On 16 October 1869, two workmen were digging a well behind a barn on William Newell's farm near the village of Cardiff, in upstate New York. A few feet down, a shovel struck stone.

They dug around it, expecting a boulder. Instead, they uncovered a foot. Then a leg. Then, lying on its side in the mud, the whole body of a man — a man more than ten feet tall, made of stone.

By the next day, word had spread. Within a week, people were arriving by the thousand.

A petrified man

Newell put up a tent over the pit and charged admission. Visitors filed past to stare at the giant: grey, wrinkled, one hand resting on its stomach, its face peaceful, as though it had lain down to sleep and turned to stone.

Opinions divided at once. Some believed it was a petrified human being — perhaps one of the giants mentioned in the Book of Genesis. Others thought it was an ancient statue, carved by some forgotten people. A few experts were sceptical from the start.

The price of admission rose. A group of businessmen bought a stake in the giant and moved it to the nearby city of Syracuse to show to bigger crowds.

The man behind the giant

The giant was the creation of George Hull, a tobacconist from Binghamton, New York, and William Newell's cousin. According to his own account, the idea came to him after an argument with a Methodist preacher about whether the Bible's mention of giants should be taken literally. Hull wanted to show how easily people could be persuaded.

In 1868, he had a huge block of gypsum quarried in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and shipped to Chicago, where stonecutters carved it into a reclining man. To make it look ancient, it was beaten with steel needles to imitate skin pores and stained with acid. Then it was shipped in secret to Newell's farm and buried behind the barn. A year later, Newell hired the well diggers.

The fake of the fake

The great showman P. T. Barnum heard about the giant and wanted it for his own exhibitions. When the owners refused to sell, Barnum simply had a copy made — and exhibited his giant in New York City, claiming that his was the real one and the one in Syracuse was a fake.

For a while, crowds in New York were paying to see a fake of a fake, while the owners of the original sued Barnum for calling their giant a fraud. The judge reportedly said that Barnum could hardly be blamed for calling a fake a fake, if the original turned out to be one too.

Exposed

Scientists who examined the giant closely were not convinced. Othniel Marsh, a palaeontologist at Yale University, declared it a recent fake, pointing out fresh tool marks and noting that gypsum would dissolve in the wet ground of a farm.

By the end of 1869, Hull admitted the whole thing. The giant was a carving, barely a year old.

It didn't matter much to the crowds. People kept coming to see both giants — partly to see what all the fuss had been about.