Uncle John’s Curiously Compelling Bathroom Reader

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  THE GREAT DIAMOND HOAX OF 1872, PART II

  Here’s the second installment of our tale of what may have been the biggest con job of the 19th century. (Part I is on page 178.)

  EMPIRE BUILDER

  As Arnold and Slack made their getaway, William Ralston was hard at work putting together a $10 million corporation called the San Francisco and New York Mining and Commercial Company. He’d already lined up 25 initial investors who contributed $80,000 apiece, and now he was preparing to raise another $8 million. New York newspaper publisher Horace Greeley had already bought into the company; so had British financier Baron Ferdinand Rothschild.

  A Rothschild investing in the diamond field? The house of Rothschild was a world-renowned banking firm and experienced at spotting good investments. With Tiffany and Rothschild involved, the excitement surrounding the diamond field grew to a fever pitch. No one but Arnold and Slack knew where the mine was, but so what? When rumors began spreading that it was somewhere in the Arizona Territory, fortune seekers by the hundreds began making their way there in the hope of finding strikes of their own.

  LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION

  The stage was now set for the swindle to grow much bigger, which meant that a lot more people would have lost a lot more money. That it didn’t happen was due purely to chance: When Arnold and Slack picked the location of their “diamond field,” they unknowingly chose an area where a team of government geologists had been conducting surveys for five years.

  The leader of the geological team was a man named Clarence King. When he learned of the diamond strike, he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He’d been all over the territory and had already filed a report stating that there were no deposits of precious gems of any kind anywhere in the area. If the story were true, he and his team of experts had missed a significant diamond field that two untrained miners had been able to find on their own. His professional reputation was on the line: If there really was a diamond field and word of it got back to Washington, D.C., he would be exposed as incompetent and funds for the survey would be cut off.

  Hey, y’all! June 2 is National Bubba Day.

  TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE?

  King arranged to meet the engineer Henry Janin over dinner to get a firsthand account of the diamond field story. As he listened to Janin describe his trip to the site, he started to smell a rat. Janin reported finding diamonds, rubies, and sapphires next to each other, and as a geologist, King knew that was impossible. The natural processes by which diamonds are created are so different from those that create rubies and sapphires that they are never found in the same deposits.

  Because Janin had been blindfolded on the trip to the site, he couldn’t tell King where it was. But King was so familiar with the area that after quizzing Janin, he was able to figure out exactly which mesa he was talking about. The next day he and some other members of his team set out to visit the site themselves.

  ON THE SPOT

  They arrived at the site a few days later. It was fairly late in the day, so they set up camp and then started exploring the area. As had been Janin’s experience, it didn’t take long for them to find raw diamonds, rubies, and other gems. By the time King was ready to turn in for the night, he’d found so many precious stones that even he had a touch of diamond fever. He went to bed wondering if the field really was genuine, and maybe even hoping a little that it was. That hope vanished early the next morning.

  • Shortly after sunrise, another member of the party found a diamond that was partially cut and polished. Nature is capable of many things, but it takes a jeweller to cut and polish a diamond—the stone had been planted there by human hands.

  • King noticed that wherever he found diamonds, he found other precious stones in the same place, and always in roughly the same quantities, something that does not happen in nature.

  • Upon close examination, the team also noticed that the crevices in which the gems were found had fresh scratch marks, as if the gems had been shoved into place with tools.

  The average American kid spends 900 hours a year in school…and 1,023 hours in front of the TV.

  • When precious stones were found in the earth, it was always in places that had been disturbed by foot traffic. When they went to areas that were undisturbed, they never found anything.

  DIGGING DEEP

  King knew that if the field was real, diamonds would also be found deep in the ground as well as on the surface. As a final test, he and his men went to an undisturbed area where they thought diamonds might occur naturally and dug a trench 10 feet deep. Then they carefully sifted through all of the dirt that had been removed from the trench, and found not a single precious stone in any of it. There was no question about it: the find was a hoax. Arnold and Slack had planted the gems.

  As soon as King got to a telegraph station, he sent word to Ralston in San Francisco that he’d been conned. Ralston was shocked and angry. He closed the company and returned the unspent capital to the original 25 investors. Then, because his reputation was on the line, he refunded the rest of their investment out of his own pocket, which cost him about $250,000. It turns out that Ralston's bad judgment wasn’t limited to diamonds: He poured millions into the building of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel and other money-losing schemes, which contributed to the Bank of California’s collapse in 1875. His body was found floating in the San Francisco Bay the following day, though the cause of death remains a mystery.

  THE HOAX EXPOSED

  The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872, as it came to be known, received widespread newspaper coverage not just in America but also in Europe. As reporters in the United States and abroad researched the story, details of how the hoax had been perpetrated began to emerge:

  • Arnold had once been a bookkeeper for the Diamond Drill Company of San Francisco, which used industrial-grade diamonds in the manufacture of drill bits. He apparently stole his first batch of not-so-precious gems from work, then bought cheap, uncut rubies and sapphires from other sources and added them to the mix. None of the people he duped had been able to tell industrial-grade diamonds and second-rate gems from the real thing.

  The United Nations ranks Norway #1 in “quality of life.” (Canada came in 3rd, the U.S. 6th.)

  • When Ralston and the other early investors paid Slack the first installment of $50,000 for his share of the mine, he and Arnold made the first of two trips to London, where they bought $28,000 worth of additional uncut stones from diamond dealers there. Most of the gems were used to salt the claim in Colorado; the few that were left over were the ones that Tiffany and his assistant had foolishly valued at $150,000.

  AFTERMATH

  Philip Arnold and John Slack made off with $650,000, which in 1872 should have set them up for life. Neither of them fared very well, though: Arnold moved to Kentucky and bought a 500-acre farm. When the law eventually tracked him down, he paid a reported $150,000 to settle the claims against him, then used the remaining money to start his own bank. Six years after the diamond hoax, he was injured in a shootout with another banker; he died from pneumonia six months later at the age of 49.

  Less is known about Slack. He apparently blew through his share of the loot and had to go back to work, first as a coffin maker in Missouri and then as a funeral director in New Mexico. When he died there in 1896 at the age of 76, he left an estate valued at only $1,600.

  Uncovering and exposing the fraud gave Clarence King’s career a huge boost; in 1879 he became the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey. But he was a better geologist than he was a businessman, as he learned to his dismay in 1881 when he quit working for the government and took up ranching. He failed at that, then went on to fail at mining and banking. He died penniless in 1901 at the age of 59.

  FOOL’S GOLD

  So did anyone come out ahead from the experience? Apparently only Henry Janin, the mining engineer who had vouched for the authenticity of the diamond field. He suffered a blow to his reputation when the hoax was exposed, but by t
hen he’d already sold his $10,000 worth of shares to another investor for $40,000. Janin was never implicated in the scam; as far as anyone knows, his good fortune was just a case of dumb luck.

  You think you’re picky about coffee? Beethoven counted out 60 beans for each cup.

  GENTLEMAN GEORGE

  Every American school kid knows (or should know) that George Washington is called the “Father of Our Country,” because he led the American victory over the British in the Revolutionary War and became the first president of the United States. Here’s a story about Washington that might surprise you.

  CLASS WARFARE

  When American colonists revolted against England in 1775, they knew that the British army would try to quash the rebellion by force. They had to raise an army of their own quickly and prepare to fight back. To lead the new militia, they selected a plantation owner and former military commander from Virginia named George Washington. The class-conscious English didn’t take the American commander seriously. To them, only noblemen were capable of commanding an army, and Washington was a commoner.

  His opponent, General William Howe, the fifth Viscount Howe, was a true gentleman, raised in the royal court, and was also a decorated war hero and one of England’s best soldiers. But Howe learned to respect his American adversary. “He conducted himself like a gentleman,” he would often say. He based his evaluation on several incidents, especially two events concerning Washington’s scrupulous following of an honored rule of war: a soldier could be taken prisoner, but his personal property must be returned to him.

  MAN OF (UNREAD) LETTERS

  When American troops occupied a British encampment early in 1776, they found a packet of letters left by a high-ranking British officer in Howe’s command. Washington read them, searching for information of intelligence value. But there was none—just an indication of some personal indiscretions by the officer. Under a flag of truce, Washington sent the letters to Howe. He added a personal note, asking his adversary to pass the letters along to the officer without reading them. Shortly thereafter, Washington received a personal note from Howe, thanking him for his courtesy and assuring him the letters had been passed along unread.

  Thanks a lot! Emperor Vespasian introduced pay toilets to Rome in the 1st century A.D.

  THE DOG

  A second exchange took place after the Battle of Germantown, on October 4, 1777. After initial success, the American attack failed. Somehow, a small white dog ended up with the retreating soldiers. When they halted, they checked his collar. They had lost the battle…but they had captured Lord Howe’s pet fox terrier.

  Washington’s staff wanted him to keep the dog as a mascot. But Washington refused: The dog was Howe’s personal property and would be returned. While the terrier was being combed and fed, Washington dictated a note to his aide-de-camp, Alexander Hamilton. “General Washington’s compliments to General Howe, does himself the pleasure to return to him a Dog, which accidentally fell into his hands, and by the inscription on the collar, appears to belong to General Howe.”

  AN HONORABLE ACT

  Washington then ordered one of his men to backtrack 25 miles, carrying the dog in one hand and a white flag in the other. The missing pup was safely returned to his master, who discovered a second—hidden—note. One of Howe’s staff officers described the reunion:

  The General seemed most pleased at the return of the dog. He took him upon his lap, seemingly uncaring that the mud from the dog’s feet soiled his tunic. Whilst he stroked the dog, he discovered a tightly folded message that had been secreted under the dog’s wide collar. The General read the message, which seemed to have a good effect upon him. Although I know not what it said, it is likely to have been penned by the commander of the rebellion.

  So what did the second note say? No one knows—neither Washington nor Howe ever disclosed its contents. However, we know Howe appreciated the gesture. He referred to the exchange many times as “an honorable act of a gentleman.”

  * * *

  FAMOUS FOLKS AND WHAT THEY FEAR THE MOST

  Michael Jordan: Swimming

  Alfred Hitchcock: Eggs

  Queen Elizabeth I: Roses

  Andre Agassi: Spiders

  Barbra Streisand: Performing

  Augustus Caesar: The dark

  Sid Caesar: Getting a haircut

  Last song that Elvis performed in public: “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

  SHOCKERS!

  They didn’t see it coming.

  HOW SEW?

  Setup: In 1993 Gennady Varlamov of Ekaterinburg, Russia, went to the doctor because he had a bad headache. The doctor could find nothing besides minor flu symptoms, so he took an X-ray of Varlamov’s head.

  Surprise! Varlamov had three sewing needles in his brain. “My hair stood on end when I saw the X-ray,” Varlamov said. “This is incredible that I have had them all my life!” They were from 1½ to 3 inches long, at the top of his brain just beneath the skull. The headache went away—the doctor said the needles probably weren’t the cause and recommended not removing them surgically, since they posed no danger to Varlamov. He kept the story to himself until 2006, when his local news station offered a chance to win a television for an unusual story. Varlamov won. Neither he nor the doctor has any idea how the needles got there. (Uncle John’s theory: aliens.)

  HAVING A BALL

  Setup: A group of 10 boys, aged 7 to 14, were playing street hockey in Fairhaven, Connecticut, in January, 2006. They were using a tennis ball they had found in a parking lot.

  Surprise! One of the boys took a slapshot at the ball and it exploded. It was described by a witness as a loud “Bang!” followed by sparks. Police examined the ball and found that it had been stuffed full of gunpowder, firecrackers, and match heads. None of the boys were hurt.

  HE AIN’T HEAVY

  Setup: Thirty-five-year-old Russian Igor Namyatov went to a doctor for back pain when he was a teenager. Doctors told him he had a “fatty growth” in his back, but that it was harmless. The pain eventually subsided and Namyatov forgot about it…until it came back 20 years later. Doctors then said it wasn’t a fatty growth, it was a tumor, and they scheduled an operation to remove it.

  Kansas City, Missouri, has more miles of boulevards…

  Surprise! The doctors were shocked (and probably a bit freaked out) when they saw that the “tumor” had hands. And legs. It wasn’t a tumor at all—it was Namyatov’s twin brother. In what is a rare but documented occurrence, the fetus had merged with Namyatov’s while they were still in the womb and had never developed. Some of Namyatov’s neighbors, newspapers reported, were disappointed that doctors had removed it. “They should have waited to see what would become of it later on,” one said.

  HOME REMODEL

  Setup: In January 2006, a real estate agent in Sandpoint, Idaho, took a couple and their son to look at a rental house near town.

  Surprise! The agent entered the house, turned on a light…and the house exploded. All four of them were blown off the porch and into the snow. There had been a propane leak in the house, and the tiny arc of electricity caused by turning on the light had ignited it. They all had to be flown to Seattle to be treated for burns, but eventually everyone was okay. The house survived, but many of the walls were damaged and all the windows were blown out.

  GOOD NEIGHBORS

  Setup: The couple in the story above, Cody and Jodi Greve-Likkel, and their six-year-old son, Mason, returned home to Idaho a few days later. An ironic twist to their tale was that they were looking at the rental home because their own house had burned down just two months earlier. And they had no insurance.

  Surprise! When they got back home to Sandpoint, they found that people in their community—many of whom didn’t know them at all—had held a fundraiser for them. Besides receiving a generous amount of cash, they were met at the airport by Chud Wendle, owner of Wendle Motors, the local Ford dealership. He presented them with the keys to a new car.

  * * *


  “After twenty years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.”

  —actor and former U.S. Senator Fred Thompson

  …than Paris and more fountains than any city but Rome.

  PIG OUT

  According to statistics, Super Bowl Sunday is more than just a sporting event—it trails only Thanksgiving as America’s biggest food feast. So what’s wrong with a little overindulgence? Read on.

  PUTTING ON THE FEED BAG

  Every year on a Sunday in February, almost half the population of the United States gathers in groups around their TV sets to watch the Super Bowl—130 million people did it in 2005. As they watch, they eat. And eat. According to the Snack Food Association of America, during the Super Bowl Americans will snarf down roughly 30 million pounds of snack food—double the nation’s average daily consumption—including 11.2 million pounds of potato chips, 8.2 million pounds of tortilla chips, 4.3 million pounds of pretzels, 3.8 million pounds of popcorn, 2.5 million pounds of nuts, and 13.2 million pounds of avocados (for guacamole). Here are some more fascinating Super Bowl food facts:

  • Americans spend $50 million on Super Bowl snacks, but that pales next to the $237 million spent on soft drinks.

  • What’s the most popular item sold in food stores on Super Bowl Sunday—beer? Wrong. It’s pizza. In fact, Pizza Hut claims that it sells more pizzas on Super Bowl Sunday than on any other day of the year.

  • During the Super Bowl an average fan might easily pig out on more than 3,000 calories of snack food and beer. (And that’s not taking into account calories consumed with pregame snacks and a postgame dinner and dessert.) A plate of nachos contains around 1,400 calories. A dozen chicken wings with blue-cheese dip adds another 1,000. A 180-pound man would have to jog 18 miles in three hours to burn off all those calories.