A caricature of the Berners Street hoax. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The Berners Street Hoax
Back in 1809, a man named Theodore Hook made a bet with his friend Samuel Beazley that he could make any house the most popular address in London. They picked a random house on 54 Berners Street that belonged to a woman named Mrs. Tottenham. Theodore proceeded to send Mrs. Tottenham a total of 12 chimney sweeps, lawyers, priests, and other service people. He also ordered multiple wedding cakes, pianos, fish, shoes, and other goods that were all being delivered to the address at the same time. This caused a traffic jam surrounding the house as a large crowd of people began to gather. Theodore and his friends were watching the chaos unfold from a house across the street. The police put out an award for the capture of whoever was responsible for the prank, but he was never caught.
A newspaper clipping of the time hippo meat almost came to America. Credit: Library of Congress
There Was a Campaign For Americans to Start Eating Hippos
In 1910, there was a major monopoly on meat in the United States, which caused meat shortages and price gouging at butcher shops and grocery stores. A senator named Robert Broussard suggested that Americans should start importing hippos from Africa, and let them live in the rivers of Louisiana. Hippos are so large that they could feed a lot of people with their meat. Obviously, Broussard didn’t mention the fact that hippos are incredibly dangerous animals, and it would be a terrible idea to set them free in the wild in the United States. This plan was highly publicized in newspapers, but it never actually came to fruition. Eventually, the meat market stabilized again when there was an increase in “factory farming” across the nation.
