Great Frauds in History

[astarmathsandphysics]

At the moment I ca't think of any greater fraud in history than Thomas Edison, who people think of as the greatest inventor in history. In fact many of the inventions for which he was famous were not his own. He claimed the credit for many inventions made pby people who worked for him. He was a great businesman, publicist, salesman and fraud.

If anyone can think up a greater fraud than this, post here.

[the winner]

polticians are the great fraud people

[astarmathsandphysics]

The alternatives are probably worse. I was thinking of frauds perpetrated By individuals, not systems.

[Becca]

All of us know that Alexander Graham Bell is the first person to receive a patent for the telephone, but did you know that a German, Philipp Reis, invented the original device first?? 

[the winner]

NO I didn't know that....

[Most UniQue™]

NO

NO SPAM! Post Edited!

[PoThePanda]

Sometimes I feel like everyone is a fraud.
But that's usually after I read "Catcher In The Rye".

It's because I'm a hipster.
I'm a hipster Panda.
I wear all my favorite brands - Gucci, BVLGARI, D&G.

My scent is Hugh Jackman.

[Becca]

Can you imagine the great lengths people would go to to get more money??!  



"In 1971, a Philippine government minister (Manuel Elizalde) discovered a small stone age tribe living in isolation on the island of Mindanao. This tribe, called the Tasaday, spoke a strange language, used stone tools, and exhibited other stone-age attributes. Their discovery made television headlines, the cover of National Geographic, and was the subject of a bestselling book. When anthropologists tried to get a better look at the tribe, President Marcos declared the land a reserve and made it off-limits to all visitors.
 
When Marcos was deposed in 1986, two journalists visited the site and found that the Tasaday in fact lived in houses, traded with the local farmers, wore jeans and t-shirts and spoke a modern local dialect. The Tasadays explained that they had moved in the caves and behaved in a stone-age manner because of pressure from Elizalde. Elizalde had fled the country in 1983 with millions of dollars he had stolen from a foundation set up to protect the Tasaday people."
 
Got this from a website on various frauds in history...  

[Becca]

Here's another one... People can be so silly sometimes! XD


"Cars that run on water and fusion machines that generate more energy than they use are staples of inventors’ fantasy. They pop up all the time. Charles Redheffer raised large sums of money in Philadelphia with a perpetual motion machine and then took it to New York in 1813, where hundreds paid a dollar each to see it.
 
It did, indeed, seem to keep itself turning. In the end, skeptics offered a large sum of money to “prove” that the machine was in fact a fraud. Redheffer took the money and the skeptics removed some wooden strips along the wall from the machine. When they did so, they found a cat-gut belt drive, which went through a wall to an attic where an old man was turning a crank with one hand, and eating a loaf of bread with the other."

 
http://listverse.com/2008/04/09/top-10-scientific-frauds-and-hoaxes/
^This is where I got it from...

[takluboy]

I have researched on this topic and have read many books that Edison was a quite fraud.In many of the inventions that were done by his co-workers he has named his own.He is a fraud but we cannot ignore the fact that he is also a great inventor.