9 Bizarre Historical Fads That Actually Happened

Somewhere near you sits a shoebox of Beanie Babies, tags still attached, sealed in 1998 by a sensible adult who had run the numbers and concluded that a purple bear full of plastic pellets would cover a semester of tuition. It did not. Every era leaves a fossil.

So we went hunting for crazes with paperwork. Dates, named originators, prize money, the occasional coroner. Nine made the cut. One is not funny, and it stays because it explains why a great deal of workplace safety law exists. Let’s kick things off in a Dutch flower market.

1. Tulip Mania, 1634 to 1637

The Dutch Republic really did spend three years bidding up flower bulbs. A single Semper Augustus, streaked by a virus nobody then understood, carried an asking price near 10,000 guilders, thirty times a craftsman’s annual wage. In February 1637 buyers stopped turning up to auction. Then the myth took over. The historian Anne Goldgar went through the archives and found a trade confined to a few hundred merchants and comfortable artisans, dealing in forward contracts on which almost no money actually changed hands. The sold looms and the ruined families arrived in 1841, courtesy of a Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay.

2. Mummy Unrolling Parties, 1830s London

Thomas Pettigrew was a London surgeon who found his true calling taking the bandages off dead Egyptians in front of a paying crowd. He published History of Egyptian Mummies in 1834, and that January unwrapped a Twenty-first Dynasty mummy at the Royal College of Surgeons to a sold-out room, working layer by layer, lifting out amulets. Tickets ran out. The habit stuck. When Alexander, 10th Duke of Hamilton, died in 1852, he had already engaged Pettigrew to mummify him and lay him in a Ptolemaic sarcophagus bought in Paris in 1836. It had been carved for a woman. The Duke’s legs were broken so he would fit.

3. Arsenic Complexion Wafers, 1880s to the 1920s

Pale skin was the goal and the shortcut was poison. Dr. James P. Campbell’s Safe Arsenic Complexion Wafers were sold from 146 West 16th Street in New York from at least 1886, promising to clear freckles, blackheads and what the copy called “muddy” skin. Britain had its own brand, Dr MacKenzie’s Improved Harmless Arsenic Complexion Wafers, by March 1896. Buyers nibbled them like after-dinner mints. They worked, in the narrow sense that arsenic destroys red blood cells and anaemic people look pale. There is no evidence Dr. Campbell was a real man. There is evidence of the wafers: Hildegarde Walton, eighteen, died in St. Louis in 1911 after several boxes. The Smithsonian holds a surviving package, which makes the worst of Temu look responsible.

4. Flagpole Sitting, 1924 to 1930

In January 1924 a Hollywood cinema paid a former steeplejack named Alvin Kelly to sit on a pole outside and promote a new picture. Kelly, who went by “Shipwreck”, lasted 13 hours and 13 minutes. Newspapers ran it. He spent the decade touring twenty-eight cities, sat 23 days over Carlin’s Park in Baltimore, and logged 49 days and one hour on a flagpole 225 feet above the Steel Pier at Atlantic City. Food went up by rope. He said he slept upright with his thumbs wedged into drilled holes, so a slump would wake him. Children copied him from garage roofs. Then the Depression came and nobody would pay a man to sit still.

5. Radium Everything, 1925 to 1932

William J. Bailey sold Radithor out of East Orange, New Jersey: half an ounce of triple-distilled water guaranteed to hold at least one microcurie each of radium-226 and radium-228. A dollar a bottle. He moved over 400,000. Eben Byers, a Pittsburgh steel executive and former US amateur golf champion, hurt his arm in 1927, got a prescription from his own doctor, and drank three bottles a day for three years. He died on 31 March 1932 at 51, most of his jaw removed, holes opened in his skull, buried in a lead-lined coffin. The Federal Trade Commission had ordered Bailey to drop the claims that December. Bailey later died of bladder cancer. The Museum of Radiation and Radioactivity still keeps bottles.

Here we stop making jokes. At the U.S. Radium Corporation in Orange, New Jersey, young women painting glowing watch dials were told to shape their brushes with their lips between strokes, all day, for years. Grace Fryer and four colleagues sued in May 1927 and settled out of court in 1928 for $10,000 each, an annuity of $600 a year and medical costs. They were already dying when they filed.

6. Dance Marathons, 1923 to the late 1930s

On 2 March 1923 a dance instructor named Alma Cummings went 27 straight hours at the Audubon Ballroom in New York, wearing out six partners. Her record fell nine times inside three weeks. By the Depression it had hardened into something grim and commercial: 45 minutes upright out of every hour, twelve meals a day eaten while shuffling, 15 minutes of sleep at a stretch on cots wheeled onto the floor. The money was the point. Mike Ritof and Edith Boudreaux logged 5,154 hours and 48 minutes at Chicago’s Merry Garden Ballroom for a $2,000 purse. Homer Morehouse had collapsed and died after 87 hours in 1923. Boston banned marathons, then Los Angeles, Seattle and New York. Hollywood turned up late and put Jane Fonda in one of these ballrooms for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

7. Goldfish Swallowing, 1939

A Harvard freshman named Lothrop Withington Jr. bet his classmates $10 that he could swallow a live fish, and on 3 March 1939 he collected, putting away a three-inch goldfish in front of a Boston reporter. His only complaint was that the scales caught slightly going down. Within weeks it was an intercollegiate arms race. Penn managed 25. MIT reached 42. By April a Clark University student named Joseph Deliberato had reportedly got through 89. Then the adults intervened. State senator George Krapf filed a bill to preserve the fish from cruel and wanton consumption, the Animal Rescue League leaned on the colleges, and it evaporated by summer. A British twenty-year-old was recently fined £200 and banned from keeping animals for filming a revival.

8. Phone Booth Stuffing, 1959

On 20 March 1959, twenty-five male students at the YMCA in Durban, South Africa, got at least the greater portion of themselves inside one standard upright telephone booth. They ranged from 5 feet 4 to 6 feet 2. The phone rang. Nobody could answer it. Attempts followed in Britain, Canada, Southern Rhodesia and along the American west coast. Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, got a Life photographer to shoot a daylight reenactment that same month. The rules never resolved. Did all of you have to be inside, or would a foot in the door do? It was over by the end of the year, and the Durban twenty-five have never been beaten.

9. The Pet Rock, 1975

Gary Dahl was a freelance copywriter in Los Gatos, California, who, listening to friends complain about their pets in a bar, pointed out that a rock asks for nothing. He bought smooth grey stones from Rosarito Beach in Mexico for pennies, bedded them on straw in a cardboard carrier with air holes, and launched in August 1975. Just under four dollars each. He cleared about 95 cents a unit and sold close to 1.5 million. The real product was the writing. Every rock shipped with a 32-page booklet, The Care and Training of Your Pet Rock, covering commands, house-training and the animal’s natural gift for playing dead, played entirely straight. You can still read it. The craze ran six months and expired after Christmas 1975, by which point Dahl was a millionaire, having sold a rock to a million and a half people who knew exactly what they were buying.