The London Hammer

In 1936 Mr and Mrs Hahn, walking by a waterfall on Red Creek near the town of London in Texas, picked up a lump of rock with a piece of wood sticking out of it. The stone was later split and an iron hammer with a wooden handle was inside. The creationist Carl Baugh bought it and opened a museum, announcing it as the tool of an antediluvian man hundreds of millions of years old. The surrounding rock is not Ordovician sandstone but a calcium carbonate concretion, which forms around iron in a matter of years and is common in that creek. The hammer itself matches a pattern of miner's tool mass-produced in Texas in the nineteenth century.