The Daily Lesson

It was August 31, 1798, in the night and into the following morning, that theives knocked over the Bank of Pennsylvania at Carpenter’s Hill, making off with $162,821, which would now be worth around 3.1 million.  This was the first major bank robbery in the United States, and perhaps the dumbest.  Well... maybe.  The robbery was set up a guy named Thomas Cunningham, who was a porter at the bank and managed to get a copy of the key.  He gave the key to a carpenter named Issac Davis, who used it to get inside and get at all that money. 

So what do you do with all that money?  I mean, you can’t just leave it all lying around.  The safest thing would be to put in the bank... the same bank they robbed it from.  Yeah.  They were caught.  Well, Davis was.  Cunningham died of yellow fever, which was rampant in Philadelphia at the time, within a couple days of the robbery.

Until Davis was caught, a blacksmith named Patrick Lyon, who had worked on the vault, was accused of the robbery.  After all, the locks on the safe were undamaged.  Davis eventually confessed of the crime and was pardoned on the condition that he return the money, which he did... all but $2,000 (worth around $50,000 now), which he kept.  He left town and was never heard from again, and he never spent a day in jail.

Lyon, on the other hand, was kept in jail even after Davis’s confession, even though his bail was reduced.  When Lyon was finally released, he sued – and won – for false imprisonment.  Lyon is probably best known – aside from the robbery – as a major inventor of fire engines.

So, yeah.  I suppose there’s a lesson to be learned here.  Probably more than one.  But I’ll be darned if I can figure out what that might be.

​