THE CARDIFF GIANT, THE MOST FAMOUS AMERICAN HOAX

Today, The Grandma have received great news of her friends Joseph de Ca'th Lon and Claire Fontaine, who are travelling from Sankt Pölten in Austria to Trnava in Slovakia. They continue scouting young football players, and enjoying formative football matches in this part of Europe.

After talking with her friends, The Grandma has been reading about the Cardiff Giant, one of the most popular American hoaxes of all time, that was discovered on a day like today in 1869.

The Cardiff Giant was one of the most famous archaeological hoaxes in American history. It was a 3.0 m purported petrified man, uncovered on October 16, 1869, by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C. "Stub" Newell, in Cardiff, New York. He covered the giant with a tent and it soon became an attraction site. Both it and an unauthorized copy made by P. T. Barnum are still being displayed.

The giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull. He was deeply attracted to science and especially to the theory of evolution proposed by Charles Darwin. Hull got into an argument with Reverend Turk and his supporters at a Methodist revival meeting about Genesis 6:4, which states that there were giants who once lived on Earth. Hull, a skeptic, being the minority party, lost the argument. Angered by his defeat and the credulity of people, Hull wanted to prove how easily he could fool people with a fake giant.

The idea of a petrified man did not originate with Hull, however. During 1858, the newspaper Alta California had published a fake letter claiming that a prospector had been petrified when he had drunk a liquid within a geode. Other newspapers had also published stories of supposedly petrified people.

In 1868, Hull, accompanied by a man named H. B. Martin, hired men to quarry out a 3.2 m block of gypsum in Fort Dodge, Iowa, telling them it was intended for a monument to Abraham Lincoln in New York. He shipped the block to Edward Burkhardt in Chicago, a German stonecutter. Burkhardt hired two sculptors named Henry Salle and Fred Mohrmann to create the giant. While it is not clear if Burkhardt was aware of Hull's intentions, it is reported that they took steps to cover up their work during the carving, putting up quilts to lessen the sound of carving.

The giant was designed to imitate the form of Hull himself. Hull consulted a geologist and learned that hairs would not be petrified, so he removed the hair and beard from the giant. The length of the giant was 3.162 m and it weighed 1,360 kg.
Various stains and acids were used to make the giant appear to be old and weathered. In order for the giant to look ancient, Hull first wiped the giant using a sponge soaked with sand and water. The giant's surface was beaten with steel knitting needles embedded in a board to simulate pores. The giant was also rubbed with sulphuric acid to create a deeper, vintage-like color. During November 1868, Hull transported the giant by railroad to the farm of his cousin, William Newell. By then, he had spent US$2,600 for the hoax.

On a night in late November 1868, the giant was buried in a hole in Newell's farm. Nearly a year later, Newell hired Gideon Emmons and Henry Nichols, ostensibly to dig a well, and on October 16, 1869, they found the giant. One of the men reportedly exclaimed, I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!

More information: Live Science

The hoax is the very absence of truth, 

which usually means art is absent, too 
-hoaxes regularly substitute claims of reality 
for imagination, facts for form, 
acting as if artifice is the antithesis of art.

 

Kevin Young