He never actually said, “There's a sucker born every minute,” but P.T. Barnum understood B.S. could be big business. Take the case of Joice Heth. In 1835, Barnum acquired partial “ownership” of an African-American woman who was alleged to be the slave who raised George Washington. There was reason to be wary of this story, since Washington had died in 1799 at age 67. It was insisted that the timeline still made sense, because she was 161. Barnum charged audiences 25 cents to hear her tell tales of Washington's childhood.
It gets stranger. Heth died in 1836, but Barnum squeezed out one final payday: 1,500 people paid 50 cents each to watch her autopsy. It revealed she was likely about 80, not 160. Refusing to let facts get in the way of a great story, Barnum deepened the deception by leaking to a newspaper that she was in fact still alive.
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