Botulism

For a man who left no official writings, French philosopher Jean-Baptiste Botul cut an impressive swath through the early 20th century. Born in 1896, he befriended Marcel Proust, betrothed Marthe Richard, and associated with Simone de Beauvoir, Marie Bonaparte, Jean Cocteau, Jean Giraudoux, Stefan Zweig, and Andre Malraux. At age 50 he resettled in Paraguay, where he founded a town that observed the principles of Kantian philosophy.

Actually, none of that is true. Botul was invented out of whole cloth in 1995 by journalist Frédéric Pagès and promoted by an “Association of the Friends of Jean-Baptiste Botul,” which published works that supposedly advanced his ideas, including The Sexual Life of Immanuel Kant, Nietzsche and the Noonday Demon, and Soft Metaphysics.

The joke has been so successful that an annual prize has been awarded for a work that mentions Botul. The most famous recipient is Bernard-Henri Lévy, who quoted the imaginary philosopher extensively in his 2010 book On War in Philosophy. He acknowledged afterward that he’d fallen for a “well-rigged” hoax.

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Hazard

From an April Fools’ feature in LIFE, April 4, 1938:

https://books.google.com/books?id=40oEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA6

The photo appeared in a German paper, which claimed the story was American. “To Germans, actual American goings-on are fantastic enough to be April Fools’ tricks.”

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Startup Costs

On April 11, 1916, inventor Louis Enricht invited a group of reporters to his Long Island home. He showed them a car with an empty gas tank, filled a porcelain pitcher from a garden hose, stirred in a greenish fluid, poured the mixture into the car’s tank, and signaled his son to crank the engine. The car started up. Enricht announced that he’d discovered a gasoline substitute that could be made for a penny a gallon.

Chemists denounced the claim as impossible, but Henry Ford began talks with the inventor. These broke down over a dispute with the Maxim Munitions Corporation, with which Enricht was apparently also talking.

The affair went quiet for a year, but in November 1917 railroad financier Benjamin Yoakum accused Enricht of treason: Yoakum had been financing the project but now Enricht refused to turn over the formula, and Yoakum feared that he may have sold the secret to the German government. Enricht admitted to meeting with the Germans but insisted that he hadn’t given them the formula — in fact, he’d burned the only copy.

In the early 1920s he promoted a similar scheme, claiming he could produce fuel from peat, but this too remained unsubstantiated, and he ended up in Sing Sing. When he died in 1924, he took the secret to endless gasoline with him. Possibly the whole thing was hot air (he had a long history of swindles). Possibly the secret ingredient was really acetone, which would have fired the car’s engine long enough to persuade onlookers but would produce corrosion and in any event was more costly than gas. And just conceivably his claim was true — but no one’s ever been able to rediscover the formula.

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Side Line

https://archive.org/details/APM10_2/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater

The April 1, 1878, issue of the New York Daily Graphic announced that Thomas Edison had invented a “victuals machine” that would feed the human race:

I made all this food out of the dirt taken from the cellar and water that runs through these pipes. … I believe that in ten years my machines will be used to provide the tables of the civilized world. … I can make cabbages and oranges that have never felt the rain. Nature is full of surprises. Bananas and chocolate can be made out of the very same ingredients, and the methods of combining differ only a trifle.

The last paragraph revealed that the story was a hoax, but many readers didn’t get that far — several newspapers picked up the news, and some readers even tried to order the device. Reporter William Augustus Croffut, who’d concocted the tale, wrote diffidently to Edison on April 4 (above), “Did you see my hoax? And are you in a state of fiery wrath? Or how is it?”

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No Play Zone

https://pixabay.com/en/the-shoals-course-muscle-shoals-1613273/

In an April 3, 1971, letter to the editor of the Saturday Review, reader K. Jason Sitewell reported some alarming news: A congressman named A.F. Day had introduced a bill that would abolish all private parks of more than 50 acres and all public recreation areas that were used by fewer than 150 people a day. The practical effect would be to abolish the nation’s golf courses.

Sitewell said he understood Day’s motive because he’d grown up with him. The congressman’s grandfather had “perished in a sand trap,” and his father had died of a coronary after hitting 19 balls into a pond.

An uproar followed. Country clubs vowed to fight the bill, constituents besieged their representatives, and editorials decried the measure, which Golf World called “as ominous a threat to golf as anything that has come along.”

But eventually it became clear that there was no such bill and readers saw the link between the purported congressman’s name and the date of Sitewell’s letter. It turned out that the whole thing had been a jape cooked up by Review editor and inveterate prankster Norman Cousins.

“I wrote apologies to each subscriber who had been offended or angered,” Cousins wrote. “I begged my golfing friends, who threatened to have me barred from every course in the nation, to forgive me for my joke. I suffered enough every time I played, I told them, and penance was awaiting me on each tee.”

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A Sharp

Antique dealer Leopoldo Franciolini (1844–1920) was so prolific in creating fraudulent musical instruments that scholars are still trying to sort out the confusion he left behind. The modern stewards of Frederick Stearns’ collection write:

In this case, we have an Alto Clarinet in F. … It is a composite instrument with four sections: two are leather-covered maple, … the barrel appears to have been purloined from a bass clarinet … the bell from an oboe. The mouthpiece appears to be re-purposed from a bass clarinet. … The simultaneous crudeness and creativity demonstrated in [Franciolini’s] catalogue is greatly entertaining. More troubling, however, is the shadow cast upon the flawed judgment of Frederick Stearns in his last years of collecting.

The catalog description of a harpsichord in the Stearns collection reads, “One could say that it is the only surviving instrument ever crafted by the maker Rigunini, however, given that not a single person by the name of Rigunini ever seems to have drawn breath, we might assume that Franciolini invented the name and forged the date.”

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The Sleeping Cupid

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giulio_romano,_giove,_national_gallery_di_londra,_forse_copia_del_cupido_di_michelangelo.jpg

A young Michelangelo once aged a sculpture artificially to bring a higher price. He began working on a sleeping cupid in 1495, at age 20, apparently inspired by a sculpture in the Medici Gardens. At the advice of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco he aged it falsely to resemble an antique and then passed it on to a dealer, who sold it to Cardinal Riario of San Giorgio. Riario erupted when he discovered the artifice, and Michelangelo offered to take back the sculpture, but the dealer wouldn’t hear of it, and Michelangelo ultimately kept his share of the money.

The work has since been lost, but it helped to establish the artist’s reputation and first brought him to the notice of patrons in Rome.

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Outsider Art

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boronali_Impression.jpg

This is Sunset Over the Adriatic, a painting exhibited at the 1910 Salon des Indépendants and attributed to the “excessivist” Genoan painter Joachim-Raphaël Boronali.

When critics praised the work, novelist Roland Dorgelès revealed that he’d tied a paintbrush to the tail of a donkey named Lolo to decry the excesses of modern art.

Lolo’s thoughts are not recorded.

See Different Strokes.

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Top Secret

But the most absurd and preposterous of all [ventures offered during the South Sea Bubble], and which shewed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled ‘A company for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.’ Were not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. The man of genius who essayed this bold and successful inroad upon public credulity, merely stated in his prospectus that the required capital was half a million, in five thousand shares of 100l. each, deposit 2l. per share. Each subscriber, paying his deposit, would be entitled to 100l. per annum per share. How this immense profit was to be obtained, he did not condescend to inform them at that time, but promised that in a month full particulars should be duly announced, and a call made for the remaining 98l. of the subscription. Next morning, at nine o’clock, this great man opened an office in Cornhill. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o’clock, he found that no less than one thousand shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was thus, in five hours, the winner of 2000l. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the Continent. He was never heard of again.

— Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1852

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Fore!

In 1962, a burnt golf ball arrived at the botanic gardens at Kew, in southwest London. The head of mycology, R.W.G. Dennis, may have rolled his eyes: The office had received another burnt golf ball 10 years earlier, which the submitter had claimed to be a “rare fungal species.” In that case the staff had got as far as trying to collect spores before they’d realized the hoax.

Twice provoked, Dennis responded in good humor. He published an article titled “A Remarkable New Genus of Phalloid in Lancashire and East Africa,” formally nominating it as a new species of fungus, “Golfballia ambusta,” and describing the specimens as “small, hard but elastic balls used in certain tribal rites of the Caledonians, which take place all season in enclosed paddocks with partially mown grass.” When a third burnt golf ball arrived in 1971, it was accepted into the collection, where all three balls now reside.

That creates a sort of Dadaist dilemma in mycology. By accepting the specimens and publishing a description, Dennis had arguably honored them as a genuine species. The precise definition of a fungus has varied somewhat over time; in publishing his article, Dennis may have been satirically questioning criteria that could accept a nonliving golf ball as a species. But what’s the solution? Some specialists have argued that fungi should be defined as “microorganisms studied by mycologists.” But in that case, points out mycologist Nathan Smith, we should be asking, “Who is a mycologist?”

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