Fun Facts About Timothy Dexter

Timothy Dexter was an eccentric 18th-century American merchant from Massachusetts who achieved legendary wealth through a sequence of seemingly foolish, highly improbable commercial ventures. Dexter first built a fortune in the wake of the Revolutionary War by purchasing massive amounts of depreciated Continental currency for pennies on the dollar, which yielded vast returns when Alexander Hamilton’s Funding Act of 1790 allowed debt to be funded with new federal bonds. Dexter expanded his wealth when competitors repeatedly tried to ruin him with bad advice: he shipped stray cats to the Caribbean just as local warehouses suffered severe rodent infestations, exported coal to the mining hub of Newcastle right in the middle of a massive miners' strike, and sent New England bed-warming pans to the West Indies, where sugar plantations bought them at a premium to skim molasses. Beyond commerce, Dexter gained lasting notoriety for his extreme personal eccentricities and idiosyncratic writing. In 1802, he published an autobiographical work titled A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, printed entirely without punctuation marks and filled with bizarre phonetic spelling. When readers criticized the chaotic manuscript, Dexter printed a second edition featuring a full page of punctuation marks at the back, famously inviting readers to "peper and solt it as they plese." Craving validation from his community, he even orchestrated his own mock funeral to see who would mourn him, drawing thousands of attendees before bursting from hiding to scold his wife for not crying convincingly enough during the procession. ⁠Listen Ad-Free on Patreon. ⁠ For just $3 per month, you can get ad-free versions of Fun Facts Daily, Who ARTed and Art Smart. Head over to ⁠https://www.patreon.com/cw/FunFactsDailyPod⁠ if you are interested. Want to learn more? Head over to my website www.funfactsdailypod.com and be sure to listen to my other podcasts Who ARTed: Weekly Art History for All Ages or Art Smart. For family fun, check out my son's podcast Rainbow Puppy Science Lab The image used in the episode cover art came from an engraving of Dexter by James Akin in 1805 and an image of the appendix from A Pickle for the Knowing Ones. Fun Facts Daily is an Airwave Media Podcast. If you are interested in advertising on this or any other Airwave Media show, email: advertising@airwavemedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices