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The Dumbest Get-Rich-Quick Schemes in History

Khalid Elhassan October 30, 2022 33 min

The Dumb Whale Bone Monopoly That Turned Out to be Not So Dumb

A whalebone corset. Victoria and Albert Museum

On another occasion, rival merchants talked Timothy Dexter into another seemingly dumb idea in the hopes of ruining him, and got him to be an ungodly amount of whalebones. 340 tons of whalebones, to be exact. 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.

Another dumb investment that rivals talked Dexter into that turned out not to be so dumb and earned him a good return was bibles. Somebody convinced him that the West Indies were in desperate need of bibles. So Dexter bought thousands of them in New England for pennies on the dollar, and shipped them to the Caribbean. The demand was low at first, until Dexter began to preach that the locals would go to hell, unless they had a Holy Bible at home. It resonated, and he made a huge profit as a result.

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.