Futility Closet - 271-The Fraudulent Life of Cassie Chadwick

Episode Date: November 4, 2019

In 1902, scam artist Cassie Chadwick convinced an Ohio lawyer that she was the illegitimate daughter of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. She parlayed this reputation into a life of unthinkable extravagance -- until her debts came due. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll describe Chadwick's efforts to maintain the ruse -- and how she hoped to get away with it. We'll also encounter a haunted tomb and puzzle over an exonerated merchant. Intro: Inventor Otis L. Boucher offered a steel suit for soldiers during World War I. The tippe top leaps up onto its stem when spun. Sources for our feature on Cassie Chadwick: Kerry Segrave, Women Swindlers in America, 1860-1920, 2014. Alan F. Dutka, Misfortune on Cleveland's Millionaires' Row, 2015. George C. Kohn, The New Encyclopedia of American Scandal, 2001. William Henry Theobald, Defrauding the Government: True Tales of Smuggling, From the Note-book of a Confidential Agent of the United States Treasury, 1908. Karen Abbott, "The High Priestess of Fraudulent Finance," Smithsonian.com, June 27, 2012. "Chadwick, Cassie L.," Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (accessed Oct. 20, 2019). Lindsay Kernohan, "Cassie Chadwick: A Very Double Life," Strathroy [Ontario] Age Dispatch, May 17, 2018, A7. Sadie Stein, "Impostors Among Us," Town and Country, February 2017. "Top 10 Imposters," Time, May 26, 2009. "Mrs. Chadwick Measured," Poughkeepsie Journal, Dec. 30, 2004, C.1. "Femme Fatale," D&B Reports 40:4 (July/August 1992), 47. "Cassie Chadwick's Jewels," The Bankers Magazine 106:3 (March 1923), 551. Arthur B. Reeve, "New and Old South Sea Bubbles," World's Work 41:1 (November 1920), 31-35. C.P. Connolly, "Marvelous Cassie Chadwick," McClure's Magazine 48:1 (November 1916), 9-11, 65-71. Walter Prichard Eaton, "The Gullible Rich," Munsey's Magazine 46:3 (December 1911), 335-340. "Cassie Chadwick Fretted Life Away in Ohio Prison," Cañon City [Colo.] Record 30:42 (October 17, 1907), 12. "Cassie Chadwick Dies in Prison," New York Times, Oct. 11, 1907. "Mrs. Chadwick Broken Down," Chickasha [Indian Territory] Daily Express, Feb. 19, 1907. "Mrs. Chadwick's Sentence," New York Times, March 28, 1905. "Carnegie Sees Note; Laughs at Bad Spelling of Chadwick Trust Agreement," New York Times, March 6, 1905. "Mr. Carnegie on Hand for Chadwick Trial," New York Times, March 5, 1905. "Chadwick Indictments," New York Times, Feb. 22, 1905. "Motion to Quash," St. John Daily Sun, Feb. 28, 1905. "Tracing Chadwick Satchel," New York Times, Dec. 22, 1904. "Nearly Collapsed in Court," [Fredericksburg, Va.] Daily Star, Dec. 19, 1904. "Meeting Dramatic," Associated Press, Dec. 16, 1904. "Chadwick Paper Out Is Over $19,000,000," New York Times, Dec. 11, 1904. "Trail of Mrs. Chadwick," Carroll [Iowa] Herald, Dec. 7, 1904. Listener mail: C.H. Shanan, "The Haunted Tomb," Wide World Magazine 35:207 (July 1915), 281-285. (Listener Peter Atwood found this story through the podcast Reading, Short and Deep, Episode 188.) Wikipedia, "The Wide World Magazine" (accessed Oct. 26, 2019). "The Wide World Magazine," The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia (accessed Oct. 23, 2019). "Biography: The Boer War," The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia (accessed Oct. 23, 2019). Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Arthur Conan Doyle" (accessed Oct. 23, 2019). "Govt Mulling Over 1400-km Long Great 'Green Wall' to Tackle Land Desertification," News 18 India, Oct. 9, 2019. Vishwa Mohan, "Government Plans 1,400km Long Great 'Green Wall' of India," Times of India, Oct. 9, 2019. Aryn Baker, "Can a 4,815-Mile Wall of Trees Help Curb Climate Change in Africa?", Time, Sept. 12, 2019. Tony Hoare, "Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake," QCon 2009. Wikipedia, "Tony Hoare" (accessed Oct. 23, 2019). The Chambers Dictionary. Chambers' 500 entertaining words. This week's lateral thinking puzzle was devised by Greg. Here's a corroborating link (warning -- this spoils the puzzle). You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on Google Podcasts, on Apple Podcasts, or via the RSS feed at https://futilitycloset.libsyn.com/rss. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- you can choose the amount you want to pledge, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from a mobile fort to a perplexing top. This is episode 271. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1902, scam artist Cassie Chadwick convinced an Ohio lawyer that she was the illegitimate daughter of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. She parlayed this reputation into a life of unthinkable extravagance until her debts came due. In today's show, we'll describe Chadwick's efforts to maintain the ruse and how she hoped to get away with it.

We'll also encounter a haunted tomb and puzzle over an exonerated merchant. Elizabeth Bigley was born into unremarkable circumstances in Eastwood, Ontario in 1857, the fifth of eight children of a section hand on the Great Western Railway. She was very bright and did well in school, though she was unpopular and said to be peculiar. From an early age, she favored jewelry and fine clothing, though these were beyond her family's means, and her sister later said that she always seemed to be absorbed in thought, sitting in silence for hours. It appears she was thinking of fine things and how to get them. In 1879, at age 22, she spread rumors that she was an heiress,

bought an expensive organ, and forged a local farmer's name to cover the debt. She moved to Cleveland to live with her sister and her husband, who discovered that one night, when they'd been out of the house, she had mortgaged their furniture. When they kicked her out, she moved to a different section of Cleveland, where she met Dr. Wallace S. Springsteen, whom she married in December 1883. The marriage lasted 12 days before the doctor sought a divorce. She'd run up large debts to merchants, and it was said the creditors seized even his stethoscope. A clear pattern began to emerge. She committed frauds in order to live an extravagant lifestyle,

and when she was caught, she moved on and started over. She went through a succession of false names, sometimes posing as a clairvoyant, and led a succession of gullible men into brief marriages in which she incurred large debts. To escape responsibility, she would leave town. In at least one case, she faked her death. Generally, she managed to evade punishment. One exception occurred in Toledo in 1890, when she duped a local express clerk into cooperating in a forgery scheme. The clerk was released, but she was sentenced to nine and a half years in the penitentiary and paroled after three and a half. These early frauds were so widespread and often successful that their full extent will probably never be known, but it's clear that she was intelligent, resourceful, ambitious, and brilliantly persuasive.

It was said that it was impossible to refuse her what she wanted. One newspaper called her the Lady of the Hypnotic Eye. In 1896, she seemed to get everything she wanted when she married Dr. Leroy S. Chadwick, a wealthy physician in Cleveland. She moved into his 16-room brick home on Millionaire's Row, where reportedly she had her own retinue of servants, an automobile, and carriages. For six years, she devoted herself to living quietly, honestly, and extravagantly. Those who knew her in those years affirmed that nothing in the world surpassed the thrill of shopping with Cassie Chadwick. She decorated the home like an oriental palace and spent thousands on gowns, furnishings, jewelry, and plate. It was said that she imported more valuable items than anyone in Cleveland.

She bought a pipe organ, a perpetual motion clock, a musical chair. She bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of diamonds and pearls, sculptures from the Far East, furniture from Europe, and custom-made hats and clothing from New York. She seems to have had no reason to return to her life of duplicity, but in the spring of 1902, she embarked on a new plan, and one that was more audacious than anything in her past. She took a train from Cleveland to New York, waited in the lobby of the Handsome House Hotel, and there bumped innocently into James Dillon, a lawyer and a friend of her husband. She told him what a delightful coincidence it was to meet him there, and mentioned that she was in town on private business. In fact, she was just on her

way to her father's house. Would he escort her there? He held a carriage, and she directed it to 2 East 91st Street, a four-story mansion that belonged to the steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie. She asked Dylan to wait in the carriage and said she'd be back shortly. At the house, she presented herself and said she was thinking of hiring a maid who had worked there, Hilda Schmidt. The servants expressed some confusion. They knew of no one by that name. She managed to stretch the encounter to half an hour, then thanked them and left, withdrawing a large envelope from her coat. When she got back to the carriage, she confided to Dylan that she was Andrew Carnegie's illegitimate daughter and that he periodically gave her sums of money out of a sense of guilt and responsibility.

The envelope, she said, contained two promissory notes and securities valued at $5 million. She said that she had other notes from Carnegie at home and that she'd inherit millions from him when he died. She asked Dillon not to tell anyone about this, trusting that he'd tell everyone. He did. When she visited the Wade Park Banking Company of Cleveland in 1903, she found that the secretary, Ira Reynolds, was very pleased to see her. She told him that the package she was carrying contained securities worth $5 million, and she wanted to deposit them for safekeeping. She would call for them in 1907 and collect the accumulated interest at that time. She gave him a memorandum listing all the securities in the package. Reynolds ought to have inspected the contents for himself before signing his name to it, but Cassie Chadwick was

a very important customer, and he was a lifelong friend of her husband. When he hesitated, she expressed indignation that he would doubt her word, so he signed the memorandum. That was all she needed. Under their agreement, the seal couldn't be broken until 1907, and with her copy of the memorandum, Cassie Chadwick now had a receipt for some five million dollars that didn't exist. With that, she could easily get more loans, and she began to seek them at banks all over the country. One of her standard tactics was to approach a prominent lawyer who handled banking business and tell him she was very wealthy but temporarily embarrassed and needed a loan immediately. Further, she didn't want to tell her husband because he didn't know how much she was really worth. When the banker

asked what securities she had, she presented the memorandum indicating that Reynolds was holding $5 million for her. She said she didn't want to sell the securities themselves, but she accepted a high rate of interest and offered the banker a bonus of $10,000 for making the loan. A wise banker should have been suspicious at that, but most of them could not see past the lucrative deal in front of them. And there seemed to be no risk. If she couldn't repay the loan, the collateral was a package of securities backed by Andrew Carnegie himself. It's amazing how much of this depends on just that one moment when Reynolds decided for social reasons not to inspect the package. She's about to build a whole pyramid on top of that one little moment of sort of social awkwardness. I wonder what she would have done if he had inspected it.

Yeah, she'd be, I guess, guilty of a crime right there on the spot. I mean, given what turned out to be the package. So she's taking a bit of a risk. Yeah, this is, I mean, it's even more audacious than it seems at first blush. One of the most lamentable victims in all of this was C.G. Beckwith, the 65-year-old president of the Citizens National Bank of Oberlin, Ohio. Beckwith was one of Oberlin's most respected citizens. He'd begun his career with the bank when he was 18 years old and worked his way all the way to the top. He trusted Cassie Chadwick on the strength of a recommendation from bankers in Elyria, Ohio, and he trusted her enormously, lending her not only $240,000 of his bank's funds, but a further $120,000 from his private fortune. All of this was built on sand,

but Cassie had run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in such loans before a Boston banker named Herbert Newton brought the spree to an end. He'd loaned Cassie Chadwick nearly $200,000, but by November 1904, he concluded that she had no intention of repaying it and started legal proceedings against her. As her reputation finally began to founder, rumors began to surface of Cassie's past life as a fraudster. She denied the insinuation emphatically, and she was backed up at first by the faithful C.G. the insinuation emphatically, and she was backed up at first by the faithful C.G. Beckwith of the Oberlin Bank, who called her a woman of spotless record. Beckwith was caught in a tightening circle. He was pledging his confidence even as his own bank directors began to fear he'd been deceived. He said, I thought then, and I think now, that in

some respect she was the most remarkable woman I had ever seen. She was a splendid conversationalist, and there was no subject that seemed foreign to her. She said that she needed money, and I thought from what she said that I was not assuming an unusual risk by letting her have it. He added, I have seen three chests full of jewels owned by Mrs. Chadwick. There were diamonds worth a king's ransom. Apparently she took great delight in displaying them. She would hold them in her hand and fondle them. Her jewels alone must have been worth $500,000. I think I have one photograph of Cassie Chadwick, and she just looks like an ordinary person. We've talked about some other people on this show in the past. There seem to be some people who were just born with this amazing, compelling aura about them.

Some kind of personal magnetism. And if you're 100 years later, and you're looking at a picture of them, you can't see it at all. And you wonder, why on earth is everyone just falling for this? But whatever it was, she discovered she had it. And apparently it was very strong in her case. Cassie plied Beckwith with excuses that seemed increasingly thin. She told him that her wealth was managed by three trustees, one of whom was named William Baldwin. Nothing could be done without that man's approval, she said. Beckwith tried doggedly to reach Baldwin and had to conclude finally that he was a fiction. Cassie next claimed that she had to negotiate a power of attorney with a Pittsburgh bank

and maintained that this would take time. But by now Beckwith's bank was running out of cash and the directors were putting more and more pressure on him to find a solution. The New York Times later revealed how Cassie contrived to put off the bank officials who came to her home. On one visit by Beckwith, his cashier, and two bank directors, Cassie, quote, kept calling them from the room singly to converse in private. She promised both personal rewards and rewards for the bank for the accommodation that had been extended, and artfully explained that to rush things might spoil everything. Every few minutes, a maid would come

into the room saying that madam was wanted on the telephone or that a telegram had just been received, all calculated, as the banker now sees, to assist in the attempts to allay suspicion and bolster up the hope that relief was at hand. She held them off, but on the Monday after Thanksgiving, Beckwith's bank was forced to close its doors and Beckwith himself was said to suffer a mental and physical collapse. This was, let's remember, even before women could vote. So as audacious as all this sounds, it was even more so in the context of that time when women didn't have nearly as much power and respect as they do now. I mean, it's impressive looking at it from this remove,

but it's even more if you imagine what it was like to the people. These were supposed to be shrewd, powerful men who were very discerning and experienced, and she just had them wrapped around her finger. Do you think maybe that the sexism worked in her favor because they would think, oh, women wouldn't be capable of such a complicated deceit? I bet that was in there. Yeah, that might have helped her. During the same period, Cassie had also been holding off

Herbert Newton, the Boston banker who had first raised the alarm. She claimed that the securities were controlled by a party whose name she wouldn't divulge as security for a loan she'd negotiated. As a result, she said she couldn't touch them. Lawyers for Newton confronted Ira Reynolds, the Wade Park bank secretary who had so unwisely foreborn to inspect Cassie's package of securities. But Reynolds would release only the memo that listed its contents, some stock in U.S. steel, shares in an American railroad, some gold bonds, and an enormous block of stock in the Caledonian Railway of Scotland. He said he would have no objection to letting them see the securities if Cassie agreed, but she didn't. The lingering question of Cassie's past was resolved dramatically on December 15, 1904, when two former employees of an Ohio penitentiary confirmed that she'd been jailed

there for forgery as Madam Lydia Devere. By that time, she was being held in a county jail. C.G. Beckwith visited her there that afternoon, supported by his wife. He said, Mrs. Chadwick, you have ruined me, but I'm not so sure yet you are a fraud. I have stood by you to my last dollar, and I do think now that the time has come for you to make known everything in relation to this thing. She said nothing. To this day, no one knows the full extent of Cassie Chadwick's takings. As of December 25, 1904, her known debts

totaled $633,000, but it's thought that many of her victims never came forward. Victims were still coming to light in November 1907 when it was revealed that she had received a loan of nearly $800,000 from the president and vice president of the Pressed Steel Car Company of Pittsburgh. That brought the total amount of her fraudulent takings to $1.4 million, or about $40 million today. Oh my gosh. Where did it all go? It appears she used it to support an absurdly lavish lifestyle. An inventory of her personal property filed by a bankruptcy trustee included a mammoth pipe organ that cost $8,000,

two elaborate revolving urns of French china, and a dozen rare Colport china plates. At Christmas 1903, she had bought eight pianos to give to friends. Two years earlier, she had taken seven Cleveland girls to Europe, paying all their expenses and buying gifts for them. For a week-long shopping trip to New York City, she had chosen first one hotel and then another. Rather than cancel the first reservation, she had simply paid for both sets of rooms. It was reported she would walk into the dining room of a hotel at noon dressed as if she were ready to go to the opera. She would wear evening clothes, and her fingers and throat would glisten with jewels. At her home in Cleveland, she had ordered valuable Parisian rugs to be

thrown out because she was tired of looking at them. She'd order three cabs at once because she would ride only behind bay horses and wanted to increase her chances of getting one. She feared redheads and once turned away a new maid for that reason. The agency sent a second woman, who was also unfortunately a redhead. Cassie said, Go away. Get out of my sight. Go back to the agency and tell the manager not to send any more redheaded girls. I won't have them around.

She judged things by their prices and insisted on paying top dollar even for small toilet articles. One contemporaneous account said, If a thing didn't cost enough to suit her, she would order it thrown away. As a result, in the end, many of her paintings and pieces of china were valued at much lower figures than she'd paid for them. The total valuation of her personal property was $31,123, and the real estate was appraised at $41,190. Cassie Chadwick went to trial in March 1905. She was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud a national bank and sentenced to 10 years in the penitentiary. At the train station, 10 police officers held back the crowd. When a reporter asked for an interview, she said, what more can the world want to know about me now? He wrote, She died in the penitentiary hospital ward on October 10, 1907.

There were no friends or relatives at her bedside. Her son had been summoned but didn't arrive in time. She was 50 years old. The whole time I was researching this story, I kept asking myself how on earth she planned to get away with it. In effect, she just declared one day that she had five million dollars and then sailed along on the strength of that claim. But the truth was bound to catch up with her, and when it did, she'd go to jail. Why would anyone do that to herself? But I think I understand it now. When the package was finally opened, it contained a purported trust agreement between Andrew Carnegie and Cassie Chadwick, and that contained provisions saying that if Carnegie died, then the trust would terminate immediately and everything would vest absolutely in Cassie. So if she'd managed to keep borrowing until Carnegie had died, then she could hope to invoke the trust, claim an inheritance,

and the whole fraud might stand up. She wasn't crazy. She had a plan. But it doesn't appear that the plan would have worked. The day before Cassie's trial, someone showed the trust agreement to Carnegie. It was said that as he read it, he smiled, and the smile broadened until he burst into a laugh. He said, if anybody had seen this paper and then really believed that I had drawn it up and signed it, I could hardly have been flattered. He pointed out that it was full of errors in spelling and punctuation, and he said, why, I have never drawn up any document that even resembles this agreement in all my life, and I have not signed a note in the last 30 years. That knowledge arrived far too late to help Cassie Chadwick. If she felt any remorse for the harm she'd caused, it's not recorded. One observer wrote in 1908,

summing up, one word might be said to soften the heinousness of this woman's not recorded. One observer wrote in 1908, summing up, one word might be said to soften the heinousness of this woman's many offenses. Though she defrauded the nation and swindled our magnates, at least she did not plunder the poor. Keep this charitable thought with you, reader, rather than the remembrance of her sins. In episode 265, the main story was about an enormous hedge that ran for more than a thousand miles across India for a few decades in the 19th century as part of a British customs line to enforce a tax on salt. The customs line was abandoned in 1879, and the hedge, which had required considerable upkeep, was gradually dismantled or decayed.

We had remarked on how odd it was that this massively ambitious project was mostly completely forgotten about, and fairly soon after its demise. Peter Atwood wrote to let us know that someone remembered it, at least in 1915. Hello, Greg and Sharon. By coincidence, I had just learned about the Great Hedge of India. A story titled The Haunted Tomb is set at a tomb on the border of the Great Hedge. It was published in 1915 by a C.H. Shannon. And Peter said that he heard about this story on a podcast called Reading Short and Deep, which coincidentally ran their episode just a few days

before our episode on the hedge. And he included a link to a PDF of the story, which was published in the Wide World magazine in July 1915. The table of contents page of this issue of the magazine explicitly states that for anyone who wants to submit true stories of adventure, that every narrative must be strictly true in every detail and a written statement to this effect must be furnished. Shannon, the author of the story, asserts that the story was told to him while he was serving in India as an assistant engineer in the Indian Public Works Department, and he says that several officers of the SALT department have assured me that the narrative is true in every detail. Shannon relates a story about a tomb near the hedge of the old customs line, which many years earlier had been thought to be haunted, as various people described seeing some sort of

terrifying ghost or demon near the tomb. People began to avoid the area, but eventually the apparition was revealed to have been a very large hyena whose head had been chemically treated so that it would glow, and that had apparently been trained by salt smugglers in order to scare people away from the area. The story does include a footnote by the editor that notes that Sir A. Conan Doyle makes use of an exactly similar device in his Hound of the Baskervilles. And as a note, the Hound of the Baskervilles was first serialized in the Strand magazine in 1901 and then published as a book in 1902. The Haunted Tomb was published in 1915, but the author claims that the story was told to him 15 years earlier, so he is in effect saying that his story predates the Doyle story. Wikipedia tells me that The Wide World was a

British monthly magazine that was published from 1898 to 1965 and that described itself as an illustrated magazine of true narrative featuring true life, adventure, and travel stories with a motto of truth is stranger than fiction. But Wikipedia does report on at least one highly publicized story that they ran that was exposed as a hoax. The hosts of Reading Short and Deep speculate whether the author of the haunted tomb was actually Doyle himself. Wikipedia says that Doyle did publish some stories using his own name in the wide world, and I found a reference to the magazine publishing a 14-part series he wrote in 1901 and 1902 titled The Great Boer War.

Doyle had served in a medical capacity during the war in South Africa. But other than the similarity to The Hound of the Baskervilles, I'm not sure what other evidence there is that Shannon is actually Doyle. The podcast hosts also speculate that because of several specific details that are given about that area of India, that the author had been there himself, and that would fit with what the magazine was trying to go for. But from what I found, Doyle was never in India. Still, for our purposes, it's interesting to see that in 1915, the hedge was still known about by at least some people outside of the local area.

Yeah. And I guess as to whether it's true... It seems pretty unlikely. It's unlikely. There's nothing supernatural in it in the end. Right, right. I mean, theoretically, it's possible. There was an extra large hyena that managed to be trained and have his head treated with chemicals. And this all happened to be just like the Hound of the Baskervilles, only predating it. Yeah, the hedge does make a spooky setting. I hadn't thought about that till I read the story. Yeah. And Michael Fridman wrote to let us know about a possible new Great Hedge of India. The Indian government is considering

creating a 1,400 kilometer long and five kilometer wide green wall from Porbandar to Panipat, running along the Aravalli hill range. But this new living wall will be intended to help restore degraded land, check the spread of the tar desert, and act as a barrier for dust from the desert. The project hasn't yet been officially approved and the exact details still need to be worked out, but the Times of India reports that the Indian government sees the project as a national priority with a goal of restoring 26 million hectares of currently degraded land by 2030. And apparently this is being modeled after a 4,815 mile great green wall of trees that's intended

to run the width of Africa to help combat climate change and desertification, which I didn't know was a word until I was researching this, but which means that land is turning into desert due to deforestation, climate conditions, and or over farming. The African Wall is the goal of an $8 billion plan to reforest 247 million acres of degraded land from Senegal to Djibouti. The project was launched in 2007 by the African Union with funding by the World Bank, the European Union, and the United Nations. Currently, work is underway on almost 15% of the wall, and Time ran an article in September describing how volunteers from 27 countries were pitching in to plant trees in Senegal. The hope is for the Great Green Wall to also be completed in 2030. You think those projects would be better known because they're so

dramatic? Yeah, I hadn't heard about either of them. And that's a really intriguing idea in both cases. Also in episode 265, I discussed how a California man got a license plate for his car that read null and then got sent every ticket in the California ticketing database that didn't have a value in the field for license plate, as the lack of a value for a variable can equate to the term null in many programming languages. Daniel Summers wrote, howdy y'all. The whole issue of null has been a recurring segment and the one from your latest episode made me literally laugh out loud while I was driving when I heard about the guy getting all the tickets. That shows how we programmers often fail to think

through alternative outcomes of our solutions. The man who invented the concept of the null reference, a reference that doesn't actually refer to anything, has called it his billion-dollar mistake. That concept is why most languages have a null keyword, or at least the concept, in their syntax. It wasn't all bad, though. The concept of null in data storage enabled early relational databases to require much less storage than they otherwise would have, all other things being equal, of course. Who's to say what would have been invented if that concept hadn't already existed? My son's new cat Annabelle says mew to Sasha. Sir Charles Anthony Richard Hoare, commonly known as Tony Hoare, is a British computer scientist known in the field for, for example, the development in 1960 of a sorting algorithm called Quicksort. Hoare developed the idea of a null reference in

1964 that could be used to indicate that data is missing or not known at this time. But in a talk that he gave at a software conference called QCon London in 2009, he stated that null reference violations in the last 40-some years had probably cost on the order of $1 billion in programmers' time, user problems, and general damage, as he called it. In the talk, he said, with a null pointer, you either have to check every reference or you risk disaster, and said that he didn't realize at the time that many programmers would rather risk or even suffer disaster than check all their subscripts. He did note that a friend of his raised concerns about the null reference, and pointed out to him that if you include a null reference, then, for example, every unmarried person in a dataset will seem to be married to the same person, called null.

As Daniel indicated, the null reference did serve a useful purpose at the time, and so Hoare went forward with it despite his friend's concern, which turned out to be a rather valid criticism, as we saw from the license plate example. There will be a link to a video of the talk in the show notes for anyone who wants to learn more about computer programming in the 1960s and to hear Hoare's thoughts on how other program developers should be willing to acknowledge their major blunders and the costs they've incurred. That's an interesting problem. I mean, there must be a lot of other stories, apparently, like the parking one that we just haven't heard about that just caused chaos

everywhere. I'm sure. And lastly, in episode 265, we also heard from a physician who had found some alarming errors in a digital version of a prescription drug reference, as words like not that had been in bold or italic had been automatically deleted when the paper version of the book was converted to digital. Chris Lear wrote, Hi Greg and Sharon, your story about the missing italics in a medical textbook reminded me of another incident, which is more relevant to me, but fortunately far less likely to be fatal. The 13th edition of Chambers Dictionary was originally published without around 500 words. And Chris explains, Chambers is an important dictionary for crosswords in the UK and was the official non-US Scrabble dictionary for many years. Chris goes on to say,

in the 12th edition in 2011, the Chambers dictionary introduced highlighting for words that were considered especially entertaining. This was a bit of a gimmick, and for the 13th edition in 2014, they decided to remove the highlighting. Sadly, while doing so, they also removed the previously highlighted words and their definitions completely, making the 13th edition a significantly worse dictionary than the 12th. The Chambers website now has a rather apologetic-looking link saying, please find a list of the missing words here, which at least takes you to a page of entertaining words. In fairness to Chambers, there was a reprint in 2015 or 2016 which reintroduced the missing words, so the current version of the 13th edition is complete, but still a serious cause of had I whist for Chambers,

which is fairly jelastic for the rest of us. And Chris is using some of the missing Chambers entries to say that their cause for regret is a source of laughter for us. Some of the other highlighted entries that got deleted that caught my eye were Autophobie, meaning a shrinking from making any reference to oneself, Bletherskate, for a garrulous talker of nonsense, Glimmergawk, for an owl, Kakistocracy, meaning government by the worst, Nippertitipperti, meaning finicky or mincing

And the wonderful Coca-Colonization Meaning the invasion of other parts of the world By American culture and values As typified by the availability of the drink What's that word again? Coca-Colonization I'm glad we have a word for that Thanks so much to everyone who sends us comments,

questions, and follow-ups. We really appreciate hearing from you. If you have any that you'd like to send to us, please send them to podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me a strange-sounding situation, and I have to try to work out what's going on, asking yes or no questions. In 1909, New York merchant G. Herman Gottlieb was arrested on Fifth Avenue for attracting a crowd. But after an argument at the station, the police relented and even drove him home. Why did they let him go? Okay. Did he attract a crowd? Yes. Was a crowd attracted in the vicinity that he was in? Yes.

Did he do something? Had his actions done something to attract the crowd? Yes. So you would specifically say that? Yes. But they let him go go even though he had attracted a crowd and apparently that's illegal in 1909 in new york to attract a crowd i haven't heard that of that law before it's like i don't know if you're a really good looking person and you attract a crowd or you sing really well uh uh seems well okay was that, that he had done something like you would say pleasant, like he sang really well or played the violin really well. And so he attracted a crowd for a good reason and the police weren't upset with him about it.

I think I could say yes to that, but I don't want to mislead you. Okay. Or he'd done like a good Samaritan deed. Like he saved somebody's life and he attracted a crowd. I mean. No, that's not it. No. Okay.

Um, cause you can attract a crowd for a lot of different reasons. Okay. All right. All right. You said he was a businessman, a merchant, a merchant. Sorry. Had he attracted a crowd in some way connected to his occupation? Yes. Uh, something to do with a store? No, no. Was he trying to sell something at the time that he attracted a crowd yes okay so he was trying to sell a product yes of some sort um something that people would get very excited about like an automobile because most people hadn't seen him yet in 1909 no no um but something like that something new and really interesting, so people would be like, hey, go see the whatever.

No, I'll say no to that. Was he giving away something for free? No. How? He was selling it. Because that would attract a crowd, too. Okay. And the police eventually decided he had not broken a law.

That's right. Were there other people involved? Well, he was trying to sell his product to people. Right. But did he have accomplices in this? No. Okay. Animals? Yes. Like he had some kind of cool animal, like an elephant or a monkey, and everybody came to see the elephant or the monkey? No. Or an animal doing interesting tricks or something? No. Okay. But there were animals involved. Yes. He'd attracted a crowd of animals, not humans. Yes. Okay. That's the heart of it, but I'll let involved. Yes. He'd attracted a crowd of animals. Yes. Not humans. Yes.

Okay. That's the heart of it, but I'll let you go a bit further. Was he selling like pet food or something? Yes. You're very close. Do you want me to keep trying to guess? No, that's good enough. Bird seed and the attracted birds or dog food.

He was selling catnip door to door. Ah. He was targeting wealthy families with spoiled cats, but apparently there were also a lot of stray cats on Fifth Avenue at the time. He was leading 30 or 40 of them up the street when he was stopped by Police Sergeant John F. Higgins, who arrested him for causing a crowd to collect. According to the New York Herald, Gottlieb said, why don't you arrest a catnip that is collecting the crowd, not I?

At the station, a philosophical argument ensued as to what constitutes a crowd, and the police finally decided to let him go. The cats couldn't keep up with the patrol wagon, and by the time they reached East Harlem, only a single black cat remained. Gottlieb threw at a handful of catnips, said don't tell your relatives or your friends, and slammed the door. Well, that was very effective catnip, apparently. Yeah. We can always use more lateral thinking puzzles. So if you have a puzzle that you'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's our show for today. If you would like to become one of the wonderful patrons who help support this show and get bonus content like outtakes, extra lateral thinking puzzles,

more discussion on some of the stories and updates on Sasha, our nippity tippity feline mascot who does like catnip herself. Please see our Patreon page at patreon.com slash futility closet, or see the support a section of the website at futility closet.com. While you're at the site, you can also graze through Greg's collection of over 10,000 quirky curiosities. Check out the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books, and see the show notes for the podcast, with links and references for the topics we've covered.

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