"Coffin Cab" is a 1902 illustration by Henry Charles Moore.

“Big Joe” Grimes was the “World’s Largest Man” at P.T. Barnum’s circus at the beginning of last century, when all you needed to be a star was enormous size. (As opposed to current times, when all you need to be a star is enormous emotional baggage.) In a 1902 Ringling tour, he shared performance space with Francisco Lentini, the Three-Legged Boy, and Enoch the Man Fish, among others. But what gave Grimes relative fame and fortune also claimed him–though not in the expected way. It wasn’t a heart attack or stroke or diabetes that ended the sideshow attraction’s life, but rather his huge body straining a cab to the breaking point and beyond.

I came across “World’s Largest Man Dead,” a very brief notice in the September 5, 1903 issue of the New York Times, which details his death but didn’t mention his show biz career, as it were. The piece is subtitled: “‘Big Joe’ Grimes of Cincinnati Breaks Through Cab and Fatally Wounds Himself.” An excerpt:

“‘Big Joe’ Grimes, said to have been the largest man in the world, is dead at the home of his parents in the city, as the result of a peculiar accident. While riding in a cab, his great weight broke through the bottom, one of his legs was gashed, the wound refusing to heal.

Grimes weighed 754 pounds, and was thirty-four years of age. He was 6 feet 4 inches in height, and his body and limbs were of ponderous dimensions.”