During the oil boom of 1919, Wichita Falls, Texas, was desperate for office space, so investors jumped at developer J.D. McMahon’s offer to build a 480″ high rise downtown.

When the building turned out to be four stories tall, they double-checked the blueprints. McMahon had promised a building 480 inches tall, not 480 feet. And that’s what he’d delivered.

By that time he had decamped with the money.

Marvin Harold Hewitt was bright enough to find schoolwork boring, so he dropped out of high school. That didn’t hold him back:

• To get a job at 23, he claimed he was a Temple University undergraduate and found himself teaching arithmetic, geography, and history at Camp Hill Military Academy in Philadelphia.
• Discovering a taste for teaching, he borrowed the identity of Columbia physicist Julius Ashkin and began teaching calculus, algebra, and trigonometry at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, where he also bluffed his way through managing a physics lab.
• Still posing as Ashkin, he taught analytical and solid geometry, algebra, and physics at the Bemidji State Teachers College in Minnesota; moved to St. Louis University, where he taught graduate courses in nuclear physics, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, and tensor analysis; and arrived finally at the University of Utah, which hired him as a full professor of physics.
• Here his luck finally ran out — a number of people noticed discrepancies in his stories, and he had to admit his real identity and return to his mother in Philadelphia.
• Chastened but not discouraged, he applied next to teach at the University of Arkansas College of Engineering, posing as “George Hewitt,” a former research director of RCA. They hired him, but a former RCA employee exposed him the following spring and he was fired.
• Posing as “Clifford Berry,” he took a job teaching second- and third-year physics and calculus at the New York State Maritime College in the Bronx.
• Posing as “Kenneth P. Yates,” he taught physics at the University of New Hampshire at Durham, where he was finally outed by a suspicious student amid publicity too wide to live down.

In all, Hewitt spent nine years teaching mathematics, engineering, and physics at seven different schools and universities, using forged credentials throughout. “The ease with which Hewitt obtained these jobs fills him with indignation,” reported Life magazine, which profiled him in 1954 when it was all over. “The unquestioning acceptance of a transcript and careless checking of references is, in his fairly expert opinion, a universal weakness throughout the U.S. higher educational system. When he considers what might have happened to a great many people had he made medicine or surgery his field, he shudders.”

Journalist George Shepard Chappell intended his Cruise of the Kawa (1921) as a burlesque on romantic South Sea adventure books — it records author “Walter E. Traprock’s” improbable adventures among the “Filbert Islands” of Polynesia:

The wak-wak has a mouth like a subway entrance and I was told that so great was his appetite for human flesh that when, as occasionally happened, some unfortunate swimmer had been eaten by a shark, a wak-wak was sure to come rushing up and bolt shark, man and all. Consequently I did most of my swimming in the lagoon.

Chappell salted the whole book with nonsense: “Captain Ezra Triplett” is shown holding a flintlock pistol carved out of wood, and the nest of the “Fatu-liva” bird is shown to contain “four snow-white, polka-dotted cubes.” Author Traprock’s other books are even listed as Through Borneo on a Bicycle, Around Russia on Roller Skates, Who’s Hula in Hawaii, and How to Explore, and What.

Inevitably, though, it received several serious reviews, and at least one reader responded to the book’s ad for an excursion to the South Seas in order to “see the cute cannibals.” So — after an interval of bemused blinking, one imagines — Chappell gamely followed it up with My Northern Exposure (1922) and Sarah of the Sahara: a Romance of Nomads Land (1925).

One of the most eminent architects in the kingdom once showed the accompanying photograph to a number of his colleagues. Had they ever seen such an exquisitely carved capital? They had not; and they said so. Then arose disputes as to the precise nature of the architecture. Finally sundry big wagers were made, and then the architect gravely proceeded to explain the structure of the column and its capital. This he did by producing his Malacca walking-stick and a few sprigs of succulent broccoli, such as are seen in Fig. 19. Naturally enough, however, after many abstruse disquisitions on mediæval architecture had been given on the subject of the mysterious pillar, this explanation of the photograph was received in silent disgust.

— William G. FitzGerald, “Some Curiosities of Modern Photography,” Strand, January 1895

In 1959, Down Beat editor Gene Lees invited Don DiMicheal to be his Louisville correspondent. DiMicheal sent an item about blues singer Blind Orange Adams, and Lees ran it, “because I so respected and therefore trusted Don’s knowledge of the earlier forms of jazz and the blues.”

When the issue appeared he got a panicked phone call. “That was a joke,” DiMicheal said. “I thought you’d get a laugh and take it out of my copy. It’s a pun on Blind Lemon Jefferson! Jefferson, Adams — get it?”

“Too late now,” Lees said. He told the magazine’s editors and publisher, and they began inserting joking references to Blind Orange into their copy. “The career of Blind Orange Adams blossomed during those years,” Lees told author Bill Crow for Jazz Anecdotes (2005). “Soon there was mail about him, and DiMicheal went so far as to rent a postal box and to found the Blind Orange Adams Appreciation Society.”

The joke reached its peak when Lees received a letter from a New York record label that wanted to find and record Adams. “I tried a desperate ploy. I wrote to the company saying that Blind Orange didn’t trust people, and the only one he would deal with was DeMicheal. He would agree to do an album only if DeMicheal and I produced it.” He planned to record saxophonist Eddie Harris as the mysterious singer, but the record label insisted on meeting their artist.

“I can no longer say with certainty what we did to resolve the situation,” Lees said, “but I seem to recall that Don wrote a story killing Blind Orange off in a car crash.”

In 1871 a man calling himself Lord Gordon-Gordon arrived in Minneapolis. He said he had come to purchase about 50,000 acres of Minnesota land to resettle some tenants from his ancestral estates in Scotland. After selecting the land he traveled to New York, ostensibly to arrange a transfer of funds. There his apparent wealth attracted financier Jay Gould and editor Horace Greeley, and the three formed a partnership to gain a controlling interest in the troubled Erie Railroad. Gould gave his new friend $1 million in cash and securities as a gesture of good faith.

When Gould discovered that Gordon-Gordon was selling these, he realized he had been conned, but the swindler fled to Canada before he could be tried. There he escaped an attempt to kidnap him and eluded capture until 1874. When officers finally confronted him with charges of larceny and forgery, he drew a revolver and shot himself.

To this day, his real identity remains unknown. A Scottish peer he certainly was not: It turned out that before coming to America he had swindled Englishmen and Scotsmen out of some $50,000 while posing as “Lord Glencairn.” “Whatever and whoever he was,” writes historian Edward Harold Mott, “he had genius enough to deceive the shrewdest financiers, the greatest editor, and the most brilliant lawyers of this country.”