5 July: PT Barnum, the Greatest Showman

PT (Phineaas Taylor) Barnum, US showman best remembered for founding 

a circus, and subject of the hit film The Greatest Showman, was born this 


date in 1810. 10 things you might not know about him.

1. While he may be best remembered for Circuses, he didn't get into the circus business until he was 60 years old. Before that, he was famous as the owner of a museum of curiousities and for his freak shows.
2. He got in to the freak show business at 25 when he bought an old, blind slave called Joice Heth. She was proably about 80 but Barnum billed her as being 161 years old and a former nurse of George Washington. He had her tell tales of “dear little George,” which audiences flocked to see. When she died, he sold tickets to her public autopsy.
3. He's often credited with having coined the phrase “there’s a sucker born every minute”, but there's no proof he ever said such a thing. Some believe the phrase actually originated from one of Barnum's rivals when he saw people queuing for tickets to a Barnum show. Barnum did say “The people like to be humbugged,” and believed they were willing participants in the hoaxes. He was even nicknamed the "Prince of Humbugs". As long as people were entertained and getting value for money, why not? Was his attitude. What he didn't like was fake spiritualist mediums who cheated bereaved people. He even went to court to testify against one such person, spirit photographer William H. Mumler, by exposing the fraudulent tricks he used.
4. He not only popularised circuses and freak shows, but Opera and theatre as well. In 1850 he signed Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind and took her on tour. Thanks to Barnum's clever marketing, she became an overnight sensation in America, and helped make opera popular. Theatres at the time were often seen as "dens of evil", so Barnum set out to clean up the theatre's image, making them respectable and family friendly. He built a theatre in New York and called it the "Moral Lecture Room." His first production was basically pro-temperance propaganda, but later he put on Shakespeare plays watered down to make them family friendly, and also flower shows, beauty contests, Dog shows, poultry contests and baby shows.
5. It was thanks to PT Barnum that we use the word "Jumbo" to mean something super-sized. This is because he bought a 6-ton African Elephant from London Zoo in 1882. The elephant was called Jumbo and American audiences went mad for him. Jumbo even helped put to rest people's fears about the stability of the new Brooklyn Bridge. Barnum offered to parade a bunch of circus animals across the bridge, including Jumbo and 20 more elephants. Not only did this prove the bridge had to be structurally sound, it was good publicity for Barnum's show at the same time. Jumbo, sadly, was killed when he was hit by a freight train in Canada in 1885. Barnum had him stuffed and donated it to Tufts University where it became the school's mascot, and is to this day, even though the actual stuffed Jumbo was destroyed in a Fire in 1975.
6. Talking of fires, PT Barnum seemed to have more than his fair share of bad luck connected with fires. Two of his mansions burned to the ground and his museum burned down twice. It was after the second museum fire that Barnum decided to take his show on the road as a travelling circus.
7. Barnum's circus was the first to have a professional female Clown, in 1939. She was English, 35 years old and went by the name of Lulu.
8. Another of Barnum's famous exhibits was a dwarf child known as General Tom Thumb, who Barnum brought to England to meet Queen Victoria. Another was the “Fejee Mermaid,” which was actually the upper half of a monkey sewn to the bottom of a fish. Other bizarre things he tried: he attempted to buy Shakespeare's childhood home, hire a Zulu chief who had recently attacked the British army, and haul an iceberg from the Arctic to New York Harbor.
9. Other things he tried his hand at and was fairly successful at were writing and politics. His memoirs, entitled The Life Of P.T. Barnum, Written By Himself, sold more than one million copies. In 1865, he won a seat in the Connecticut General Assembly as a Republican and became an advocate for African American rights, abolition of the death penalty and the temperance movement. He lost out on a bid for congress to one of his distant relatives. He also served as mayor of Bridgeport, Connecticut. During his lifetime he ran a general store and a Newspaper.
10. In 1849 he designed and opened a cemetery in Bridgeport. When he died in 1891, aged 80, he was buried in his own cemetery. He even asked for his obituary to be published before he died, so he could correct any mistakes.