William Randolph Hearst, owner of the New York Journal, had a reputation for never letting truth get in the way of a good story. According to one famous tale, when hostilities broke out between the Spanish and the Cubans, Hearst sent the illustrator Frederic Remington to Cuba to draw pictures of the conflict. Finding that not much was happening, Remington cabled Hearst in January 1897: "Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return."

Supposedly Hearst cabled back: "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war."

It is doubtful Hearst ever sent such a telegram. The first report of it appeared in a 1901 book, On the Great Highway, by journalist James Creelman. Creelman was in Europe at the time the telegram was supposedly sent, so he either heard the story second-hand or invented it himself. Since he was known for exaggeration, the latter is likely. Hearst himself denied having sent such a telegram. More…

Prescott Jernegan claimed he had found a way to cheaply extract gold from sea water. His "Gold Accumulator" consisted of a wooden box, inside of which was a pan of mercury mixed with a secret ingredient. A wire connected the mercury to a small battery. When lowered into the ocean, this contraption supposedly sucked gold out of the water.

A test conducted in Narragansett Bay in February 1897 proved the gold accumulator worked. After a few hours the box was raised, full of gold flakes.

Soon Jernegan had found investors who helped him found the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company. When the company offered stock, the share price rapidly rose from $33 to $150. But to the dismay of investors, the apparent success of the gold accumulator was entirely due to the diving skills of Jernegan's accomplice, Charles Fisher. Fisher would swim underwater in a diving suit and salt the mercury with gold.

Jernegan and Fisher fled to France in July, 1898 with over $200,000 before the scam was found out. More…

On June 25, 1899 four Denver newspapers reported that the Chinese government was going to tear down portions of the Great Wall of China, pulverize the rock, and use it to build roads. American companies were said to be bidding on the enormous demolition project. Newspapers throughout the country picked up the story, but it eventually became apparent the news was not true. The Chinese were not planning to tear down the Great Wall. Four Denver reporters — Al Stevens, Jack Tournay, John Lewis, and Hal Wilshire — had invented the tale while sharing a drink at the Oxford Hotel in order to spice up a slow news day. A rumor later suggested that when the news reached China, the Chinese become so furious at the idea of Americans tearing down the Great Wall, that they took up arms against Westerners in the Boxer Rebellion. This rumor was not true. More…

In February 1899, numerous American newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, printed a story claiming that a farmer, W.W. Mangum, had successfully trained monkeys to pick cotton on his plantation in Smedes, Mississippi. The story was sourced to an article in the Cotton Planters' Journal by T.G. Lane. Reportedly Mangum was so pleased with the success of his monkey-labor experiment that he had ordered more monkeys from Africa, and he was urging other planters to join him in using simians as laborers. There is no evidence this story was true. In fact, the tale of monkeys being trained to pick cotton (or other crops) was one of the more persistent legends that circulated in the American South during the second half of the nineteenth century. Versions of it appeared in newspapers every few years. More…

Woolly mammoths became extinct thousands of years ago. But in October, 1899 a story appeared in McClure's Magazine titled "The Killing of the Mammoth" in which a narrator named H. Tukeman described how he had recently hunted down and killed a mammoth in the Alaskan wilderness. More…

When Francis Douce, a wealthy English collector, died in 1834 he left an unusual stipulation in his will. He wanted all his personal papers donated to the British Museum, but they were first to be sealed in a box and only opened 66 years after his death. These instructions were dutifully carried out. When 1900 arrived, the trustees of the museum gathered to open the box. The box was unsealed. and everyone leaned over, eager to see its contents. After a moment of silence, someone snorted with disgust. Inside the box was only trash: scraps of paper and torn book covers. Douce had engineered a bizarre, posthumous prank, making the trustees wait 66 years for nothing. More…

On August 10, 1901 two English women visited the gardens of the Petit Trianon near Versailles. They later claimed that during the visit they had somehow telepathically entered into ghost-like memories left behind in that location by Queen Marie Antoinette — experiencing Versailles as it looked in 1798. Their account of what they had seen included accurate details of eighteenth-century Versailles which it would have been impossible for them to know without having conducted extensive historical research, which they insisted they had not done. However, subsequent analysis has suggested that they had, indeed, done this kind of research. More…

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russia in 1903, was said to be the text of a speech given by a Zionist leader outlining a secret Jewish plan to achieve world power by controlling international finance and subverting the power of the Christian church. The manuscript was used to justify hate campaigns against the Jewish people throughout the twentieth century. However, the Protocols are a complete hoax. The text was adapted from an 1864 work, Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, that didn't mention the Jewish people at all. More…

Between 1897 and 1904, Cassie Chadwick scammed millions of dollars from Ohio banks by claiming to be the illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie. The banks, believing they could charge Carnegie high interest rates, happily loaned her the money without asking too many questions. Chadwick's con fell apart in 1904 when bankers finally thought to ask Carnegie if she really was his daughter. Carnegie's reply: "I have never heard of Mrs. Chadwick." She was sentenced to over ten years in prison, but died in jail after two and a half years. More…

On October 16, 1906, an out-of-work German shoemaker named Wilhelm Voigt donned a second-hand military captain's uniform he had bought in a store, walked out into the street, and assumed control of a company of soldiers marching past. He led them to the town hall of Köpenick, a small suburb of Berlin, arrested the mayor and the treasurer on charges of embezzlement, and took possession of 4,000 marks from the town treasury. He then disappeared with the money. The incident became famous as a symbol (whether deserved or not) of the blind obedience of German soldiers to authority — even fake authority. More…

The performer "Sober Sue" appeared on stage in New York, billed as the girl who never laughed. The theater offered a prize of $100 to anyone who could make her smile. People from the audience, as well as professional comedians, all accepted the challenge, but all failed. Sober Sue never so much as cracked a grin. The truth was only revealed after her run at the theater was over. It was impossible for her to laugh because her facial muscles were paralyzed. More…

The earliest reference to the Old Librarian's Almanack is found In 1907, when the novelist Edmund Lester Pearson mentioned it in his Boston Evening Transcript column. It was, he said, a small almanac from 1773 that contained the "opinion and counsel" of a curmudgeonly librarian whose ideas were strikingly non-modern. Two years later, Pearson arranged for the reprinting of the Almanack, and it was favorably reviewed by many newspapers which accepted it as an authentic 18th-Century curiosity. Very few people realized that there was no Old Librarian. Pearson himself had written the Almanack as a joke.

Six years after the Wright brothers succeeded in making the first flight in a heavier-than-air craft, aviation technology was still fairly primitive. Planes could only fly a few miles. But in 1909, Massachusetts inventor Wallace Tillinghast announced a breakthrough, claiming to have built a plane capable of flying 300 miles. His announcement generated enormous excitement. In the next few weeks thousands of people throughout New England reported seeing his plane flying in the sky at night. But as the months went by and Tillinghast failed to offer any tangible proof of his claims, the media came to realize he had no airplane. One man confessed that the lights people had seen in the sky were actually small lanterns he had tied to the legs of owls as a practical joke. More…

The painting "Sunset over the Adriatic" won praise from critics when it was displayed at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris in March 1910. It was said to be the work of J.R. Boronali, proponent of a new school of painting called "excessivism". One collector offered to buy the work for 400 francs. But after a few days the truth was revealed. Boronali was actually a donkey named Lolo who had "painted" by having a brush tied to his tail. The stunt was dreamed up by art critic Roland Dorgelès as a way to play a joke on his Impressionist painter friends. [A World Elsewhere]

On February 7, 1910 the Prince of Abyssinia and his entourage were received with full ceremonial pomp on the deck of the H.M.S. Dreadnought, the British Navy's most powerful battleship. But the next day the Navy was mortified to learn that the visitors hadn't been Abyssinian dignitaries at all. They had been a group of young, upper class pranksters who had blackened their faces, donned elaborate theatrical costumes, and then forged an official telegram in order to gain access to the ship. More…

When amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson unearthed a skull and jawbone from a gravel pit near Piltdown, England, the fossil was hailed as the long-sought missing link between man and ape. For almost forty years the authenticity of the Piltdown fossil remained unquestioned, until 1953, when researchers at the British Museum took a closer look and realized the fossil was a fake. The skull belonged to a prehistoric human, whereas the jawbone came from a modern orangutan. More…

Frederick Rodman Law was a well-known daredevil active in the early 20th century. His stunts included parachuting from the top of the Statue of Liberty and jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. In May 1912, a pedestrian in Washington DC exclaimed that Law appeared to be scaling the monument without permission — and was already a third of the way up. A huge crowd gathered to watch the feat. But when the police arrived to apprehend Law when he came down, they realized that what had resembled a human figure was actually a damp spot on the side of the monument caused by the previous night's rain. More…

Paul Chabas's painting "September Morn" won a gold medal of honor in 1912 at the Paris Salon. But when copies of the painting made their way to America, it provoked a bitter controversy about nudity, art, and public morality. Thanks to this controversy, September Morn became one of the most famous paintings of the twentieth century, selling millions of copies. Publicist Harry Reichenbach later claimed to have started the controversy by complaining to moral censors about the indecency of the painting. He didn't actually feel the painting was indecent. He was cynically manipulating the self-righteous moralists in order to sell copies of the painting. More…

In 1916 a slender volume of poetry introduced the Spectric school of poetry to the world. The Spectric philosophy, as explained by its founders, was to embrace the immediacy of experience, even if that experience could not be expressed rationally. Soon Spectrism had attracted a growing band of followers. But despite repeated requests for meetings and interviews, the two founders of Spectrism never appeared in public. This led to rumors of a hoax, rumors that were confirmed in 1918 when the poet Witter Bynner admitted that he and his friend Arthur Davison Ficke were the true creative forces behind Spectric poetry. Their goal had been to parody the overly pompous experimentalism that was the fad of the moment. More…

Journalist H.L. Mencken published an article in the New York Evening Mail describing the history of the bathtub in America, noting that people were slow to accept tubs, believing they were dangerous to health. This attitude, Mencken said, changed when President Millard Fillmore became the first president to install a tub in the White House. Mencken's history of the bathtub wasn't true. He intended it as a joke, but few people recognized it as such. Details from Mencken's article began to appear in other papers. One scholar included the tale in a history of hygiene. To this day, many people still believe that Mencken's fake history of the bathtub is true. More…

Poinsettias are one of the most popular plants in the world. They account for one quarter of the annual sales of all flowering potted plants. However, it's widely believed that they're poisonous. "One poinsettia leaf can kill a child," is a warning that's been repeated often over the years. This belief is a myth. Poinsettias, although not edible, have low toxicity. The belief that they're poisonous traces back to a rumor that surfaced in 1919, alleging that a child in Hawaii died after eating a poinsettia leaf. The death was hearsay. However, the rumor was believed by several Hawaiian doctors, and through them the story was transmitted to the broader scientific community. As a result, for decades health professionals warned the public about the danger posed by poinsettias. It wasn't until the early 1970s that the scientific community realized its error and began an effort to restore the plant's reputation. More…

The White Pine Monograph Series documented the architecture of the quaint Massachusetts town of Stotham. The problem was, Stotham didn't actually exist. More…