Investing one’s lifesavings in a venture to export bed warming pans to the Tropics should result in bankruptcy. Somehow, American businessman made a killing off of that. Just as he made a killing off of an even wackier investment, exporting coal to the epicenter of the world’s coal production at the time. Below are twenty things about those and other fascinating facts from the life of one of America’s weirdest entrepreneurs.
20. Coal to Newcastle
Newcastle in northeast England had a legal monopoly on the region’s enormous coal trade for centuries. That helped the town prosper and develop in a major metropolis. As early as the 1500s, the abundance of coal there birthed the idiom “taking coal to Newcastle“. It is used to this day to signify a pointless attempt to do what is useless and is not needed. In the eighteenth century, however, an eccentric American businessman defied that bit of conventional wisdom and took coal to Newcastle. He made out like a bandit.
