Sam Hill - What in Sam Hill?

Scatter-brained, simple, and manic-depressive.  They just don't make business magnates like Sam Hill anymore.

Sam was born to a Quaker family which moved to Minnesota to avoid the Civil War.  After attending Harvard University, Sam set himself up at a law practice and made a name for himself by suing railroads.  One railroad owner, James Hill (unrelated) rather tired of Sam's antics, solved the issue by hiring Sam and making him an executive.  Sam thanked his benefactor by marrying the man's daughter Mary, who was thereafter known as Mary Hill Hill.  Thanks to his fat railroad paycheck, and a generous wedding gift from his father-in-law, Sam was thrust into the highfalutin world of the American gilded age, rubbing shoulders with millionaires, taking vacations to Europe, and becoming quite the man about town in Minneapolis.

As the start of the 20th century rolled around Sam got rather tired of railroads and his interests switched to electric companies.  He moved to Seattle and purchased the local light and gas company.  His wife and two children followed, but after six months they moved back to Minneapolis.  Sam didn't mind a bit.  His wife was becoming an invalid, his daughter was nutty enough to get locked in a mental institution, and his son was the worst kind of rich kid lay about.  Sam built himself a mansion in Seattle, which he paid for by doubling gas rates, and soon after sold his electric company and successfully invested in the stock market, netting him enough money to try whatever batshit crazy idea entered his head.  It was at this time that Sam became obsessed with roads, traveling the world to study them, and pushing Oregon and Washington to build a highway up the Columbia River Gorge.  This probably had nothing to do with the fact that he had purchased a large tract of land in Eastern Washington along the Columbia River that was pretty much nothing but rock and steep hillside.  Oregon in the end gave in, building a highway with more aesthetic than practical value.

Though he was estranged from his wife, Sam was never lonely thanks to an army of mistresses.  Three of these women became pregnant, an issue Sam solved by marrying them off to random acquaintances so his offspring wouldn't be considered bastards.  When his favorite mistress became pregnant, Sam built her a mansion and married her off to his cousin, but of course kept sleeping with her.  Sam, growing tired of roads, moved on to telephones, starting an unsuccessful telephone company in Portland.  He then spent World War I riding a train through Europe and Russia.  Sam claimed he was spying for the U.S. government, but actually he was just being a crazy rich guy.  Following the war, Sam decided to build a bunch of monuments just because he could.  The first was a concrete version of Stonehenge built on his butt fuck nowhere property in Eastern Washington to commemorate three local men who had died in World War I.  The second was a massive arch, called the Peace Arch, on the U.S.-Canadian border north of Seattle.  This monument was a little more clever given that next to it, on the Canadian side, Sam built a large resort full of liquor for Americans looking to take a vacation from Prohibition.

As Sam got older, he found himself becoming more sentimental for his estranged wife and family.  To try and attract them west, he built for them a massive concrete mansion, which he named Maryhill in honor of his wife and daughter.  Unfortunately, this mansion was built on his god forsaken property in Eastern Washington.  With his family refusing to come west, Sam was left with a bit of a problem, namely what to do with the concrete edifice hulking over the Columbia River.  In the end, on the suggestion of one of his mistresses, Sam turned his house in the middle of nowhere into an art museum in the middle of nowhere, somehow getting Queen Marie of Romania to come out and do the dedication.  The rest of Sam's life was mostly schemes involving motion pictures and underwater mining, and having elaborate globes made to give away as presents.  When he finally died he had himself interred in a monument of his own design near his Stonehenge.  A few years after his death the monument crumbled and fell into the Columbia River.

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Hill#/media/File:Samuel_Hill,_road_builder.png

Lincoln Beachey - One Crazy Son of A Bitchy

Lincoln was a chubby lonely kid born close to the end of the 19th century.  Being socially inept, the young Lincoln decided on a slightly different method for making friends.  That method involved doing crazy stunts like riding a bike with no brakes down San Francisco's famous hilly streets.  By the time Lincoln was a teenager, bike riding had become boring, so he set his focus on becoming an aviator.  This was not an easy task, given that airplanes had just been invented two years prior, which really made it unlikely that anybody was going to let some crazy seventeen year old kid pilot one.  Lincoln had to settle for the next best thing: being a test pilot for experimental dirigibles, which involved sitting in a basket under a huge balloon full of hydrogen gas.  It was exactly as safe as it sounds.  After five years of somehow not dying in a fiery explosion or ground impact, Lincoln finally got his big break while attending an air show where the pilot of a bi-plane became too sick to fly.  Despite having no idea what he was doing, Lincoln volunteered.  He flew the plane up 3,000 feet and promptly put it into a death spiral.  By some miracle Lincoln managed to land the plane, and with that, an American hero was born.

Lincoln went to work for Glenn Curtis as a stunt pilot, again, with almost no flying experience.  Lincoln, nonplussed, taught himself how to fly by crashing three planes.  At first Lincoln just repeatedly did his death spiral maneuver, but when that got old he moved on to racing trains in his plane, flying under low bridges, and down Niagara Falls.  He was the first pilot to perform figure 8's and the first to do vertical drops to achieve terminal velocity.  When he got tired of flying down, he flew straight up, setting altitude records above 11,000 feet.  Lincoln then performed the first night flight, dropping flares and noise makers over Los Angeles for a gag, and the first indoor flight, taking off and landing inside the same building.  All of this is even more impressive considering this was a time when planes were made of wood and canvas, and that Lincoln was doing all of his flying in a business suit.  In 1914, 17 million people came to his airshows, 20 percent of the whole U.S. population at the time.

When Lincoln wasn't acting crazy, he was playing pranks.  These included dressing like a woman and then flying erratically to make fun of fellow aviator Blanche Scott, dive bombing the White House, and blowing up a replica of a U.S. battleship.  However, things weren't all laughs.  Lincoln's fame as a crazy man who flew airplanes straight at the ground garnered a lot of copycats, many of whom strangely died in airplane crashes.  Feeling guilty, Lincoln retired from flying and tried his hand at selling real estate.  This lasted a few months, until another aviator performed the first loop de loop.  Horrified that someone else was doing new tricks before he did, Lincoln got back into the biz, painted his name in huge letters on his plane, and not only started doing multiple loops, but also started flying upside down.

The remainder of Lincoln's career largely involved doing loop after loop, sometimes as many as eighty in a row.  However, loops didn't pay the bills, so he also raced his plane against the famous race car driver Barney Oldfield, letting the car win sometimes just to keep things interesting.  Lincoln was forced into retirement for a second time in 1915 when at age 28 he plowed an experimental monoplane into San Francisco Bay.  Lincoln survived the crash, but drowned before rescuers could reach him.  Across the country, children mourned him by making up a jump rope song about what a crazy idiot he was. 

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lincoln_Beachey_with_his_Curtiss_biplane_at_the_Dominguez_Hills_Air_Meet_1912_CHS-11683.jpg

H.H. Holmes - What the Hell Holy Shit

The 1893 Chicago World's Fair was an amazing celebration of the American gilded age. It was an exposition of firsts.  First movie theater, first Ferris Wheel, first Pabst Blue Ribbon, and America's first serial killer.

H.H. was born Herman Mudgett, a moniker he abandoned for obvious reasons.  His terrible name aside, Herman did not have a happy childhood.  When he wasn't getting violently beaten by his alcoholic father, he was getting tortured and bullied by his future alcoholic classmates.  Herman dealt with his problems by dissecting small animals.  I think we can all see where this one is going.  He attended university to become a medical doctor, an endeavor he paid for by using cadavers from the university in complicated life insurance schemes.  This did not sit well with his first wife for some reason, so she left, a fact that didn't bother Herman in the least.  He soon got remarried, without ever getting officially divorced, and started traveling the country, taking on odd jobs and murdering a few children here and there.  Herman's new wife was apparently the most oblivious woman in history.

After a few years of random murder, Herman, finding himself in Chicago, decided to shift homicides from a hobby to a full on industry.  He secured a city block on which he built a massive edifice that was supposedly a hotel, but would later be called the Murder Castle. The Murder Castle was built over several years with no workman allowed to be part of its construction for more than a few weeks at a time.  It was a maze of hallways and false doors.  Air tight and sound proof rooms provided the perfect spots for various types of murder.  Strangulation, asphyxiation, poison, and starvation just to name a few.  In the basement Herman set up his own personal laboratory where he dissected and did away with the bodies using acid, lime, and incineration.  The entire monstrosity was funded by a combination of life insurance scams and the selling of skeletons across the country to doctors’ offices and universities.

Herman's second wife must have been the most oblivious woman in history.  Not only did he run a murder factory right under her nose, he also fueled it by seducing women from across the country, luring them into his lair.  Woman after woman fell to the charms of Herman.  Several of these mistresses stayed in his hotel for months before being dealt with.  Herman even got married for a third time, even though he was still legally married to his first two wives, though in the grand scheme of things, his penchant for bigamy probably wasn't that big of a deal what with the wanton murder and all.  Herman's "business" reached its high point during the Chicago World's Fair.  With thousands of people flocking to the city, many couldn't be that picky when it came to available hotel rooms.

Soon after the end of the World's Fair, Herman was forced to flee to avoid the police.  His second wife probably just thought he was leaving for cigarettes or something.  Herman tried to stay low, but couldn't keep himself from running a few non-murdery horse swindles and life insurance scams.  Growing bored, Herman killed his only friend, kidnapped three of the man's children, and then led his widow on what he thought was probably a merry chase across the U.S. and Canada.  This chase of course ended with the children getting murdered, because at this point how else could it end.  Herman was soon captured, tried for several of his murders, and hanged.  It's estimated that he killed up to 200 people.  His last words basically hinted that he was probably the devil.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:H._H._Holmes.jpg