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The 45-letter pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is often cited as one of the longest words in English — it’s been recognized both by Merriam-Webster and by the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED Supplement traced it to a 1936 puzzle book by Frank Scully called Bedside Manna, defining it as “a disease caused by ultra-microscopic particles of sandy volcanic dust.” But in fact it had appeared first in a Feb. 23, 1935, story in the New York Herald Tribune:
Puzzlers Open 103rd Session Here by Recognizing 45-Letter Word
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis succeeded electrophotomicrographically as the longest word in the English language recognized by the National Puzzlers’ League at the opening session of the organization’s 103d semi-annual meeting held yesterday at the Hotel New Yorker.
The puzzlers explained that the forty-five-letter word is the name of a special form of silicosis caused by ultra-microscopic particles of silica volcanic dust …
At the meeting NPL president Everett M. Smith had claimed the word was legitimate, but in fact he’d coined it himself. Distinguished by the newspaper, it found its way into Scully’s book and thence into the dictionaries, “surely one of the greatest ironies in the history of logology,” according to author Chris Cole. Today it’s recognized as long but phony — Oxford changed its definition to “an artificial long word said to mean a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine ash and sand dust.”
(Chris Cole, “The Biggest Hoax,” Word Ways 22:4 [November 1989], 205-206.)
In 2015 Nature published an alarming article suggesting that dragons are real and had only gone to sleep during the Little Ice Age. A medieval document discovered “under a pile of rusty candlesticks” in the Bodleian Library showed that the creatures were once common but had entered a state of brumation when temperatures dropped and their traditional diet of knights began to thin. Rising temperatures in the modern age have correlated with increasing mentions in fictional literature, which “suggests that these fire-breathing lizards are being sighted more frequently.”
It gets worse: “Sluggish action on global warming is set to compound the problem, and policies such as the restoration of knighthoods in Australia are likely to exacerbate the predicament yet further by providing a sustained and delicious food supply.” The date of the article was April 2.
(Andrew J. Hamilton, Robert M. May, and Edward K. Waters, “Here Be Dragons,” Nature 520:7545 [April 2, 2015], 42-43.)
The Scientific Monthly reported a startling discovery in October 1952: the Schuss-yucca, a rare desert plant whose stalk could grow 10 feet in 2 minutes.
Readers’ letters generally joined in the spirit of the hoax — including one that mentioned a boxer who “stopped hiking long enough to inspect a yucca at just the wrong time.”
The plant shot up 16 feet at that moment, dealing him an uppercut that ended his career. “All he would say of the unfortunate incident was ‘Any time a goddam bush can lay me out cold, I know prizefighting ain’t for me.'”
For a man who left no official writings, French philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul cut an impressive swath through the early 20th century. Born in 1896, he befriended Marcel Proust, betrothed Marthe Richard, and associated with Simone de Beauvoir, Marie Bonaparte, Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Stefan Zweig, and Andre Malraux. At age 50 he resettled in Paraguay, where he founded a town that observed the principles of Kantian philosophy.
Actually, none of that is true. Botul was invented out of whole cloth in 1995 by journalist Frédéric Pagès and promoted by an “Association of the Friends of Jean-Baptiste Botul,” which published works that supposedly advanced his ideas, including The Sexual Life of Immanuel Kant, Nietzsche and the Noonday Demon, and Soft Metaphysics.
The joke has been so successful that an annual prize has been awarded for a work that mentions Botul. The most famous recipient is Bernard-Henri Lévy, who quoted the imaginary philosopher extensively in his 2010 book On War in Philosophy. He acknowledged afterward that he’d fallen for a “well-rigged” hoax.
From an April Fools’ feature in LIFE, April 4, 1938:
The photo appeared in a German paper, which claimed the story was American. “To Germans, actual American goings-on are fantastic enough to be April Fools’ tricks.”
On April 11, 1916, inventor Louis Enricht invited a group of reporters to his Long Island home. He showed them a car with an empty gas tank, filled a porcelain pitcher from a garden hose, stirred in a greenish fluid, poured the mixture into the car’s tank, and signaled his son to crank the engine. The car started up. Enricht announced that he’d discovered a gasoline substitute that could be made for a penny a gallon.
Chemists denounced the claim as impossible, but Henry Ford began talks with the inventor. These broke down over a dispute with the Maxim Munitions Corporation, with which Enricht was apparently also talking.
The affair went quiet for a year, but in November 1917 railroad financier Benjamin Yoakum accused Enricht of treason: Yoakum had been financing the project but now Enricht refused to turn over the formula, and Yoakum feared that he may have sold the secret to the German government. Enricht admitted to meeting with the Germans but insisted that he hadn’t given them the formula — in fact, he’d burned the only copy.
In the early 1920s he promoted a similar scheme, claiming he could produce fuel from peat, but this too remained unsubstantiated, and he ended up in Sing Sing. When he died in 1924, he took the secret to endless gasoline with him. Possibly the whole thing was hot air (he had a long history of swindles). Possibly the secret ingredient was really acetone, which would have fired the car’s engine long enough to persuade onlookers but would produce corrosion and in any event was more costly than gas. And just conceivably his claim was true — but no one’s ever been able to rediscover the formula.
The April 1, 1878, issue of the New York Daily Graphic announced that Thomas Edison had invented a “victuals machine” that would feed the human race:
I made all this food out of the dirt taken from the cellar and water that runs through these pipes. … I believe that in ten years my machines will be used to provide the tables of the civilized world. … I can make cabbages and oranges that have never felt the rain. Nature is full of surprises. Bananas and chocolate can be made out of the very same ingredients, and the methods of combining differ only a trifle.
The last paragraph revealed that the story was a hoax, but many readers didn’t get that far — several newspapers picked up the news, and some readers even tried to order the device. Reporter William Augustus Croffut, who’d concocted the tale, wrote diffidently to Edison on April 4 (above), “Did you see my hoax? And are you in a state of fiery wrath? Or how is it?”
In an April 3, 1971, letter to the editor of the Saturday Review, reader K. Jason Sitewell reported some alarming news: A congressman named A.F. Day had introduced a bill that would abolish all private parks of more than 50 acres and all public recreation areas that were used by fewer than 150 people a day. The practical effect would be to abolish the nation’s golf courses.
Sitewell said he understood Day’s motive because he’d grown up with him. The congressman’s grandfather had “perished in a sand trap,” and his father had died of a coronary after hitting 19 balls into a pond.
An uproar followed. Country clubs vowed to fight the bill, constituents besieged their representatives, and editorials decried the measure, which Golf World called “as ominous a threat to golf as anything that has come along.”
But eventually it became clear that there was no such bill and readers saw the link between the purported congressman’s name and the date of Sitewell’s letter. It turned out that the whole thing had been a jape cooked up by Review editor and inveterate prankster Norman Cousins.
“I wrote apologies to each subscriber who had been offended or angered,” Cousins wrote. “I begged my golfing friends, who threatened to have me barred from every course in the nation, to forgive me for my joke. I suffered enough every time I played, I told them, and penance was awaiting me on each tee.”
Antique dealer Leopoldo Franciolini (1844–1920) was so prolific in creating fraudulent musical instruments that scholars are still trying to sort out the confusion he left behind. The modern stewards of Frederick Stearns’ collection write:
In this case, we have an Alto Clarinet in F. … It is a composite instrument with four sections: two are leather-covered maple, … the barrel appears to have been purloined from a bass clarinet … the bell from an oboe. The mouthpiece appears to be re-purposed from a bass clarinet. … The simultaneous crudeness and creativity demonstrated in [Franciolini’s] catalogue is greatly entertaining. More troubling, however, is the shadow cast upon the flawed judgment of Frederick Stearns in his last years of collecting.
The catalog description of a harpsichord in the Stearns collection reads, “One could say that it is the only surviving instrument ever crafted by the maker Rigunini, however, given that not a single person by the name of Rigunini ever seems to have drawn breath, we might assume that Franciolini invented the name and forged the date.”
A young Michelangelo once aged a sculpture artificially to bring a higher price. He began working on a sleeping cupid in 1495, at age 20, apparently inspired by a sculpture in the Medici Gardens. At the advice of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco he aged it falsely to resemble an antique and then passed it on to a dealer, who sold it to Cardinal Riario of San Giorgio. Riario erupted when he discovered the artifice, and Michelangelo offered to take back the sculpture, but the dealer wouldn’t hear of it, and Michelangelo ultimately kept his share of the money.
The work has since been lost, but it helped to establish the artist’s reputation and first brought him to the notice of patrons in Rome.
This is Sunset Over the Adriatic, a painting exhibited at the 1910 Salon des Indépendants and attributed to the “excessivist” Genoan painter Joachim-Raphaël Boronali.
When critics praised the work, novelist Roland Dorgelès revealed that he’d tied a paintbrush to the tail of a donkey named Lolo to decry the excesses of modern art.
Lolo’s thoughts are not recorded.
See Different Strokes.
But the most absurd and preposterous of all [ventures offered during the South Sea Bubble], and which shewed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled ‘A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.’ Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100l. each, deposit 2l. per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100l. per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98l. of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o’clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o’clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2000l. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again.
— Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1852
In 1962, a burnt golf ball arrived at the botanic gardens at Kew, in southwest London. The head of mycology, R.W.G. Dennis, may have rolled his eyes: The office had received another burnt golf ball 10 years earlier, which the submitter had claimed to be a “rare fungal species.” In that case the staff had got as far as trying to collect spores before they’d realized the hoax.
Twice provoked, Dennis responded in good humor. He published an article titled “A Remarkable New Genus of Phalloid in Lancashire and East Africa,” formally nominating it as a new species of fungus, “Golfballia ambusta,” and describing the specimens as “small, hard but elastic balls used in certain tribal rites of the Caledonians, which take place all season in enclosed paddocks with partially mown grass.” When a third burnt golf ball arrived in 1971, it was accepted into the collection, where all three balls now reside.
That creates a sort of Dadaist dilemma in mycology. By accepting the specimens and publishing a description, Dennis had arguably honored them as a genuine species. The precise definition of a fungus has varied somewhat over time; in publishing his article, Dennis may have been satirically questioning criteria that could accept a nonliving golf ball as a species. But what’s the solution? Some specialists have argued that fungi should be defined as “microorganisms studied by mycologists.” But in that case, points out mycologist Nathan Smith, we should be asking, “Who is a mycologist?”
Charles Bertram built his reputation as a historian on The Description of Britain, a 15th-century manuscript that he’d discovered at age 24 and that provided important new insights into British history, including an ancient map; more than a hundred names of cities, roads, and people; and information from a lost contemporary account by a Roman general. For more than a century Bertram’s discovery served as a touchstone of scholarship on Roman Britain — it was cited in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, among many other works.
After Bertram’s death in 1765 doubts began to mount, and by 1846 it was clear that The Description of Britain had been a forgery. Bertram had managed to convince a few influential librarians, and on the strength of their endorsement other historians had been willing to take the claim seriously. Bertram had never let anyone see the original manuscript, always inventing reasons why he couldn’t share it and sending instead facsimiles of the original.
The effects of the hoax took decades to eradicate — as late as 1911 the Encyclopædia Britannica was still referring to a fictitious naval base on the strength of the Description‘s account.
The American Medical Weekly carried an eye-opening story in 1874 — a woman impregnated by a bullet:
On the 12th day of May, 1863, the battle of R. was fought. […] Our men were fighting nobly, but pressed by superior numbers, had gradually fallen back to within one hundred and fifty yards of the house. My position being near my regiment, suddenly I beheld a noble, gallant young friend staggering closer, and then fall to the earth. In the same moment a piercing scream from the house reached my ear! I was soon by the side of the young man, and, upon examination, found a compound fracture, with extensive comminution of the left tibia; the ball having ricochetted from these parts, and, in its onward flight, passed through the scrotum, carrying away the left testicle. Scarcely had I finished dressing the wounds of this poor fellow, when the estimable matron came running to me in the greatest distress, begging me to go to one of her daughters, who, she informed me, had been badly wounded a few minutes before. Hastening to the house, I found that the eldest of the young ladies had indeed received a most serious wound. A minnie ball had penetrated the left abdominal parietes, about midway between the umbilicus and anterior spinal process of the ilium, and was lost in the abdominal cavity, leaving a ragged wound behind. Believing there was little or no hope of her recovery, I had only time to prescribe an anodyne, when our army fell back, leaving both field and village in the hands of the enemy. […] About six months after her recovery, the movements of our army brought me again to the village of R., and I was again sent for to see the young lady. She appeared in excellent health and spirits, but her abdomen had become enormously enlarged, so much so as to resemble pregnancy at the seventh or eighth month. Indeed, had I not known the family and the facts of the abdominal wound, I should have so pronounced the case. Under the above circumstances, I failed to give a positive diagnosis, determining to keep the case under surveillance. […] Just two hundred and seventy-eight days from the date of the receipt of the wound by the minnie ball, I delivered this same young lady of a fine boy, weighing eight pounds. […] About three weeks from the date of this remarkable birth, I was called to see the child, the grandmother insisting there was ‘something wrong about the genitals.’ Examination revealed an enlarged, swollen, sensitive scrotum, containing on the right side a hard, roughened substance, evidently foreign. I decided upon operating for its removal at once, and in so doing, extracted from the scrotum a minnie ball, mashed and battered as if it had met in its flight some hard, unyielding substance.
A later issue revealed that this had been a joke:
DR. L.G. CAPERS, of Vicksburg, Miss., disclaims responsibility for the truth of that remarkable case of impregnation by a minnie ball, as reported in No. 19 of this Journal. He tells the story as it was told to him. He does not say it is untrue, but is disposed to appositely remember the truth of the old adage, that ‘accidents may happen in the best regulated families.’ The joke is, that the Doctor reported the case without any signature, but as the editor is indisposed to be made the victim of canards, and recognized the writing sent, he was unwilling to deprive the author of the contemplated fun, and allowed him to enjoy even more of this than was anticipated. The readers have enjoyed the story much, but not enough ‘to cut capers’ after reading it.
Capers is Legrand G. Capers, a physician who’d served as a surgeon in the Confederate army — and evidently a practical joker.
01/04/2024 UPDATE: Wow, a similar incident involving a knife wound has been verified. (Thanks, Sally.)
On April 1, 1976, English astronomer Patrick Moore announced a unique opportunity on BBC Radio 2. At 9:47 a.m., he said, Pluto would pass behind Jupiter, and the combined gravitational forces of the two bodies would noticeably reduce gravity on Earth. If listeners jumped in the air during the conjunction, they’d feel a floating sensation.
Shortly after the appointed moment, the BBC began to receive hundreds of phone calls from listeners who’d confirmed the effect, including “a woman who said that she and 11 friends had been wafted from their chairs and orbited gently around the room.”
None of them had noted the date.
Abbreviating litre with a lowercase L can be confusing, as the character can be mistaken for the digit 1. But usually the International System of Units permits a capital letter only when a unit is named after a person.
So, in 1978, University of Waterloo chemist Kenneth Woolner announced in a schoolteachers’ newsletter that the litre had been named for Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre, a fictional French scientist who had proposed a unit of volume measurement before his death in 1778.
Woolner had intended the claim only as an April Fools’ hoax, but the point was made. Today the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology recommends abbreviating litre with an uppercase L.
Irritated at the way bestseller lists were compiled in the 1950s, late-night radio host Jean Shepherd asked his listeners to visit bookstores and request a nonexistent book, I, Libertine, by the imaginary author Frederick R. Ewing. The number of requests drove the title onto the New York Times bestseller list, and, encouraged by its popularity, bookstores began to order the novel. So Shepherd and publisher Ian Ballantine got novelist Theodore Sturgeon to write it, following the plot that Shepherd had described to his listeners. (Sturgeon fell asleep while trying to write the whole book in one marathon session, so Ballantine’s...
In 1840, librarians and booksellers throughout Europe received a catalog describing a unique collection of books to be auctioned: Jean Nepomucene Auguste Pichauld, Comte de Fortsas, had collected 52 unique books, books of which only a single copy was known to exist. The count had died the preceding September, the message said, and as his heirs had no interest in books, the collection would be auctioned off. Bibliophiles converged on Binche, Belgium, that August for the event, only to discover that the appointed address did not exist. Notices declared that the town’s library had acquired the books — but Binche...
On September 19, 1968, as the Soviet Union’s Zond 5 spacecraft was circling the moon, Jodrell Bank Observatory and the CIA were shocked to intercept the voices of cosmonauts Valery Bykovsky, Vitaly Sevastyanov and Pavel Popovich reading out telemetry and computer data and even discussing the prospect of a landing. The Zond mission had been thought to be uncrewed; now it sounded as though the Soviets might beat the United States to a moon landing. Apollo 17 astronaut Eugene Cernan said that the incident “shocked the hell out of us.” It was a hoax. Popovich recalled later, “When we realized...
In her 1929 autobiography Cradle of the Deep, silent film star Joan Lowell revealed a dramatic childhood aboard her father’s trading vessel: She’d seen a man eaten by sharks, performed an amputation, and, when the ship caught fire and sank, swum three miles to the Australian coast with “drenched kittens” clinging to her shoulders: I was conscious of only the pain caused by the salt water on my bleeding cuts and scratches. Each stroke I took was like a knife cut, and I couldn’t shake the drowning kittens off. Perhaps to those cats I owe my life, for the pain...
In 1883, Missouri real estate broker James Reavis announced that he held title to a huge tract of land in the Arizona Territory. If certified, the claim would threaten the livelihoods of thousands of residents. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the Baron of Arizona, one of the most audacious frauds in American history. We’ll also scrutinize British statues and puzzle over some curious floor numbers. Intro: In 1891, Charles Dodgson wrote a curiously unforthcoming letter to Nellie Bowman. Reputedly the English geologist William Buckland could distinguish a region by the smell...
In 1817 a young woman appeared in the English village of Almondsbury, speaking a strange language and seeking food and shelter. She revealed herself to be an Eastern princess, kidnapped by pirates from an exotic island. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of Princess Caraboo, who was both more and less than she seemed. We’ll also discover a June Christmas and puzzle over some monster soup. Intro: In 1988, Martine Tischer proposed wrapping gifts in uncut U.S. currency. In 1948, Ralph Alpher, Hans Bethe, and George Gamow seized the chance of an immortal...
In 1759, ghostly rappings started up in the house of a parish clerk in London. In the months that followed they would incite a scandal against one man, an accusation from beyond the grave. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll tell the story of the Cock Lane ghost, an enduring portrait of superstition and justice. We’ll also see what you can get hit with at a sporting event and puzzle over some portentous soccer fields. Intro: In 1967 British artists Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin offered a map that charts its own area. In 1904 Henry...
This flat, polished sandstone pebble was found in a 2,000-year-old burial mound in West Virginia in 1838. Though it seemed to bear 25 pseudo-alphabetic characters, no one could agree on their meaning. In 1845 ethnologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft consulted “noted antiquarians” and concluded that the inscription contains “four characters corresponding to the Ancient Greek; four Etruscan; five Runic; six ancient Gallic; seven old Erse; ten Phoenician; fourteen old British; sixteen Celtiberic, with some resemblance to the Hebrew.” In the 1870s physician R.J. Farquharson compiled wildly varying translations of the inscription from three different scholars: “Thy orders are laws, thou shines...
When the Rev. Jacob Gass discovered three inscribed slate tablets near Davenport, Iowa, in 1877, he thought they demonstrated the presence of an ancient Old World people who’d traveled to the Americas long before Columbus. The find was praised in local journals, but in 1885 ethnologist Cyrus Thomas declared them a fraud: The inscriptions were a hodgepodge of various languages amateurishly rendered, and Gass had reported finding the slates in loose soil in which human bones had been scattered about, suggested that they’d been planted there. It turned out that the slates matched those on the roof of a nearby...
Just before his death in 1702, butterfly collector William Charlton delivered an unusual specimen to London entomologist James Petiver. Petiver wrote, “It exactly resembles our English Brimstone Butterfly (R. Rhamni), were it not for those black spots and apparent blue moons on the lower wings. This is the only one I have seen.” Carl Linnaeus named it Papilio ecclipsis and included it in the 12th edition of his Systema Naturae in 1767. It wasn’t until 1793 that Danish zoologist Johan Christian Fabricius discovered that the dark patches had been painted on — it was only an ordinary brimstone butterfly after...
On April 8, 1885, the St. Louis Evening Chronicle published an astonishing story — coal miner Tim Collins had broken into a forgotten cavern hewn by subterranean giants:
A large room, probably 65 by 100 feet in extent, showed itself dimly by the light of our tapers. It was about 20 or 25 feet from floor to ceiling, and had evidently been lighted from the top, though there were openings in the walls where, from appearances, great oaken blinds or doors had once been. These doors had rotted, and only small portions of them remained, small bits of which we chipped off with our knives as souvenirs of our visit. Further examination showed that this room had been used as a workshop but mechanics who had been at work long before Huram’s artificers hewed the architecture for Solomon’s temple. On each side near the walls, and also in the center, were found tables or benches where they had fashioned the work of their hands. These benches were of stone, and there were but few evidences of the character of work done. The wood that had been employed was damp, rotten and so covered with mold as to be almost indistinguishable in shape, and when touched, crumbled to dust. Tools were found on the benches, the handles of which had long since rotted away. But the tools themselves were in a good state of preservation and show that they were fashioned by master mechanics. A number of them were brought to the surface and are now exposed to the gaze of the curious.
The story drew worldwide attention for three days before it was revealed to be false — reporter J.W. Estes of the Moberly Daily Monitor had concocted it as a late April Fools’ Day hoax.
Collins was real enough — to keep off curiosity seekers he was forced to mount a sign at his mine’s entrance: NO BURRYIED SITY LUNATICKS ALOUD ON THESE PREMISES.
(From Kenneth L. Feder, Archaeological Oddities, 2019.)