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In 1842 Francisco Lopez dug up wild onions in Placerita Canyon and found a gold nugget in the roots. Almost nothing came of it. Six years later, on January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall spotted flakes in the tailrace of John Sutter's lumber mill, days before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred California to the United States. Sutter wanted farmers, not miners, and swore his workers to secrec...

In the winter of 1983, parents shoved and fought in department store aisles for a soft doll with a plastic head. The man credited with inventing it, Xavier Roberts, had not invented its core idea. In 1976 and 1977 a Kentucky craft artist named Martha Nelson Thomas was hand-stitching what she called doll babies and selling them at craft shows with birth certificates and adoption papers. Roberts, a...

On a genuine $100 bill, a line at the base of the lamppost near Independence Hall is printed weakly. In the late 1980s investigators found counterfeit hundreds on which that line was flawless. These were superdollars, or supernotes: fakes on the same 75 percent cotton, 25 percent linen stock as real currency, printed by the intaglio process with raised ink, and carrying magnetic signatures that sa...

In 1698 Tsar Peter I came home from a grand tour of Western Europe convinced that Russia had to look modern, and he started with men's faces. Police were authorized to stop bearded men, demand payment, and shave those who could not pay in the public square. For many Orthodox Christians the beard was a religious requirement, part of being made in the image of God, so the decree forced a choice betw...

Under the seventh century BCE laws of the Locrians, drafted by Zaleucus, a freeborn woman in gold jewelry and a purple-bordered garment had legally declared herself a courtesan, and a man in a sheer Milesian cloak or a gold-studded ring was presumed bent on adultery. These were sumptuary laws, codes that told people what they could wear, eat, and display. This episode traces the two fears behind t...

In 1696, under King William III, England needed money and faced a public that regarded an income tax as an intolerable invasion of privacy. The answer was a proxy for wealth that an assessor could count from the street: windows. Every house paid a flat two shillings, with four more for 10 to 20 windows and eight more beyond 20. Adam Smith judged the tax relatively inoffensive in The Wealth of Nati...

The 1929 crash was the match, not the powder keg. This episode looks past Black Thursday and Black Tuesday to the conditions that turned a market drop into a decade of global misery. The Roaring Twenties ran on wealth inequality and stocks bought on margin, often with 10 percent down. The market briefly recovered in early 1930, then lost 85 percent of its value by 1932. The deeper wound was bankin...

Sha zhu pan translates roughly to fattening a pig before the slaughter, and the phrase describes the method exactly. A pig butchering scam begins with a wrong-number text about golf or a dog at the vet, or with a polished dating profile. Then come weeks or months of good morning messages and patient listening while the operator quietly profiles the target's finances. The pivot is never a loan requ...

Alvin Clarence Thomas ran away from an Ozarks farm at 16, unable to read or write and carrying less than a dollar. He became Titanic Thompson, widely considered the greatest hustler and proposition bettor in American history. With no schooling to lean on, he dealt cards to himself for hours until the odds became instinct, mastered the false shuffles and bottom deals of a card mechanic, and practic...

The Ford Pinto is remembered as the car that burst into flames because its maker put a price on human life. This episode tests that story against the record. In the late 1960s, with the Volkswagen Beetle, Toyota Corolla, and Datsun 510 taking market share, Ford president Lee Iacocca ordered a car under 2,000 pounds and under $2,000, to be ready in 25 months instead of the usual 43. Engineers built...

In 1961 an inventor named Luther Simjian put an automated banking machine on a New York City street, and the public ignored it so thoroughly that the bank removed it after six months. His Bankograph only accepted deposits, and few people would hand a paycheck to a metal box. This episode traces the messy birth of the automated teller machine: a 1966 Japanese device that dispensed cash as a three-m...

On December 14th, 1996, a Walmart clerk in Fredericton, New Brunswick pulled a red plush toy from a box during a midnight sale and was trampled by about 300 people. He left with a pulled hamstring, a broken rib, and a concussion. The toy was Tickle Me Elmo, and this episode follows its strange route to the shelf. Inventors Ron Dubren and Greg Hyman first built the giggling, vibrating mechanism int...

The phrase breaking the bank at Monte Carlo suggests tuxedos and effortless luck. The man who actually did it around 1881 was Joseph Hobson Jagger, a bankrupt textile worker and father of four from Yorkshire. Born on September 2nd, 1830 in the village of Shelf, he worked the Bradford mills as a piece worker, then tried to start his own textile business. By the late 1870s it had collapsed, and in V...

Aristotle Onassis was born in 1906 in Smyrna to a wealthy shipping family and spoke four languages by 16. Then the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922 destroyed everything: relatives died in a burned church, his father was imprisoned, and the family ended up in a refugee camp in Greece. In 1923 he sailed to Buenos Aires on a Nansen passport with $250. Working nights as a telephone operator, he noticed th...

Jordan Belfort made $20,000 one summer selling Italian ice from a styrofoam cooler on a public beach. Years later he made far more selling worthless penny stocks over the phone. Born in the Bronx in 1962 and raised in Bayside, Queens by two accountants, he walked out of dental school on the first day after the dean warned that the golden age of dentistry was over. A door-to-door meat and seafood b...

Pan American World Airways began not as a luxury brand but as a military worry. In 1927, Army Air Corps officers Hap Arnold and Carl Spaatz saw that a German-owned airline in Colombia, SCADTA, sat a short flight from the Panama Canal. The answer was an American competitor on the mail route from Key West to Havana, and the ruthless entrepreneur Juan Trippe held the Cuban landing rights. Treated by...

When Gerald Cotten died suddenly in Jaipur, India on December 9th, 2018, his exchange QuadrigaCX told about 115,000 customers that 250 million Canadian dollars was locked in cold wallets on his encrypted laptop, and that only he had known the password. This episode traces how he got there. Born in May 1988 and raised in Belleville, Ontario, Cotten graduated from York University's Schulich School o...

In February 1992, Pepsi Philippines began printing three digit numbers inside the caps of Pepsi, 7-Up, Mountain Dew, and Mirinda bottles. Most prizes were around 100 pesos, but the grand prize was one million pesos, about 40,000 US dollars and 611 times the average monthly salary. Winning numbers were read on television every night, market share jumped from 19.4 percent to 24.9 percent, and execut...

For more than 50 years, the phrase Great Depression did not mean 1929. It meant the collapse that began in the 1870s. This episode traces how the boom was built: France paid five billion francs in reparations after the Franco-Prussian War, Germany retired its government bonds, and the freed cash poured into the speculative Founder's Years and then across the Atlantic into American railroad bonds....

Rolex did not begin in a Swiss workshop. It began in London in 1905, when German-born Hans Wilsdorf and his British brother-in-law Alfred Davis started importing Swiss movements, fitting them into third-party cases, and selling them to jewelers who stamped their own names on the dial. Wilsdorf invented the word Rolex in 1908 because it was short, pronounceable in any European language, and sounded...

In 1857 a British judge looked down at a convicted career criminal and admitted, on the record, that the man's talent and perseverance would have made him a fortune in honest business. The criminal was Edward Agar, a safecracker nearing 40 who lived in a fashionable Shepherd's Bush villa with 3,000 pounds in government bonds and no need to steal again. This episode follows how a fired railway empl...

Crazy Eddie was a regional electronics chain so famous that Queen held a press conference there and Dan Aykroyd parodied its commercials on Saturday Night Live. The story begins in 1969 on Kings Highway in Brooklyn, where Eddie Antar, his father Sam M. Antar, and his cousin Ronnie Gindi opened a shop called Sight and Sound that was nearly bankrupt within 18 months. Antar bought out his cousin, too...

A friend invites you to a gifting circle: put in $100, bring two people, and be blessed with $800. It sounds like mutual aid, but it is a pyramid scheme, a model in which money comes from recruiting rather than from selling anything to outside customers. This episode works through the arithmetic that dooms every version. If each member must recruit six people, the 12th layer holds 2.2 billion part...

Ruja Ignatova sits on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list beside cartel bosses and hitmen, yet she holds a PhD in private international law and a master's from Oxford. Born in May 1980 in Ruse, Bulgaria, she moved with her family to Schramberg, Germany in 1990, skipped a grade, and went on to work as a consultant at McKinsey in Sofia. This episode follows how that polished resume became the packaging f...

By 1880, an average white 10-year-old boy in the United States was shorter and had a lower life expectancy than his great grandfather who fought in the Revolutionary War. That contradiction sits at the center of the Gilded Age, the name Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined in their 1873 novel to mock a society painting gold over cheap metal. This episode traces how the transcontinental rail...