Cardiff Giant #1 (From Eric Beheim)

Cardiff Giant-1, originally uploaded by bucklesw1. Seventy years ago this month, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ran this picture of the Cardiff Giant, which, at the time, was being used as a conversation piece in the basement rumpus room of an Iowa publisher. The giant was created in the late 1860s by a New York tobacconist named George Hull, who had had an argument with a fundamentalist minister over a passage in Genesis 6:4 about giants once living on earth. Hull obtained a 10-foot long block of gypsum from Fort Dodge, Iowa and had it shipped to Chicago, where a German stonecutter carved it into the likeness of a man. The giant was then shipped by rail to the farm of his cousin William Newell in Cardiff, New York.