FOOLING THE PUBLIC.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5481, 30 September 1929, Page 3

FOOLING THE PUBLIC.

HOAXES AND DELUSIONS. FRAUDS EXPOSED. Last winter the learned world of France was shaken in a way that it is difficult for us to understand, by the announcement that discoveries at the little village of Glozel, near Vichy, had proved the existence of man in a high state of civilisation in fabulously prehistoric times (states a writer in the Toronto Evening Telegram). Now the Glozel excitement is over and scientists no longer talk of the wonderful beings who lived in France long before the first pyramid of Egypt had raised its head above the desert. Alas, the objects dug up on the farm at Glozel proved to be crude forgeries, planted there to deceive the public. Antiques Were Spurious. Suspicious, the French police took a hand and had 10 of the trophies from the Glozel Museum examined. A bit of grass embedded in a bit of pottery was found under the microscope to have all its cells intact, a thing which could hardly have happened had it been underground for thousands of years. Bits of thread in other pieces of pottery had been coloured with aniline dyes which were not in use prior to the twentieth century. Bone instruments had gelatinous matter in the marrow. Inscriptions had been made with modern steel instruments. Fakes like those of Glozel remind one of Mark Twain’s “prehistoric man,” whom he reported as having been dug up near Virginia City, Nevada. The story, first published in the Virginia City Enterprise, on which the humourist was then a reporter, contained a detailed description of the position in which the body had been found which, had it been carefully read, would have revealed the hoax. Nevertheless it went far and wide, fooling many. Cardiff Giant Hoax. The Cardiff Giant was another hoax. Dug up at Cardiff in New York, about the middle of last century, this strange object was found by a man named Newell. This huge figure, which might have been a statue or a fossil, was lying in a cramped ■ position as though having died in great pain. Newell placed it on exhibition. Then Barnum, the circus man, obtained it, hinting in his advertisements that famous scientists had proclaimed it genuine. As a matter of fact, the so-called giant had been carved from a block of gypsum mined in lowa, by a German sculptor of Chicago, and planted on the Newell farm, near Binghampton, New York. This fake took much money from the public. In 1835 the New York Sun published a report which caused vast excitement. It purported to tell the amazing discoveries made by the British scientist Sir John Hershell, who had been at the Cape of Good Hope observing the moon through a new telescope. It was said that through Hershell’s glass the inhabitants of the earth’s nearest neighbour could be seen at work and at play. Finally a reporter named Locke admitted that he had done the story as a satire on some of the scientific yarns which were being retailed to American readers.

Keely Motor Race. In days gone by “ perpetual motion” was a bait for the unwary whose minds could not grasp its impossibility. In 1812 a man named Redheffer, of Philadelphia, was taken so seriously in this connection that the Pennsylvania Legislature named a commission to examine the machine he had invented. Robert Fulton, the famous engineer, one of the examiners, discovered that the “perpetual motion” came via a catgut cord which led secretly to a neighbouring room, where an old man turned a wheel. But the most famous perpetual motion machine in American history was that of John W. Keeley, which deceived the public for twenty years. Keely, a Philadelphia carpenter, organised, in 1872, the Keely Motor Co. in New York, and took in enough capital to keep him going for a long time. The inventor pretended that in some mysterious manner he could recombine the constituents of the atom and so release vast stores of power. In his inflated moments he boasted that he could run a train from Philadelphia to San Francisco on a single pint of water and a steamer from New York to Liverpool and back on a single gallon. After'his death, examination of his laboratory exposed his apparatus as a fraud, its “atomic energy” coming from an engine in the cellar. Liquid Air Fiasco. In course of time liquid air took the public fancy. Charles E. Triplier, who seems to have been qpite honest in his pretensions, held out high hopes in his engine run by his new scientific discovery. He asserted that by using three gallons of liquid air in his engine he could turn out 10 gallons—giving a clear profit of seven gallons. People foresaw coal and oil and water power displaced, and there were even grave fears that the earth’s supply might in time become exhausted by demands for the new motive power. Of course, Triplier’s project was a failure. It was merely a form of perpetual motion, like trying to manufacture enough electricity from a dynamo to turn that dynamo. Liquid air is still being made in laboratories, but it does not to-day threaten to compete with coal and oil.