Mark Hopkins went to California during the Gold Rush and made out quite well. With partners, he founded a mining and trading company, and then the Central Pacific Railroad. When he died in 1878, he left the largest inheritance in the world, but he had no children and no will. Since his death was big news, people came out of the woodwork to claim part of the fortune. His wife Mary (who was also his cousin) inherited the money. She soon adopted a boy named Timothy, the son of her widowed maid. Then she began her late-in-life hobby of buying, building, and decorating fine mansions. She grew close to her interior decorator, Edward Francis Searles, who was 23 years younger than Mary. He moved in with her, bringing his friend Arthur Walker, and Mary and Edward married in 1887. Mary died in 1891, sparking a battle between Timothy and Edward for her fortune. But it was when Edward died in 1920 that the real scramble for the money arose. Edward had no heirs, and willed the inheritance to Arthur. Suddenly everyone found a family connection to Mark Hopkins, Mary Hopkins Searles, or Edward Searles.   

Rumors were everywhere. It was reported that a bank in San Francisco, California, had a vault holding envelopes with securities of $350,000,000 in a trust for Mark Hopkins’ heirs whenever they should be located.

The press sparked a treasure hunt and the lawyers took advantage of the publicity. From 1924 to 1929 over a thousand claims were filed by supposed heirs and co-heirs, and even the most remote relations. They came – or their lawyers came – with forged wills, fake Bibles, and bogus family trees to show a genealogical connection to Mark Hopkins.

Lawyers Reap the Riches

The lawyers gained great riches and pooled the Hopkins hopefuls together in class actions suits. They charged $50 to $100 for each claimant to join in the legal claim.

Some claimants, like Estella Latta of Durham, North Carolina, sold Hopkins stocks to finance the huge litigation fees.

One judge, fed up with the mess, ordered an investigation of the cases which reached “racket proportions.” The judge accused the predatory lawyers of keeping the treasure hunt alive.

The contest for the Mark Hopkins estate took on a life of its own. In fact, it would take years of research to sift through entirely, but GenealogyBank and library scrapbooks from the archives provide many colorful, entertaining stories. Timothy Hopkins, the adopted son of Mary Hopkins whom she cut out of her will before leaving it all to Edward, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch “it is the result of the most amazing pieces of propaganda ever spread in America.”

The fascinating saga of the Mark Hopkins fortune and the many people who wanted a piece of it is told in a series of blog posts at Geneology Bank: part one, part two, part three, and part four have already been published, and I can't wait to see where the story goes next.

-via Strange Company

utterly obsessed with this american site that has confused mince with mincemeat, and created this abomination pic.twitter.com/Y31NqYGYrV

— Luke Bailey (@imbadatlife) December 9, 2019

My Christmas dinner table features mincemeat pie every year. The recipe is mostly apples and raisins, with a lot of cinnamon, but I've seen recipes that use pears or dried plums or other fruit. There is no real meat in it, although commercial preparations contain a small amount of "beef suet" for truth-in-labeling reasons. A couple of hundred years ago, mincemeat was a method of preserving meat with the addition of fruit, spices, and sugar, but over time, the meat went away to leave a sweet dessert filling. To add to the confusion, "mince" is a British term for what Americans call "ground beef." You can see where this is going.

In August, Spruce Eats published a recipe for mincemeat pie, accompanied by pictures that showed a pie crust filled with ground beef. The author of the recipe, British food writer Elaine Lemm, did not list ground beef as an ingredient, and did not know about the images. The only explanation is that the photographer followed the recipe, but interpreted "mincemeat" as "ground beef." When Spruce Eats republished the recipe for Christmas, it went viral for the pictured meat, illustrating the old adage that "England and America are two countries forever divided by a common language." The original recipe post has since been updated. Read what happened and the reactions the incident caused at Buzzfeed. 

In 1981, Owe Bergsten owned a small electronics shop in Kungsbacka, Sweden. During a trip to Singapore, he picked up a small handheld LCD game called Fire RC-04, and played it all the way back to Sweden. Thinking it might sell well for his shop, Bergsten tried to contact the company whose name was on the game: Nintendo. They didn't really want to talk to him, and that's where the lying began.  

Apparently, no one really cared. A month and three more telexes later, Bergsten finally got a reply, asking him to explain what his company actually did. He had a decision to make.

Over three decades later, an older, wiser, richer Bergsten looks at me across a table, presenting the telex he sent next. His well-appointed office sits in a building furnished almost entirely by the money he’s made through, for and with Nintendo over the years. That’s not an exaggeration: the building’s address is ‘Marios Gata 21’. 21 Mario Street. This telex set the course for the rest of Bergsten’s life, introduced Nintendo to Europe on a scale it had never seen, even arguably helped pave the way for its move into western markets as a whole. Without this piece of paper, gaming as we know it could be entirely different.

He smiles as he shows it to me. “At that time it was very easy to lie, because the Internet was not invented.” So that first formal communication to Nintendo was a lie?

“Yeah,” he laughs, “of course.”

Bergsten's first lie led to others, which turned out to be massive exaggerations that might have gone sour at any moment, but his enthusiasm and confidence got him in on the ground floor of Nintendo as they first ventured outside of Asia. His company Bergsala became the distributer for Nintendo products in Scandinavia, and opened the door for Nintendo's games in the rest of Europe and America, too. Read the story of how Owe Bergsten's risky bluff paid off against all odds at IGN. -via Metafilter

(Image credit: ThePViana)

The Kittisaurus cats have learned a few things about plastic wrap since they first encountered the "invisible wall" in the previous video. Here they are challenged by a maze made from plastic wrap, but what fun is finding your way around when you can defeat those invisible walls so many other ways?  -via Digg

In the criminal justice system, candy cane assaults are considered especially heinous.

In New York City, the dedicated detective who investigates these vicious crimes is a member of an elite squad & is known as #PeteOnTheBeat. These are his stories. #DunDun pic.twitter.com/LUMGs4n8E4

— NYPD 19th Precinct (@NYPD19Pct) December 6, 2019

You've heard of Elf on the Shelf, now meet Pete on the Beat! Police officers at New York's 19th precinct repurposed the elf for a Christmas campaign by giving him a tiny uniform and putting him in all kinds of situations, from meeting the boss to giving Christmas safety tips to hanging Christmas decorations.

#PeteOnTheBeat Firefly is willing to make a citizens arrest! Will wait for further instructions. pic.twitter.com/C4ORhgpmDX

— Mrs. Wozniak (@wozteacher47) December 10, 2019

You can read more about Pete at Bored Panda, and follow his adventure at Twitter.

Just what it says on the tin. The greatest movie quotes are those that people know and use over and over. You can see from this supercut that Inigo Montoya's prepared speech from The Princess Bride can be used for many different situations. While not all the quotes are exact, there is no doubt who inspired them.  -via Laughing Squid 

There was a fossil skull discovery that was recently determined to be a prehistoric snake with legs. While a snake with legs is impressive, even more impressive is how anyone could tell that from just a skull. But the find brings up a question: is a snake with legs still a snake, or is it just some kind of lizard?  

Sara Ruane, a herpetologist and evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University who studies living snakes, has some answers. “Snakes are just fancy lizards,” she says. More precisely, she explains, snakes represent a distinct branch of the lizard evolutionary tree. Both types of animals are squamates, the largest order of reptiles, and snakes belong to the suborder Serpentes. In other words, all snakes are technically lizards, but not all lizards are snakes.

It’s also true, Ruane says, that early species of snake once sported gams. But all these legged snakes are extinct today, meaning that you’d be unlikely to confuse a snake for a lizard in the wild.

But while there are no snakes in existence today with legs, there are lizards around that are legless. You might think that a legless lizard would be a snake, but that's not the case at all. Read how to tell the difference between a legless lizard and a snake at Atlas Obscura. As if you were going to stick around either of them long enough to observe those differences.

(Image credit: Stu's Images)

Your parents and grandparents tried to tell you how to be happy, but those proverbial nuggets of wisdom sounded much too simple to you, so you didn't listen. But science stepped in to observe and measure the effects of certain behaviors on the sense of well-being or happiness they inspire. Kurzgesagt brings us some of those scientific studies, and the results show that ancient wisdom, no matter how trite it sounded to you, had it right. Count your blessings. Stop focusing on yourself and look to help someone else. Look at the bright side. Science says so.

The annual Sleepy Skunk movie trailer mashup is here! Clips from boatloads of movies from 2019 have been artfully edited for maximum impact. It starts out lively, kinetic, and goofy, then slides into an epic action section, followed by a tense and dramatic emotional section. If any of these clips pique your curiosity about a movie you haven't yet seen, there's a timeline listing them here. -Thanks, Louis!

Artist Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped a banana to a wall at Art Basel Miami Beach and sold the artwork for a tidy sum. But that's just the beginning of the story. Next, performance artist David Datuna came along and ate the banana!

Gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin was about to head to the airport when he heard that the banana was eaten. He darted to the space, clearly upset. A fair goer tried to cheer him up and handed him his own banana.

Perrotin and a gallery assistant re-adhered the borrowed banana to the wall just after 2 p.m.

Those involved offered a convoluted explanation of why eating the banana did not diminish the value of the artwork. Read about the incident, and see videos, at the Miami Herald. -via Metafilter

(Image source: David Datuna)

Every time an eel farts, a Christmas tree grows brighter. Well, not exactly. The sound is generated from the setup at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. Any time the aquarium's star electric eel Miguel Wattson produces an electric current, the nearby Christmas tree gets a boost that brightens the Christmas lights. The aquarium named the project "Shocking Around the Christmas Tree."

“Whenever Miguel discharges electricity, sensors in the water deliver the charge to a set of speakers,” explains Joey Turnipseed, the Aquarium’s audio visual production specialist. Turnipseed is responsible for tackling the unique engineering challenge of translating Miguel’s electric pulses into a glimmering yuletide display. “The speakers convert the discharge into the sound you hear and the festively flashing lights.”

You can almost imagine the discussion on this. Can't we convert the sound into bells instead of fart noises? Sure, but the kids will like the fart sounds better. Okay, then. -via UPI

Emoticons and emoji are used to bring nuance to short text passages that might be misunderstood otherwise. Of course, some folks use it for decoration, emphasis, and humor, but that wasn't the original idea. Written language was first used to convey information, but as time passed and technology enabled communication over distances, humanity has struggled to imbue text communication with implied emotion that can get lost when you can't see the speaker's facial expressions and body language. At their core, such symbols are a form of punctuation, which was an early innovation in writing -even before spaces between words. Emoticons and emoji were not so much invented but instead evolved from the long process of refining written text. To understand this evolution, it helps to have a timeline of punctuation. The digital revolution ramped up the need for shortcuts in passing along in idea in text.

This all inspired the users of, for example, the PLATO IV system in 1972 to actually use a facility of that system to solve the problem, creating a whole slew of the first emojis and emoticons in the process.

And if you’re wondering about the distinction here, “emoji” derives from the Japanese for “picture” and “character”, so “picture character”. In contrast, “emoticon” derives from the English “emotion icon”. Thus, while you might think given the two words’ similarity and what they represent also being similar that one came from the other, this is actually purely coincidental.

In any event, going back to the PLATO IV system, with this system, users could press SHIFT-space and then a character to have that character plotted over the previous character without overwriting it. Particularly clever users used this fact to come up with all sorts of little images to represent various emotions and otherwise add context and meaning to a given bit of text, or sometimes to just have the thing stand alone to communicate something, like some sort of modern hieroglyphic. Eventually there were many hundreds of such symbols being used on this system.

There are other important moments in the development of emoticons, such as the time a theoretical discussion about a pigeon, a candle, and some mercury inside a falling elevator leaked outside of the chat forum at Carnegie Mellon University and almost caused a panic. Discussion of the incident emphasized the need for a way to denote something as a joke, which led to the sideways smiley face being widely adopted. Read a fairly in-depth history of punctuation that gave rise to emoticons and emoji at Today I Found Out.

I am a music historian, and with @AdrianRMG I have researched the best-selling single of every decade all the way back to 14,000BC. Here's a thread:

2010s - Ed Sheeran, The Shape of You pic.twitter.com/Y4rrOdSGY2

— 𝗔𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗲 𝗛𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻 (@jazzemu_) December 5, 2019

Archie Henderson teamed up with Adrian Gray to determine and present the top song of every decade,  going way back. Although I do believe he skipped some decades, all of the entries have a music clip.

1990s - Lou Bega, Mambo No.5 pic.twitter.com/GJ8r9iQdBw

— 𝗔𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗲 𝗛𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻 (@jazzemu_) December 5, 2019

Somewhere along the line, you begin to get the idea that this is going somewhere you didn't expect.

1970s - The Beegees, Haaaah pic.twitter.com/OBWH6QjUeE

— 𝗔𝗿𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗲 𝗛𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻 (@jazzemu_) December 5, 2019

It gets weirder as it goes. Continue reading to see the rest.

Researchers have been following the migratory movements of a golden eagle named Harper for five years. This year, they also tagged his mate Athena with a solar-powered tracker. The two eagles spent the summer on the shores of the Hudson Bay in Manitoba, then flew south for the winter. Harper took off a couple of days before Athena, and they took separate routes. But they both ended up in Bernheim Forest near Clermont, Kentucky ...and they found each other!

Bernheim Conservation Director Andrew Berry said Athena traveled down toward Fort Knox then used the Crooked Creek Wildlife Corridor to make her way back to Bernheim Forest.

Athena spent the first night alone in Bernheim, but found Harper the next morning — likely after calling to each other.  Together, they flew to the top of a knob and sat together, Berry said.

“It was really awesome to see her fly 1,700 miles back to Bernheim and then within 24 hours be able to relocate her companion Harper,” he said.

Read more about the eagles and their feat at WFPL. -via Nag on the Lake

(Image credit: Bernheim Forest)

Chemotherapy is scary and debilitating, but that's nothing compared to cancer. Chemotherapy harnesses dangerous poisons to kill cancer cells, which also harms healthy tissue. However, modern medicine is making great strides in targeting cancer cells exclusively. But there did that idea come from? Strangely, it began with a World War I chemical weapon. Learn about chemotherapy in the TED-Ed lesson. -via Geeks Are Sexy