The Curse of the Hope Diamond
The 45-carat blue diamond on show at the Smithsonian in Washington is famous as a stone that destroys its owners: prised from the eye of an Indian idol, it sent Marie Antoinette to the scaffold and ruined the Hope family. The Smithsonian historian Richard Kurin followed every episode through the documents and showed that the legend was assembled and sold by Pierre Cartier around 1910 to persuade Evalyn Walsh McLean to buy the stone — she had told him herself that unlucky things brought her luck. Half the victims never owned the diamond and some never existed. The stone really was cut from the French Blue of the crown jewels, but it was stolen from a storeroom in 1792, not taken from an idol.
The Cardiff Giant
On 16 October 1869 men digging a well on William Newell's farm at Cardiff, near Syracuse, struck a stone man ten feet tall. It cost fifty cents to see, the queue lasted all day, and clergymen argued over whether this was a petrified giant out of Genesis. It had been commissioned by Newell's cousin George Hull, a tobacconist and an atheist who had lost his temper in an argument with a preacher: a block of gypsum hauled from Fort Dodge in Iowa, carved in Chicago, aged with sulphuric acid, stippled with darning needles for pores, and buried a year before it was found. Hull confessed that December. P. T. Barnum, refused the original, exhibited a copy of his own — and the public paid to see both.
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