Coral Castle

A hundred-pound man moved thousand-ton coral alone, at night. "I know the secret of the pyramids," was all he'd say.

Ed Leedskalnin, five feet tall and a hundred pounds, quarried, moved, and set over 1,100 tons of oolitic limestone in Florida (1923-51), alone, at night, refusing observation — including a nine-ton gate balanced so finely a child could push it (when it failed in 1986, engineers with a crane needed weeks and never restored the original action). His pamphlets on magnetism read as crankery or cipher, by taste. Asked how, he said he knew the secrets of the pyramid builders. The archive keeps him as the megalith problem in miniature: a single documented case of one man doing what the textbooks say teams and centuries did.