New York, New York – July 23, 1886. 23-year-old Steve Brodie, Bowery newsboy and “long-distance pedestrian," made a miraculous 120 foot leap off the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River and lived to tell about it. Friends waiting in a rowboat below pulled the dazed but unharmed Brody from the water and rowed him to shore. He was arrested for attempted suicide and taken to New York’s Tombs prison, but his lawyer successfully argued that there was no statute under which could be held. The charge of suicide was ridiculous because Brodie had made the jump to win a bet. 

Steve Brodie was an instant celebrity, becoming the public face of the Bowery, the most notorious neighborhood in America. The stunt made headlines throughout New York and Brody was paid $500 a week to appear at Alexander’s Museum. The problem was, no one outside of Brodie’s entourage actually saw him make the jump. A reporter named Ernest Jerrold (whose byline was Mickey Finn) tracked down and interviewed everyone near the bridge that day and confirmed that no one unconnected with Brodie saw him leave the bridge. It was suspected that a confederate had dropped a weighted dummy from the bridge while Brodie waited in a rowboat below. On the signal he slipped into the water and emerged at the spot where the dummy hit.

Steve Brodie's Saloon

The public ignored any skepticism and passionately embraced the story of Steve Brodie’s leap from the Brooklyn Bridge. He opened a saloon in the Bowery that became a popular hangout for sporting men and prize fighters such John L. Sullivan, Jim Corbett, and Jim Jefferies. It was also a major tourist attraction, and when the boxers were not in attendance he would hire actors to portray them for the benefit of out-of-towners.

Theatre Poster, 1894

Brodie continued his bridge jumping career by allegedly leaping from the Poughkeepsie bridge, the Harlem High Bridge, the Cincinnati Suspension Bridge. He also attempted to swim the Niagara rapids in a rubber suit. In 1894 he starred in a hit musical play called On the Bowery in which the hero jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge to save the heroine. He played the part with an extreme Bowery accent, singing the centerpiece song “My Pearl” as “My Poil is a Bowery goil…”

Steve Brodie was a master of self-promotion, constantly making headlines. In 1891, when New York was in a frenzy over the Jack-the-Ripper-like murder of prostitute Carrie Brown, Brodie reported he had found a piece of the dead woman’s intestines in front of the hotel where she was killed. The coroner later determined that it was a cat’s intestine. Everything Brodie did was big news until 1898 when he faked his own death. He was in Cleveland performing with Gus Hill’s vaudeville company in a sketch entitled “One Night in Brodie’s Barroom” and reportedly suffered a heart attack on stage. After Brody triumphantly appeared alive back at his saloon, the papers were reluctant to take any more of his stories at face value.

Steve Brodie died (for the last and final time) of tuberculosis, in San Antonio, Texas, on January 31, 1901. He had left New York several months earlier and moved to Texas to “die in peace.” In St. Louis an admirer asked him about his health and his bridge-jumping experience. The ever-colorful Steve Brodie replied:

“Well, young feller, its hard ter say, even if yer say it fast, but me time’s come. I’ve got the ‘con’ for fair, and I’m as good as a dead corpse. Bridge-jumping? Say. You take an old fool’s advice. If yer wanter get off the car, just reach up and pull the strap, and wait till it stops. See?”

• Every, Edward. Sins of New York as “exposed” by the Police gazette, . New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1930.
• Sante, Luc. Low life: lures and snares of old New York. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1991.

In a shack on a pier in Providence, Rhode Island, one chilly February afternoon in 1897, the Reverend Prescott F. Jernegan gave a scientific demonstration to Anthony F. Pierson and Arthur B. Ryan, two prominent Connecticut businessmen. At Jernegan’s request, the men had brought with them a zinc lined box built to Jernegan’s specification and several jars of mercury. Reverend Jernegan insisted that the men bring their own equipment so there would be no question as to the authenticity of the experiment. This was hardly necessary as Ryan knew the Baptist minister well and could vouch for his honesty.

The Reverend Prescott F. Jernegan.

The experiment would demonstrate the discovery by Reverend Jernegan of a method of extracting gold from seawater. It was well known that seawater contained a measurable amount of gold but there was no profitable way to extract it. Jernegan would remedy that. He poured the mercury into a pan in the bottom of the box, sprinkled some of his secret formula over it, attached electrodes from the pan to a battery, covered the box with a lid, perforated to let the water in and out, then he lowered the box through a trapdoor into the ocean below. The men then settled in to wait for morning, no doubt spending the night discussing the fortunes to be made if the experiment proved true.

At dawn Jernegan opened the trapdoor and pulled up the box. When he opened the box the men could see that some of the mercury was gone. The Connecticut men took away what was left and had it analyzed by a chemist. Sure enough, the chemist found traces of copper and silver along with $4.50 worth of gold. The experiment was a success, Jenegan had succeeded in extracting gold from seawater.

The demonstration was repeated at several other locations in Rhode Island and Connecticut generating considerable interest among potential investors. On November 5, 1897 five of them met with Reverend Jernegan and his partner Charles Fisher in Portland, Maine to form the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company. They issued ten million shares of stock at a par value of $1.00 per share and began selling them to raise capital for the new company.

The company purchased a grist mill in North Lubec, Maine, and there built a plant over the ocean where they sunk 243 “gold accumulators.” They named it the Klondike Plant and by July 1898 it was pulling in gold at the rate of $308 dollars a day. Work had already begun on Klondike Plant No. 2.

Charles Fisher.

Unbeknownst to any of the investors, the gold that manifested in the accumulators was actually placed there at night by Charles Fisher who opened them up underwater while wearing a diving suit with a tank of compressed air. He would remove some of the mercury and replace it with mercury he had laced with gold. All of the experiments were done this way and he even salted the accumulators at the Klondike Plant. He and Jernegan had used the early investments to buy old jewelry which they melted down and added to the mercury.

Charles Fisher and Prescott Jernegan, both sons of whaling captains, had grown up together in Edgartown, Martha’s Vineyard before Jernegan got the calling. Years later they reunited and came up with a scheme that they believed, correctly, would be worth a fortune. They practiced together until they could pull off the experiments without a hitch and they were even able to convincingly run the Klondike Plant for a time.

Then one day in July 1898 the plant stopped paying. No gold came up in the accumulators. The investors learned that a large sum of money had been withdrawn from the accounts of the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company, and Jernegan and Fisher were nowhere to be found. Fisher had fled to New South Wales. Jernegan, under the alias Louis Sinclair, had taken his wife and family, along with about $100,000 to Europe. He sent a letter to Ryan saying Fisher had run off with the secret formula and he had gone to track him down.

A while later Jernegan had a change of heart. Maybe it was his religious training coming back or maybe he just enjoyed perpetrating the fraud more than the spoils, but he sent a check for $75,000 from Brussels, Belgium to his investors in the United States. That, together with the sale of the property allowed investors to recover thirty-six cents for every dollar invested. Jernigan tried the scheme again in England, but the Brits proved harder to fool and he lost $30,000.

Prescott Jernegan surfaced again around 1901 in the Philippine Islands. He had gone straight, becoming a schoolteacher there and publishing several books on Philippine history and culture.

Sources:

• Laura Hernegan: Girl on a Whaleship - Prescott Jernegan
• "Oceanic Gall." Boston Herald 31 July 1898: 6.
• Silitch, Clarissa M.. Danger, disaster, and horrid deeds. Dublin, N.H.: Yankee, inc., 1974.