncut diamonds and other gems.

PAY DIRT

If somebody were to make such a claim today, they’d probably get laughed out of the room. But things were different in 1871. Only 20 years had passed since the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill in California sparked the greatest gold rush in American history. Since then other huge gold deposits had been discovered in Colorado, as well as in Australia and New Zealand. A giant vein of silver had been found in the famous Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, and diamonds had been discovered in South Africa in 1867—just four years earlier. Gems and precious metals might be anywhere, lying just below the earth’s surface, waiting to be discovered. People who’d missed out on the earlier bonanzas were hungry for word of new discoveries, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 opened up the West and created the expectation that more valuable strikes were just around the corner. When Arnold and Slack rolled into town with their tale of gems on a mesa and a bag of precious stones to back it up, people were ready to believe them.

Combined, American children spend 6.3 billion hours coloring with crayons annually.

OPEN SECRET

The next morning the two men went to the Bank of California and deposited their bag in the bank’s vault. They made another big show of not wanting anyone to know what was in the bag, and again they let some of the bank employees have a peek. Soon everyone in the bank knew what was in it, including the president and founder, William Ralston. He had made a fortune off the Comstock Lode, and had his eye out for the next big find. Ralston didn’t keep the men’s secret, and neither did George Roberts: Soon all of San Francisco, the city built by the Gold Rush of 1849, was buzzing with the tale of the two miners and their discovery.

Arnold and Slack left town for a few weeks, and when they returned, they claimed they’d made another trip to their diamond field. And they had another big bag of gems to prove it. Ralston knew a good thing when he saw it and immediately began lining up the cream of San Francisco’s investment community to buy the mining claim outright. While Arnold played hard to get, Slack agreed to sell his share of the diamond field for $100,000, the equivalent of several million dollars today. Slack received $50,000 up front and was promised another $50,000 when he brought more gems back from the field.

Arnold and Slack left town again, and several weeks later returned with yet another bulging sack of precious stones. Ralston immediately paid Slack the remaining $50,000.

BIG TIME

Ralston didn’t know it, but he was being had. The uncut gems were real enough, but the story of the diamond field was a lie. Arnold and Slack had created a fake mining claim in Colorado by sprinkling, or “salting,” it with diamonds and other gems where miners would be able to find them. It was a common trick designed to make otherwise worthless land appear valuable. What made this deception different was its scale and the caliber of the people who were taken in by it. Ralston was a prominent and successful banker; he and his associates were supposed to be shrewd investors.

Your spine was straight until you learned to walk…then it became S-shaped.

DUE DILIGENCE

To the investors’ credit, they did take some precautions that they thought would protect them from fraud: Before any more money changed hands, they insisted on having a sample of the stones appraised by the most respected jeweler in the United States—none other than New York City’s Charles Tiffany. If the appraisal went well, they planned to send a mining engineer out to the diamond field to verify first, that it existed, and second, that it was as rich as Arnold and Slack claimed. These precautions should have been enough, but through a combination of poor judgment and bad luck, both failed completely.

MAKE NO MISTAKE

In October 1871, Ralston brought a sample of the gems to New York so Tiffany could look them over. Ralston was already hard at work drumming up potential investors on the East Coast, and present at the appraisal were one U.S. Congressman and two former Civil War generals, including George McClellan, who’d run for president against Abraham Lincoln in 1864. Horace Greeley, editor of the
New York Tribune
, was there too.

Tiffany’s expertise was actually in cut and polished diamonds—he knew almost nothing about uncut stones, and neither did his assistant. But he didn’t let anyone else in the room know that. Instead, he made a solemn show of studying the gems carefully through an eyepiece, and then announced to the assembled dignitaries, “Gentlemen, these are beyond question precious stones of enormous value.”

The investors accepted the claim at face value—the appraiser, after all, was
Charles Tiffany
. Two days later, Tiffany’s assistant pegged the value of the sample at $150,000, which, if true (it wasn’t), meant the total value of all of the stones found so far was $1.5 million (in today’s money, $21 million)…or more.

Creepy fact: A spider’s leg has seven sections.

IN THE FIELD

Now that the gems had been verified as authentic, it was time to send an independent expert out to the diamond field to confirm that it was everything Arnold and Slack said it was. As he’d done when he brought the stones to Tiffany, Ralston went with the most qualified expert he could find. He hired a respected mining engineer named Henry Janin to do the job. Janin had inspected more than 600 mines and had never made a mistake. His first goof would prove to be a doozy.

Janin, Arnold, Slack, and three of the investors traveled by train to Wyoming, just over the border from Colorado. Then they made a four-day trek by horseback into the wilderness, crossing back into Colorado. At Arnold and Slack’s insistence, Janin and the investors rode blindfolded to keep them from learning the location of the diamond field.

The men arrived at the mesa on June 4, 1872, and began looking in a location suggested by Arnold. A few minutes was all it took: One of the investors screamed out and held up a raw diamond that he’d discovered digging in some loose dirt. “For more than a hour, diamonds were found in profusion,” one of the investors later wrote, “together with occasional rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Why a few pearls weren’t thrown in for good luck I have never yet been able to tell. Probably it was an oversight.”

SEEING IS BELIEVING

Janin was completely taken in by what he saw. In his report to Ralston, he estimated that a work crew of 20 men could mine $1 million worth of gems a month. He collected a $2,500 fee for his efforts, plus an option to buy 1,000 shares in the planned mining company for $10 a share. He used the $2,500 and somehow came up with another $7,500 to buy all 1,000 shares; then he staked a mining claim on 3,000 acres of surrounding land, just in case it had precious stones too.

One of the secrets of pulling off a scam is knowing when to get out. It was at this point that Arnold and Slack decided to make their exit. Slack had already cashed out for $100,000; Arnold now sold his stake for a reported $550,000, and both men skipped town.

For Part II of the story, turn to
page 410
.

The plane truth: 90% of all airplane collisions take place on the ground.

DIVINE BOVINE

We hope these heifer-vescent cow facts really m-o-o-o-o-ve you
.

• The first American cows arrived with the British in 1611 at the Jamestown colony.

• It takes about 350 “squirts” to make a gallon of milk.

• How can you tell how old a cow is? Count the rings on her horns.

• Cows were first domesticated about 5,000 years ago.

• While many animals only see in black and white, cows see in color (except red).

• Natural lifespan of a cow: about 25 years.

• Cows can clean their noses with their tongues.

• Cows eat about 80 pounds of feed per day. But cow feed is cheap—it only costs about $4.

• Cows navigate by looking at the ground. If one is stuck in a field that’s covered in water, she has no idea where she is.

• A typical cow generates about 20,000 pounds of manure in a year.

• Because their eyes protrude slightly, cows have panoramic vision, allowing them to see nearly 360° around.

• Stand back: If a cow dies of heatstroke, the gases inside it can expand rapidly and cause the carcass to explode.

• The average dairy cow produces nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime. (She’ll have to drink about 30 gallons of water a day—enough to fill a bathtub—to do it.)

• Cows don’t tear grass out of the ground with their teeth. They wrap their tongues around it and pull.

• Good news: If the gas of 10 cows could be captured, it could heat a house for a year.

• Bad news: The methane gas released by cows’ burping and farting is said to be one of the leading causes of holes in the ozone layer. The world’s cows produce about 100 million tons of it every year.

• A study found that cows give 35% more milk when listening to Elvis Presley music.

Eagle eyes? Chickens can see daylight 45 minutes before it is visible to humans.

DUMB KOPS

A teeny, tiny percentage of police officers sometimes—but rarely—commit some act which might be construed as, oh, we don’t know… “dumb.” (This introduction approved by the BRI Legal Department.)

P
ICKING FLOURS
“A middle-aged Brazilian woman is suing the police for mistaking two bags of flour she was carrying for cocaine. The woman, in her 50s, spent two days in jail after being arrested as she got off a bus carrying the flour. The policeman had a hunch she was a drug courier—but she was actually just going home with her shopping.”

—
Terra Noticias Populares
(Brazil)

I KNOW THAT GUY

“The day after they launched a high-profile public appeal for information on escaped convict Jimmy Melvin’s whereabouts, Nova Scotia police spent hours driving the convicted drug dealer around town. Mounties picked up Melvin for being drunk, and then handed him over to Halifax’s major-crime unit after he told them he could assist in their manhunt for Jimmy Melvin. Officials say Melvin gave them a false name and showed them a phony ID. The police contend Melvin looks considerably different than his mugshot from a couple years ago.”

—
Halifax Daily News
(Canada)

TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE

“Officer Marius Vlasceanu pulled over Gheorghe Tosa as he drove through Craiova, Romania, fining him £22 for ‘having a face like a moron and being a big monkey.’ The head of the Romanian police said Vlasceanu, who claimed he had handed out the fine as a joke, was demoted for ‘inappropriate behavior and defaming the police force.’”

—
The Scotsman
(Scotland)

I
THE BOMB SQUAD