P. T. Barnum
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Phineas Taylor Barnum (July 5, 1810 - April 7, 1891), American showman who is best remembered for his entertaining hoaxes and for founding the circus that eventually became Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus.
He was born in Bethel, Connecticut, his father being an inn and store-keeper. Barnum first started as a store-keeper, and was also concerned in the lottery mania then prevailing in the United States. After failing in business, he started in 1829 a weekly paper, The Herald of Freedom, in Danbury, Connecticut; after several libel suits and a prosecution which resulted in imprisonment, he moved to New York City in 1834, and in 1835 began his career as a showman, with his purchase and exploitation of an African-American woman, Joice Heth, reputed to have been the nurse of George Washington, and to be over a hundred and sixty years old.
With this woman and a small company he made well-advertised and successful tours in America until 1839, though Joice Heth died in 1836, when her age was proved to be not more than seventy. After a period of failure he purchased Scudder's American Museum, New York, in 1841; to this he added considerably and it became one of the most popular shows in the United States. He made a special hit in 1842 with the exhibition of Charles Stratton, the celebrated midget "General Tom Thumb". In 1843 Barnum hired the traditional Native American dancer Do-Hum-Me. During 1844-45 Barnum toured with Charles Stratton in Europe and met with Queen Victoria. A remarkable instance of his enterprise was the engagement of Jenny Lind to sing in America at $1,000 a night for one hundred and fifty nights, all expenses being paid by the entrepreneur. The tour began in 1850.
Barnum retired from the show business in 1855, but had to settle with his creditors in 1857, and began his old career again as showman and museum proprietor. In Brooklyn, New York in 1871, he established "The Greatest Show on Earth," a travelling amalgamation of circus, menagerie and museum of "freaks." In 1881 he merged with James Bailey to create the Barnum & Bailey Circus, which toured around the world. The show's primary attraction was Jumbo, an African elephant he purchased from the London Zoo.
Jumbo (1861 - September 15, 1885) was an African elephant, born in 1861 in the French Sudan from where he was imported to France and kept in the old Zoo Jardin des Plantes close to the South railway station Gare de Sud in Paris. In 1865 he was transferred to the London Zoo, where he became famous for giving rides to visitors. It was the London zoo-keepers that gave Jumbo his name ?- it is a slightly garbled version of the word jambo, which is Swahili for "hello".
Jumbo was sold in 1882 to P. T. Barnum, owner of "The Greatest Show on Earth", the Barnum & Bailey Circus. Estimated to be 3.25 metres high in the London Zoo, it was claimed that Jumbo was approximately 4 metres tall by the time of his death. Jumbo died at a train station in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada, where he was crushed by a locomotive. A statue now at the site commemorates the tragedy.[1]
Jumbo's skeleton was donated to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Jumbo's hide was stuffed and traveled with Barnum's circus for a number of years. In 1889, Barnum donated the stuffed Jumbo to Tufts University, where it was displayed until destroyed by a fire in 1975. In honor of Barnum's donation, Jumbo became the Tufts mascot.
As a result of Barnum's publicity the word "jumbo" is now synonymous with "large" or "huge": a large hot dog sausage may be called a "jumbo hot dog"; the Boeing 747 is known as the "Jumbo Jet".
After his death, his circus was sold to Ringling Brothers in 1909 (or 1907?).
Barnum wrote several books, including The Humbugs of the World (1865), Struggles and Triumphs (1869), and his Autobiography (first in 1854, and later editions including 1869).
This article incorporates text from the public domain 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.T._Barnum
