On 16 October 1869, on William C. “Stub” Newell’s farm at Cardiff, in the Onondaga Valley of central New York, two hired men digging a well struck a vast stone figure that looked like a petrified human ten feet tall. Word spread within hours, and a tent went up over the pit. It was a fraud from the first stroke. The figure was a block of gypsum, quarried in Iowa and carved in Chicago at the direction of George Hull, a Binghamton tobacconist and avowed skeptic, who had buried it on his cousin Newell’s land roughly eleven months earlier and waited for it to be “found.”
The deception barely outlived its own celebrity. Within weeks geologists pronounced the object impossible, and on 10 December 1869 — under two months after the discovery — Hull confessed the whole scheme to the press, having already pocketed the money. Yale’s pioneering paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh examined the giant and dismissed it as “of very recent origin, and a most decided humbug,” noting fresh tool marks and a polished surface that water-soluble gypsum could never have kept underground. The courts followed: in February 1870 the giant and a copied rival were both declared fakes.
Hull’s motive was not, at first, money. By his own account he conceived the hoax after a theological argument with a revivalist preacher who insisted, citing Genesis 6:4 — “there were giants in the earth in those days” — that scripture was literally true. Hull set out to manufacture exactly the relic such literalism predicted, then watch the credulous pay to believe it. He spent a reported 2,600 dollars building the giant and recouped a fortune; a syndicate led by the Syracuse banker David Hannum bought a three-quarter interest for a sum reported around 30,000 dollars, and the showman P.T. Barnum, refused the original, simply commissioned a plaster copy and exhibited it as the genuine article.
The Cardiff Giant endures less as a mystery than as a parable. It fooled no expert who was allowed to test it, yet it drew enormous crowds because it confirmed what many wished to be true and arrived wrapped in the authority of the soil. The phrase “there’s a sucker born every minute,” long misattributed to Barnum, is most plausibly traced to Hannum, exasperated that the public was paying to see Barnum’s fake of Hull’s fake. Today the original rests at the Farmers’ Museum in Cooperstown, New York.
In 1726, at the University of Würzburg in Franconia, the physician and professor Johann Bartholomäus Adam Beringer published a lavish book illustrating some two hundred remarkable “fossils” he believed had been dug from a hillside called Mount Eibelstadt. The stones showed lizards, frogs, spiders in their webs, birds, comets, the sun and moon, and even Hebrew letters spelling the name of God. None of it was real. The objects were soft limestone carved by hand and planted for Beringer to find — a hoax aimed squarely at a man his colleagues judged insufferably arrogant. The volume, Lithographiae Wirceburgensis, is one of the most famous self-inflicted disasters in the history of science.
The deception was the work of two university colleagues: Johann Ignatz Roderick, a professor of geography and mathematics, and Johann Georg von Eckhart, the court librarian and privy councillor. By their own later admission and the surviving court record, they resented Beringer’s conceit and contrived to ruin it by feeding him exactly the marvels his theories craved. Their instrument was one of Beringer’s own diggers, the seventeen-year-old Christian Zänger, who planted the carved stones where the professor and his other two boys — the brothers Niklaus and Valentin Hehn — would unearth them.
According to the durable tradition, the hoax undid itself when stones began to appear bearing Beringer’s own name, a flourish too pointed to be nature’s. Realizing he had been deceived, Beringer took the matter to law. The Würzburg records show a hearing before the Cathedral Chapter on 13 April 1726 and municipal proceedings on 15 April and 11 June 1726, in which the conspirators were examined. The fraud destroyed the careers of its perpetrators — Roderick left Würzburg and Eckhart his standing — but it did not spare its victim, whose name has been attached ever since to credulous, wishful science.
What makes the case endure is not the crudeness of the carvings but the sophistication of the self-deception. Beringer was not stupid; he was a learned man whose theoretical commitments and vanity led him to read manufactured nonsense as evidence for a cherished idea — that some fossils were not the remains of organisms at all but figures impressed in stone by a “formative force” or the hand of God. The Lying Stones, the Lügensteine, remain the textbook warning that a clever mind defending a beloved hypothesis can be the easiest of all to fool. Beringer reportedly tried to buy back every copy of his book; he died about a decade later, in 1738.
At Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, between roughly 1998 and 2001, the young German physicist Jan Hendrik Schön published a torrent of results that appeared to remake condensed-matter physics. He reported transistors built from single organic molecules, superconductivity in organic crystals, and a string of other firsts, at a tempo that astonished his field — in 2001 he was an author on a newly published paper, on average, roughly every eight days, in the most selective journals in science. Almost none of it was true. In 2002 an investigation concluded that Schön had fabricated or falsified data across at least sixteen separate cases, and his cascade of breakthroughs collapsed into one of the largest fraud episodes in the history of physics.
The exposure turned on the data themselves rather than on any failed replication. In the spring of 2002, physicists outside Bell Labs — among them Lydia Sohn, then at Princeton, and Paul McEuen at Cornell — noticed that graphs in different Schön papers, supposedly describing different experiments at different temperatures and in different materials, contained identical traces of random electronic noise, down to the same minute, irreproducible wiggles. Real measurements do not share their noise; the curves had been copied. Once the duplications were flagged, Bell Labs’ parent company, Lucent Technologies, convened an external committee chaired by the Stanford physicist Malcolm Beasley.
The Beasley committee reported on 25 September 2002. Examining 24 allegations across 25 papers, it found compelling evidence that Schön had committed scientific misconduct in at least 16 of them, while explicitly clearing his co-authors of misconduct. Schön had, in numerous cases, been unable to produce raw data, primary samples, or laboratory notebooks; the committee found his explanations unconvincing and the pattern of manipulation unmistakable. Bell Labs dismissed him immediately. In the months that followed, the journals unwound the record: Science retracted eight papers and later two more, Nature retracted seven, and Physical Review and Applied Physics Letters retracted others.
The reckoning extended to his credentials. In 2004 the University of Konstanz revoked the doctorate it had awarded him, citing dishonorable conduct, and Germany’s research funding agency barred him from its grants and committees. Schön contested the revocation through years of German litigation; the courts ultimately upheld it, with the Federal Administrative Court sustaining the decision in 2013. What remained, once the fabricated papers were withdrawn, was close to nothing: a celebrated body of work that had reported phenomena no one — including Schön — could reproduce.
In the summer of 1842, in New York City, the showman P.T. Barnum exhibited what he advertised as a preserved mermaid taken from the waters near the Feejee (Fiji) Islands. It was no such thing. The object was a manufactured specimen — the desiccated head and torso of a monkey stitched to the dried tail of a fish — most likely made by craftsmen in the East Indies and acquired decades earlier by a Western sailor. Barnum knew it was false; before he displayed it he had consulted a naturalist who told him plainly that it was a fabrication. He exhibited it anyway, having engineered the public into demanding to see it.
What makes the Feejee Mermaid a landmark is not the crude object but the campaign Barnum built around it. He had leased the curiosity from the Boston showman Moses Kimball, and rather than simply put it on display, he constructed a fictional authority to vouch for it. An associate, Levi Lyman, was installed in a New York hotel as “Dr. J. Griffin,” a supposed naturalist of the (entirely invented) “British Lyceum of Natural History,” carrying the mermaid as a scientific prize. Barnum then planted letters in New York newspapers, ostensibly mailed from Alabama and South Carolina, mentioning the eminent Dr. Griffin and his specimen, and distributed woodcuts of beautiful, bare-breasted mermaids — images that bore no resemblance to the shriveled object itself.
The illusion was deliberately self-debunking only in retrospect; at the time it worked. Griffin “lectured” on natural history, the press relayed the controversy, and crowds poured into the exhibition — first at a Broadway concert hall, then at Barnum’s American Museum, where receipts reportedly tripled. The specimen, when finally seen, was a small, blackened, agonized-looking thing that Barnum himself described as ugly; the gap between the advertised maiden and the actual relic was part of the entertainment. Naturalists and a skeptical southern press denounced it as a fraud within the year, and the mermaid’s authenticity collapsed even as Barnum’s fame grew.
The Feejee Mermaid became the template for Barnum’s career: not the sale of a believable object, but the orchestration of curiosity through a fake expert, manufactured news, and seductive imagery, with the public half-aware it might be humbugged and paying to find out. The original specimen’s fate is uncertain; it is generally believed to have been destroyed in one of the fires that consumed Barnum’s and Kimball’s collections in the nineteenth century, with a related specimen later associated with Harvard’s Peabody Museum.