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Charles Vance Millar, a respected lawyer in Toronto, Canada at the turn of the 19th century, was known as a shy but all-around nice guy in life. That reputation would get altered somewhat, when he became renowned for a baby boom he caused years after his death.
Millar, having made a vast fortune as a lawyer, made an even bigger fortune through his brewery and several racehorses that he owned. He was generous with it — and donated winnings from his horses to children's hospitals — but, by his own admission, he had far too much money. With no dependents, he decided that it was his duty to leave "proof of my folly in gathering and retaining more than I required in my lifetime". In essence, he decided that his legacy was going to be to mess with people in ways that proved it was absurd to have so much darn cash.
Upon his death in 1926, he left his house in Jamaica to three lawyers who absolutely hated each other, on the condition that they share it. He gave valuable shares in his jockey club to fierce opponents of gambling, and his brewery to a bunch of prohibitionist Protestant ministers, possibly to make them hypocrites if they accepted the fortune. But the part that made him famous and got everybody banging around the clock was the competitive element to his will. He would leave the rest of his massive piles of cash to whichever Toronto mother had given birth to the most children in the 10 years following his death.
When he died on Halloween, 1926, his heart attack acted like a starting pistol telling people to get fornicating. Canada's media blew up the story, and soon there were far more entrants into the competition than could possibly win. People were having humans, with all their usual needs and wants, not out of love but because they acted like about 1/9 of a lottery ticket made of meat.
The competition became known as "The Great Stork Derby", which made it sound a whole lot more wholesome than the amount of ejaculating the reality involved. Though he may have been making a (fairly obscure) point about contraception, Millar underestimated exactly how poor and desperate people were at the time and would be as the Great Depression kicked off. People who were already struggling to raise one or two kids, suddenly thought it might be an idea to pop out seven or eight more to give themselves a chance at being able to adequately raise the first two. In one particularly grim detail, Newsweek casually mentioned that one of the frontrunners for the prize, Lillian Kenny, had recently lost a child. Her baby had been killed by rat bites due to the terrible squalor they were living in, reports FiveThirtyEight.
Over the next decade, legal fights took place to decide whether the competition was valid. There were questions as to whether it was harming the health and the welfare of the children involved. Mothers fought over whether stillbirths counted. One woman found herself outside of the confines of Toronto while giving birth to one of her kids, and wasn't allowed to add this one to the tally. Meanwhile, several others were disqualified on the grounds that they had had stillbirths, or the children had been illegitimate.
But in the end, the competition was found to be legally valid, and there were four winners, who each received an equal share of the life-changing prize.
