The story of how a useless pebble sparked a crazy trend and made an unemployed man a millionaire (12 photos)

So, it's the late 90s. Children all over the world are lugging around squeaky Tamagotchi keychains on lanyards. These are digital pets that need to be fed, treated, and put to bed.





Manual labor, digital responsibility—just what the doctor ordered to instill responsibility in the younger generation.



And it turns out that something similar already existed in the 70s. But a bit more primitive. Primitive in the truest sense of the word, literally Stone Age-style. It was 1975, and the world was going crazy for specific pets. Pet rocks. Yes, that's not a mistake. Specifically, rocks.





"Pet Rock" became one of the craziest fads of the decade. The funniest thing is, people loved them. And their creator became a millionaire.



The idea was Gary Ross Dahl's. One evening in 1975, he was hanging out with friends at a bar in the San Francisco Bay Area (where else do such ideas come from?). By the time the brilliant idea struck, Gary was an unemployed copywriter and desperately needed money.



Of course, this Pet Rock wasn't just any rock. Most of it was smooth river rocks. But the secret to its success wasn't the rocks themselves, it was the packaging. Buying a Pet Rock meant you were getting a taste of marketing, not just geology.



Gary Dahl

The rock came in a cardboard box with ventilation holes—just like the kind you'd find for hamsters or turtles at a pet store. Inside, on soft wood shavings, lay the "rock" itself, to keep it cozy.



The box included detailed instructions on how to feed, train, and care for the rock, all to keep it healthy and happy. The brochure even included a pedigree, like that of a high-end puppy. Many of the stones, as you might guess, came from great ancestors: those who participated in the construction of the pyramids, helped build the Great Wall of China, and so on.



A separate section was devoted to training. The most effective commands were: "Come," "Sit," "Down." And for advanced owners, even "Play Dead."



Imitation. The original stones had no eyes.

As soon as the first boxes appeared on the shelves of novelty and toy stores in the San Francisco Bay Area, the stones exploded into the public eye. Demand almost exceeded supply. However, "barely" is an exaggeration, as the supply was literally right under everyone's feet. In just a year, Gary Ross Dahl became a millionaire. He was invited to appear on television shows, and his song "I'm in Love with My Home Rock" was played on the radio.



Bob is one of the most common names for pet rocks.

Of course, this was a fad, a pure seasonal phenomenon. A year later, boxes of unsold pet rocks were gathering dust in warehouses. Rumor has it that many rocks were released into the wild and are now back in the wild. As for the inventor himself, he tried several similar ideas, such as a sand-making kit. But all of them failed.



Some kept the original stones as souvenirs.

However, the money Dahl earned from the stones was enough to open his own advertising agency and retire peacefully. He tried to remain in the shadows for the rest of his life, as people too often approached him with, as he put it, "crazy" ideas. After all, if he had succeeded with the stone, they would surely succeed with something similar.



It's not a problem to make something like this yourself these days. It's practically free.