In January 1749, the Duke of Portland bet the Earl of Chesterfield that “let a man advertise the most impossible thing in the world, he will find fools enough in London to fill a play house and pay handsomely for the privilege of being there.” The earl agreed, and shortly afterward the London newspapers announced a wonderful new performer:

He presents you with a common Wine Bottle, which any of the spectators may first examine; this Bottle is placed on a Table in the middle of the Stage, and he (without any equivocation) goes into it, in the sight of all the Spectators, and sings in it; during his stay in the bottle, any Person may handle it, and see plainly that it does not exceed a common Tavern Bottle.

A crowd packed the theater on the appointed night and, when the performer failed to appear, they rioted, gutting the building. It was jokingly said afterward that perhaps the man had been corked during rehearsals.

The Cheltenham Journal actually topped this in 1825 with an advertisement for five Arabian conjurors:

[T]hey will take each a lighted torch in either hand, when lo! incredible to relate! Suckee, with the burning torches, will jump clean down Mustapha‘s throat, who in an instant, with equal dexterity, will pass down the throat of Abdallah, then Abdalluh will jump down that of Benassar, and Benassar down his brother Muley‘s; who, lastly, notwithstanding he is encumbered with his four brothers and their four torches, will throw a flip-flap-somerset down his own throat, and leave the audience in total darkness!–Probatum est.

Here again the room was crammed, but five minutes before showtime “the conjuror decamped with the money and was no more heard of,” reports William Hone. “Probably he jumped down his own throat.”

A young man, poorly clothed, presented himself before a dealer in curiosities. ‘Sir,’ said he, showing a violin which he carried, ‘I am a musical artist; this is the season of balls and soirées; I have just had a long illness which has exhausted my purse; my only black coat is in pawn, I shall be much obliged if you will lend me ten francs to redeem it. I will leave as security one of the violins you see, for I have two; it is an excellent instrument. I shall return for it as soon as, thanks to my coat, I shall have earned enough money for the purpose.’ The young man had such an honest bearing that the dealer lent him ten francs and kept the violin, which he hung up in the shop. The next day but one, a gentleman, well-dressed, wearing at his buttonhole the ribbon of the Legion of Honor, was choosing from the dealer’s stock of goods some shell-work. Seeing the violin, he took it up, examining it narrowly. ‘What is the price of that instrument?’ said he. ‘It is not mine,’ replied the shopkeeper; and he related how he came to possess it. ‘This violin,’ continued the unknown, ‘is worth money, it is a Cremona. Perhaps its owner is ignorant of its value. If he returns, offer him two hundred francs for it.’ Then handing fifty francs to the shopman, the unknown said on taking his leave, ‘You will keep that for yourself if the affair succeeds; I will return in a few days.’ Two days after, the young man reappeared, bringing the ten francs to redeem his violin, for which the dealer offered him two hundred. After some hesitation, he agreed. At the end of a week, the dealer, not having seen the decorated gentleman, became suspicious; he carried the violin to an instrument-maker, who offered him three francs for it.

— Thomas Brackett Reed et al., Modern Eloquence, 1900

[In 1816] the interest in Napoleon and St. Helena was strong. A small paragraph in a local Chester paper told the inhabitants of that ancient and usually somnolent city that the British government desired to rid St. Helena of the rats and the mice which were understood to be leading the exiled emperor ‘such a life.’ Accordingly, said the paragraph, the government was offering large sums for cats–sixteen shillings for well grown males, ten for females, and half a crown for kittens. It was requested that all who desired to help in the good work by disposing of their pets at these prices should appear at a given hour at a given address.

At the time and place, an army of about three thousand generous and patriotic souls presented itself at the house designated. There were cats in baskets, cats in boxes, cats squirming restlessly in the warm clutch of children. The house was empty, and a little investigation soon proved that it had been unoccupied for a long time. Next morning more than five hundred cats were found drowned in the waters of the Dee; so that this hoax was not without its element of tragedy, and brutal tragedy at that.

— William S. Bridgman, “Famous Hoaxes,” Munsey’s Magazine, August 1903

So recently as 1860 some gay spirits in London put their heads together and perpetrated a successful and notorious piece of foolery on the wholesale plan. Towards the latter part of March many well-known persons received through the post the following invitation card, bearing the stamp of an inverted sixpence on one of the corners for official effect:

‘Tower of London–Admit Bearer and Friend to view annual ceremony of Washing the White Lions on Sunday, April 1, 1860. Admittance only at White Gate. It is particularly requested that no gratuities be given to wardens or attendants.’

The ruse worked so well that a succession of cabs rattled around Tower Hill all the morning, much to the disturbance of the customary peace of the Sabbath, in vain attempts to discover the White Gate.

— William Shepard Walsh, Curiosities of Popular Customs, 1898

On Jan. 16, 1926, a speech from Edinburgh on the BBC was interrupted with a shocking eyewitness report:

The Houses of Parliament are being demolished by an angry mob equipped with trench mortars. The clock tower 320 feet in height has just fallen to the ground, together with the famous clock, Big Ben, which used to strike the hours on a ball weighing nine tons. One moment, please. Fresh reports announce that the crowd has secured the person of Mr. Wurtherspoon, the minister of traffic, who was attempting to make his escape in disguise. He has now been hanged from a lamppost in Vauxhall. London calling. That noise you heard just now was the Savoy Hotel being blown up by the crowd.

Millions of Englishmen placed calls and wires to learn more about the calamity. Finally the radio company explained that the program they’d overheard had been intended by broadcaster Ronald Knox as a parody. One detail that should have tipped them off: According to the radio announcement, the riot in Trafalgar Square was led by one Mr. Popplebury, secretary of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues.

The antiquarian has always been the object of hoaxes. At a convention of the tribe in Banbury, on one occasion, a worn and ancient looking block of stone was sent in with the information that it had been the corner stone of an old building recently torn down. The finders prayed the learned body to interpret the inscription upon it, which read:

SEOGEH SREV EREH WCISUME VAHL LAH SEHS SE OTREH NOS LLEBD NAS REGNI FREH NOS GNIRES ROHYAR GANOED IRYD ALE NIFAE ESOTS SORCY RUB NABOT ES ROHK CO CAED IR.

It took the venerable society several days to discover that the sentiment was ‘Ride a cock horse’ inverted.

— William S. Bridgman, “Famous Hoaxes,” Munsey’s Magazine, August 1903

In 1860, the Times of Fort Smith, Ark., published a long account of a discovery said to have been made 90 miles northeast of Fort Stanton, N.M. This condensed version appeared in the Eclectic Magazine that November:

The plain upon which lie the massive relics of gorgeous temples and magnificent halls, slopes gradually towards the river Pecos, and is very fertile, crossed by a gurgling stream of purest water that not only sustains a rich vegetation, but perhaps furnishes with this necessary element the thousands who once inhabited this present wilderness. The city was probably built by a warlike race, as it is quadrangular and arranged with skill to afford the highest protection against an exterior foe, many of the buildings on the outer line being pierced with loopholes, as though calculated for the use of weapons. Several of the buildings are of vast size, and built of massive blocks of a dark granite rock which could only have been wrought to their present condition by a vast amount of labor. There are the ruins of three noble edifices, each presenting a front of three hundred feet, made of ponderous blocks of stone, and the dilapidated walls are even now thirty-five feet high. There are no partitions in the area of the middle (supposed) temple, so that the room must have been vast; and there are also carvings in bass relief and fresco work. Appearances justify the conclusion that these silent ruins could once boast of halls as gorgeously decorated by the artist’s hand as those of Thebes and Palmyra. The buildings are all loopholed on each side, much resembling that found in the old feudal castles of Europe, designed for the use of archers. The blocks of which these edifices are composed, are cemented together by a species of mortar of a bituminous character, which has such tenacity that vast masses of wall have fallen down without the blocks being detached by the shock.

No one has ever found such ruins … but there’s a ship out there too if you want to go looking.

Stuck in a Honolulu jail in 1913, forger William Francis Mannix passed the time by writing a memoir. Unfortunately it wasn’t his own — he invented an autobiography of Chinese viceroy Li Hung Chang:

To-night I am to attend another banquet given by the Czar, which I hope will not continue as long as the one of last night. It is true they prepare foods especially for me, but they do not taste like the foods at home, or those of our own cooks which we have with us.

Mannix contrived the whole thing using books obtained from friends and a typewriter loaned to him by the territorial governor. The book fooled many who knew Li, including former secretary of state John W. Foster; when the hoax was exposed the publisher issued a “confessional” edition in 1923, but by then no one was laughing.