The Amazing Fate of the Solar Armor Inventor

Before Photoshop, before Snopes, before YouTube, there was Jonathon Newhouse. Or rather, there wasn’t, but he became famous anyway.

In 1874, one man; an inventor of considerable genius, was reported to have completely reversed the effect of the sun. In the scorching heat of the mid-summer Nevada desert, he was found frozen stiff by Indians – his beard covered in frost and an icicle over a foot in length hanging from his nose. That man was Jonathon Newhouse, the genius inventor of solar armor.

The story spread like a virus.

First printed in the Territorial Enterprise on July 2, 1874, the story soon appeared in other publications including Scientific American, The New York Times and The Daily Telegraph, which at the time had the largest circulation in the world.

It took a while before any newspaper asked for corroboration. Then the real story came out. Link -via Digg

(image credit: waytoocrowded)