Fun Facts About Timothy Dexter

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1:00Welcome to Fun Facts Daily. Your source for just the good stuff. Monday through Friday, we're bringing fun facts and news you can use all carefully curated to uplift and inform. So give yourself a break, relax, and learn something awesome in just a few minutes every day. Hi everyone, I'm Kyle Wood and today, we're going to be learning all about Timothy Dexter, an 18th-century American merchant from Massachusetts who became famous for making a massive fortune through a series of seemingly insane business decisions. But before we get into the facts, let's warm up our brains with a little challenge to see if you can tell fact from fiction. Consider this. Legend has it, Timothy Dexter, once bought thousands of bedwarming pans, metal pans with long handles meant to hold hot coals under bed sheets during freezing New England winters.

2:02And he shipped them of all places to the tropical West Indies. Naturally, people assumed this would completely ruin him because Caribbean islands never have freezing weather. But supposedly, instead of losing all his money, Dexter was able to sell every single pan at an enormous markup. What do you think? Did Timothy Dexter really make a fortune selling bedwarming pans in the Caribbean? We'll find out at the end of the episode. Now for your word of the day. Our word for today is Serendipity. That's S-E-R-E-N-D-I-P-I-T-Y. Serendipity describes remarkable good fortune, an occurrence of finding valuable or wonderful things not sought for,

3:03or the development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way. A Serendipitous event has an unexpected circumstance and a positive outcome for the person involved. The term Serendipity was coined in 1754 by the author Horace Walpole in a letter to his friend Horace Mann. Walpole derived the term from a Persian fairy tale called the Three Princes of Serendip. In this story, three traveling princes were continuously making discoveries through both accidents and sagacity or wisdom. They found things that they were not originally seeking. Serendip was the ancient Persian and Arabic name for the island of Sri Lanka known to Europeans at the time as Salon. Today, people will often apply this term to people who succeed through fortunate accidents rather than deliberate calculation.

4:04The Greatest of the World Time for your daily high five are top five fun facts about Timothy Dexter. Number one, Timothy Dexter built his initial fortune by buying up devalued currency that most people thought was worthless. During and immediately after the American Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress issued paper currency known as Continental Currency to fund the army. Because of rampant inflation and a lack of gold backing, the value of the paper notes collapsed until they traded at roughly one percent of their original face value. Dexter used his modest savings from his work as a Tanner and his wife's inheritance and he bought up massive amounts of these depreciated notes for pennies on the dollar. Most people thought that his purchase was a foolish gamble because the newly formed

5:10national government hadn't yet proven its stability. But then in 1790, the Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton introduced his financial plan and the federal government passed the funding act. This legislation authorized the US government to redeem continental notes using newly-issued federal bonds. Dexter's pile of previously worthless paper currency suddenly became an enormous fortune overnight. After that, Dexter was no longer working class, he was actually one of the wealthiest citizens in Massachusetts. Number two, Timothy Dexter was able to ship and sell thousands of stray cats to an island that just so happened to have a rodent problem. With his newfound wealth, Timothy Dexter decided to grow his fortune investing in the shipping trade.

6:10And he did a smart thing by seeking out advice from people who knew the business. Unfortunately, he got advice from rivals who were trying to mislead and bankrupt him. One person suggested that he gather stray cats and transport them on cargo ships destined for the Caribbean. Dexter decided to follow the advice and paid a few cents for every stray cat brought to his estate. He quickly assembled a collection of several hundred, maybe even thousands of cats, loaded them aboard a merchant ship and sent the captain south. Fortunately for Dexter, when the ship arrived in the Caribbean, the ports in the West Indies were dealing with warehouse rat infestations. And warehouse managers and ship captains faced severe grain losses and needed the cats immediately to protect their inventory. Dexter's cargo of cats arrived at the exact

7:12moment demand peaked, allowing his people to sell the cats at a premium price. What started as a malicious prank from a rival actually turned into quite a bit of good fortune for Timothy Dexter. Number three, Timothy Dexter was able to sell coal to England's biggest coal producing city. Once again, people were trying to mass with Timothy Dexter by telling him to ship a full cargo hold of coal to Newcastle on time. At the time, the phrase carrying coal to Newcastle was an English idiom meaning to do something completely pointless and redundant because Newcastle was the coal mining capital of Britain. Dexter though took the advice. He chartered a ship, loaded it with coal from the US and sent it across the Atlantic Ocean. And again, people thought the ship would return home filled with unsolved inventory. But in another bit of serendipity, the ship reached

8:18Newcastle during a massive strike that had shut down the region's mines. Newcastle was facing fuel shortages and factories were desperate to buy coal from anywhere they could. Dexter's ship was one of the only sources available for coal and his crew was able to sell the entire shipment record high prices before returning to Massachusetts. Number four, Timothy Dexter wrote an entire book with zero punctuation. Then added pages of punctuation marks at the end, inviting readers to distribute the periods and commas as they see fit. In 1802, Timothy Dexter wrote and self-published autobiography and a bit of a philosophical pamphlet titled A Pickle for the Knowing Ones. The texts had about 20 pages of complaints about politicians, the clergy, his wife, and local society. And the original edition had some creative, phonetic spelling, random capitalization,

9:26and not a bit of punctuation. There were no periods commas or semi-colons throughout the entire manuscript. But despite the chaotic style, it sold out pretty quickly. Dexter decided to publish a second edition. Critics complained about the total lack of punctuation, so Dexter decided to add an extra page at the end of the second printing. The appendix consisted of solid rows of periods, commas, colons, question marks, and exclamation points. Above all of the punctuation, he inserted a little note telling readers they could, quote, pepper and salt as they please, with pepper salt and please all misspelled. The book became such a popular novelty throughout New England. It actually went through eight print runs. And our fifth and final fun fact for

10:28today. In order to see who would genuinely mourn his passing, Timothy Dexter staged his own mock funeral. Dexter was curious how the community would react to his passing, so he decided to design his own funeral service and constructed an elaborate tomb on his property. He invited several thousand people to his mansion, provided food and drinks, and had a coffin carried out to the tomb. Dexter hid in a room above the estate to watch it all through a window. And it drew about three thousand attendees. Now hosting your own sort of mock funeral to see how people will react is a bit unusual, shall we say, but it really went off the rails when Timothy Dexter was not satisfied with his wife's reaction during the procession. While many visitors acted somber, his wife didn't

11:29show any visible signs of grief. And Dexter lost it. He popped out of his hiding place, which obviously startled the gathered crowd, and started scolding his wife in front of all the shocked and confused guests for not crying enough during his funeral. Now for some news you can use. Timothy Dexter's life is a great example of how good fortune can come to people through just sheer blind luck, but Timothy Dexter is also famous because this is the rare case. While there is serendipity and good things can happen by pure chance, generally good fortune tends to find people who are doing good work. Now as I was doing the research for this episode, and I came across the story of Timothy Dexter staging the funeral for himself to see how people

12:33would mourn his passing. It reminded me of a psychological idea of a primordom. Basically a post mortem, an autopsy people are familiar with as sort of an investigation to figure out the cause of death, but a primordom is this idea of sitting down before starting a project and asking yourself, assuming this goes completely wrong, what specific factors would have caused it to fail? This prompts your brain to look for the blind spots that you might miss at the start of a project because let's face it, you start something looking at it through an optimistic lens. The psychologist Gary Klein developed the primordom method after finding that people who went through this prospective analysis, sort of anticipating what would be the cause of future outcomes,

13:34were able to increase their ability to correctly determine future events by about 30%. While Dexter got lucky through just random chance, let's face it, relying on luck is not a good long-term plan. Conducting a primordom before starting a big project is going to help you identify risks early so you can come up with contingency plans or even solve problems before they start. It's a great way to make sure that your real-world ventures succeed by design rather than just pure chance. Finally, the moment you've been waiting for. At the beginning of the episode, I asked, did Timothy Dexter really make a fortune selling bedwarming pans in the Caribbean? Oddly enough, that's an absolute fact. When Dexter's ship arrived in the West Indies,

14:38the captain discovered that local sugarcane plantations were in the middle of their processing season, and plantation workers needed ladles and skimmers to scoop scum off large vats of boiling molasses. The captain removed the lids from the warming pans, detached the long wooden handles, and sold the metal pans as skimming ladles and measuring bowls. As absurd as it sounds, plantation owners bought the entire inventory, turning what seemed like a certain total loss into a 79% profit. Now, I hope you enjoyed learning a bit about Timothy Dexter with me today. Be sure to tune in every weekday for even more fun facts. Funfax Daily is an airwave media podcast. It was written, recorded, mixed, and edited by me, Kyle Wood. Thanks for sharing a part of your day with me. Be sure to follow Funfax Daily on your favorite

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