so it's the 1800s and you're not feeling so great you've been doing a lot of hard labor for very little money and your body is aching but then you see a crowd of people all gathered around listening to a man named Clark Stanley or as he called himself the rattlesnake King you hear Clark tell the crowd about this incredible medicine he's discovered that could not only relieve muscle pain but sprains bruises sore throats frostbite inset bites and many more different ailments people in the crowd are queuing up to buy his snake oil medicine and so
desperate for some pain relief you go and buy a bottle for yourself and take a drink welcome to the story of Clark Stanley the original snake oil salesman foreign [Music] in the present day the phrase snake oil salesman is often used to describe a scammer who knowingly sells fraudulent goods and tries to rip people off in other words a con man and Clark Stanley is the man responsible for that but here's the plot twist snake oil may have genuine medicinal properties you see snake oil was introduced to America by Chinese immigrants who are brought in
to build the railroads after a hard day of back-breaking Labor they would share their homegrown remedies with the other workers to help ease the pain in their aching joints because back in China oil obtained from Chinese water snakes had been used in traditional medicine for centuries in order to treat joint ailments such as arthritis and some modern day scientific Studies have backed this up analysis of traditional snake oil showed that it contained a very high percentage of omega-3 fatty acids which help reduce cholesterol inflammation blood pressure and can improve cognitive functions in fact researchers in
Japan found that mice fed with Chinese sea snake oil showed a significant Improvement in their ability to learn mazes and swim now don't get me wrong snake oil is certainly not some miracle medicine that's going to make a lot of difference but the point is snake oil didn't start out as some fake medicine to get people's money it was simply passed around by people as something that was genuinely a little useful so why is snake oil nowadays associated with Shady scams well here's the thing because some people did get benefits from this Chinese snake oil
wood if it spread like wildfire among the American working class and soon all over the country there was huge demand for this Chinese snake oil there was just one problem though there obviously weren't any Chinese water snakes in America there was no way that Chinese immigrants could import enough oil from back home to meet the ever-growing demand in the US and so since demand for Chinese snake oil far outweighed the supply this opened the floodgates for scammers to create their own version of snake oil which of course they claimed was just as good if not
better than the real thing and this is where we meet our stories intriguing protagonist list Clark Stanley [Music] [Music] Clark Stanley the self-proclaimed rattlesnake King said that he came from Texas Clark claimed that whilst working as a cowboy for over a decade he'd spent a good chunk of the 1880s with the Hopi tribe in Arizona and they liked him enough try and trust him with the secret knowledge of how to make their special snake oil medicine which he then improved to turn it into the most potent snake oil on the market it was a good
story but it was just a story nobody ever confirmed any of this and there's absolutely zero evidence of it what's more likely is that Clark had simply heard that there was high demand in America for this Chinese snake oil and thus created his own fake version using rattlesnakes instead which were much more readily available in America and then created a backstory to make it sound good but despite having no medical evidence to back up his claims Clark proudly told everyone he met that if you suffered from joint pain or countless other ailments then a bottle
of Clark Stanley's snake or liniment was guaranteed to soothe you now at first Clark was just another stereotypical small time Shady salesman he traveled all over the United States peddling his miracle cure one bottle at a time to the unsuspecting gullible masses and whilst Clark was the first to truly capitalize on the snake oil craze he certainly wasn't the first person to sell useless concoctions disguised as medicines before we get to the next part of the story have you guys noticed an increase in scams lately that's why today's sponsor is Aura an all-in-one security tool
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United States Food and Drug Administration there was no real regulation over the sale of medicine anyone could sell their products and claim it had whatever medicinal properties they wanted without fear of interference from the government as a result many entrepreneurs with no morals began creating something called patent medicines these were typically advertised as treating a wide range of pains and illnesses but conveniently they never actually revealed what all of the ingredients were it was always a secret formula which really just meant they could contain pretty much anything unless most of the time they were just
a random mix of ingredients with little to no medical benefit was the pattern medicine industry began in England in the 17th century by the 1800s they were being imported to many other countries and pretty soon scammers in the US realized it would be much more profitable for them just create their own tonics and elixirs instead of importing them so yet more of these useless patent medicines popped out in fact if you've seen my video on the story of coke you'll know Coca-Cola actually started out as one of these patent medicines however was so many different
patent medicines being created in the 1800s the market became crowded because all of them made massive claims about the many different elements they could treat and so it became harder for these scammers to make their products stand out that's why all of the most successful patent medicine sellers including Clark Stanley and his snake oil had one thing in common their sales pitches were more of a theatrical performance they'd enter a town set up shop on the Main Street gather a crowd of onlookers and put on a show to attract an audience and entice people to
buy their products they'd make sure the whole thing was a spectacle so it was essentially Park Carnival part sales pitch one of the most common tactics these patent medicine sellers used was to have fake plants in the crowds who vouched for the product from personal experience and strongly encouraged others to try it for themselves everyone else in the crowd just assumed they were genuine customers who loved the product but really they were planted actors getting a cut of the sales money and then once the show was finished and they'd sold lots of the fake medicine
they travel from town to town repeating the same Con in a new place now there were many people who did this but it's believed Clark Stanley carefully observed the tricks the most successful patent medicine sellers were using and then decided to create an attention-grabbing show of his own it was at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago that Clark Stanley got his first big opportunity back then this was the largest public event in the history of the United States and Clark set up his own little stand at the fair where he would Fascinate the public by
manufacturing his special formula right there in front of them of course he already knew the Golden Rule but on a show so Clark had brought with him a big bag of snakes and he would snatch one from the sack cut it open right in front of his gorking audience and plunge it into boiling water he then skimmed the fat off the top mixed it with his own secret concoction of ingredients and made his snake oil right there and then in front of the crowd it was an impressive show and this over-the-top display of cutting the
snakes right in front of the audience gathered a lot of attention and thus Clark's snake oil was immediately snapped up by the crowds who gathered to see his Grizzly performance whilst Clark's theatrics helped him get a lot of initial customers the other big breakthrough for Clark came when he used some of the profits to open a factory in Beverly Massachusetts to produce his snake oil in larger quantities he began operating on a much grander scale than any of the other patent medicine sellers of the time and this made his operations seem more authentic by 1901
Clark had become the largest snake or salesman in the country and had one of the most popular products on the market and so he opened an even bigger manufacturing plans in fact his product had become so popular that Clark had to Contender with knockoffs that purposely tried to imitate the look of his bottle Clark warned everyone not to be taken in by such worthless imitations sold by Shady traveling salesmen and Street vendors the irony of course is that this is exactly how Clark himself started out but as bizarre as it may seem Clark had done
such a good job of marketing his fake snake oil that people were now making fake versions of his product but despite the imitators life was good for Clark Stanley and his business was booming at least it was as long as he didn't have to actually prove any of these claims he was making [Music] [Music] at the start of the 20th century the United States government finally decided it was time to crack down on all of these unchecked patent medicines they passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. this was designed to improve the quality
of food and medications as well as punish offenders who mislabeled their products or operated in unsanitary conditions although in reality this act was mainly passed in response to public outrage over the appalling conditions found in Chicago's meat packing industry and so that was the government's first Target this meant that even though dodgy patent medicines were rampant in the United States it wasn't the government's main priority which allowed Clark even more time to keep selling his formula it wasn't until a decade later that the recently formed FDA turned its attention to snake oil and the other
patent medicines of course it made perfect sense to start by testing the most popular product on the market which was Clark Stanley's snake or liniment now it turns out that rattlesnake oil contains less than half the Amiga 3 the traditional Chinese water snake oil had so despite Clark's bows and promises that his snake oil was the best that money could buy it was never even close to the genuine Chinese snake oil in terms of Effectiveness however it gets much worse when the FDA tested plaque's product in 1916 they found that there was not even any
snake oil whatsoever in his medicine it was mostly just mineral oil mixed with one percent beef fat some chili peppers and a dash of camphor and turpentine to give it a distinct aroma so basically any health benefits people felt from Clark's supposed miracle cure were likely the result of the placebo effect some may say the ingredients which Clark added to give it the distinctive smell actually did incidentally have some minor health benefits but what is clear is that Clark's Ward claims of everything his product could cure were not true at all now if he'd been
selling actual real Chinese snake oil then he'd have still been wildly exaggerating the benefits but at least he'd have been selling what he claims but the reality was his product didn't even contain snake oil of any kind and thus what most people don't realize is that Clark Stanley wasn't convicted for selling snake oil he was convicted for selling fake snake oil in the end the whole thing was a blatant outright scam claiming one thing and selling another and using Showmanship and lies to fool his customers and thus that is how the term snake or salesman
was born and of course lives on long after Clark Stanley is gone the worst part though is that even though Clark had misled his customers for decades and made a Fortune of his hopeful victims he was only fine twenty dollars for misbranding his product he was charged with falsely and fraudulently representing it as a remedy for all pain but even accounting for inflation that's only a fine of about 550 in today's money and thus the rattlesnake King evaded any severe repercussions for his actions and got to ride off into the sunset with his ill-gotten gains
thus literally and permanently giving snake or salesman a bad name now Clark Stanley may have put on a good show to trick people but he wasn't as impressive as these guys right here this is my mini series on some of the most infamous scammers con artists including the much crazier stories of the Ponzi scheme the con Man Who Sold the Eiffel Tower and the guy who robbed an entire country some of these are truly insane so just click on the playlist on screen now and take your pick I'll see you there in a second cheers
