P. T. Barnum

Barnum ran a general store and a newspaper before moving to New York in 1834 and pivoting to entertainment: first a variety troupe, then a museum stocked with hoaxes like the Fiji mermaid and human curiosities like General Tom Thumb. In 1850 he gambled on an unknown Swedish singer named Jenny Lind, paid her $1,000 a night for 150 shows, and made her a sensation. The 1850s brought bad investments, lawsuits, and collapse; he crawled out lecturing on temperance. He served two terms in the Connecticut legislature, argued for the Thirteenth Amendment, then became mayor of Bridgeport, where he fixed the water and founded a hospital. At sixty he launched the traveling circus that still carries his name. His first wife died in 1873 after forty-four years of marriage; he remarried months later to a woman forty years younger and stayed with her until a stroke killed him in 1891.