3 May 2005
David Blaine, please take note
From my "Well, Duh!" Page-a-day Andrews McMeel calendar for yesterday:
In 1841, England's greatest daredevil, Samuel Scott, performed stunt acrobatics while hanging by a rope with the noose around his neck from London's Waterloo Bridge. One day the noose slipped. Scott strangled to death on the bridge while the audience cheered, assuming it was part of the act.
Well, that's what the calendar says. I haven't found any corroborating evidence (or really anything at all about this so-called 'greatest daredevil' other than somebody else's diary transcribing this very same paragraph, albeit without attribution) or any evidence that doesn't corroborate.
Ten minutes in Lexis-Nexis yielded nothing about the guy.
There's apparently a book by Lou Harry entitled Strange Philadelphia that supposedly mentions "Samuel Scott's Last Leap (1841)". Is there anybody out there in Philly (or with access to the Pennsylvania libraries) that could see what this is all about? Inquiring minds must know.
Inquiring minds might also want to know why the writing on the calendar is so horrible, with bad prepositional phrases and other poor sentence structure. However, inquiring minds really just want to debunk, not proofread.