Arthur Schütz

Arthur Schütz (also under the pen name Erich Ritter von Winkler

Life Schütz was born as son of the Austrian consul in Moscow. He studied engineering and in 1904 established a company, "Arthur Schütz & Co.", specializing on drive systems and components in Vienna. He later published the magazine Riementechnische Mitteilungen.

The "Grubenhund" In November 1911, Schütz was dissatisfied with the editorial standards of the Viennese newspaper Neue Freie Presse after they had exaggerated the effects of a recent, rather harmless, earthquake. In order to "educate" them, he wrote a letter that his "Grubenhund" (German for "mining dog") had been uneasy half an hour before the earthquake happened. The journalists of the Neue Freie Presse reprinted the letter in their newspaper shortly afterwards without checking it for facts. They were told afterwards that a "Grubenhund" is the term for an underground freight wagon used for transporting the ore in mines, which was actually common knowledge and could have been easily checked. Schütz devised those hoaxes as a kind of educational training together with friends and co-workers, to set out to prove that any article will be picked up by the media and circulated if it manages merely to seem convincing and legitimately scientifically proven.

Legacy In 2004, the "Arthur-Schütz-Institut" tried to make German newspapers print a "Grubenhund". The organization, which claimed to be a gene research institute but was actually a group of researchers of the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, claimed to have found a gene in the human DNA which is responsible for all sexual behavior, even as detailed as the choice of sexual partners. The story was a failure though, with only 3 of 1500 editorial departments contacted accepting it as fact.