← Back to the front page

How Timothy Dexter Turned Ridiculous Ventures Into Riches

Khalid Elhassan November 22, 2024 13 min

Dexter - Timothy Dexter — Timothy Dexter. New England Legends

6. Cornering the Market on Corsets

A corset from Timothy Dexter’s days. K-Pics

On another occasion, rival merchants talked Timothy Dexter into another seemingly dumb idea in the hopes of ruining him, and got him to invest heavily in whalebones. So he bought 340 tons of whalebones. As it turned out, the dumb investment turned out to not be so dumb. In those days, whalebones were a key ingredient in corsets, and Dexter bought so many of them that he cornered the market. He got to set his own price on whalebones, and unloaded them at a handsome profit.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.