"BILLY WELLS"

The Iron-Skull Man

"Mexican Billy" Wells was actually born a Dutchman as Wilhelm Wells.  The story is told that at the age of eight Billy was watching a parade go by from an upstairs window in Amsterdam.  Leaning over too far, the young boy fell 15 feet straight down, landing squarely on his head. Everyone rushed over, expecting to see the lifeless body of a dead child but before anyone could lay a hand on him little  Billy  sat up, sprang to his feet and clapped his hands as the parade went by!     Whether this story is true I cannot say but somewhere along the way Billy came to realize that he had an unusually thick skull and that he could parlay this "deformity" into an act.      With nothing more than a piece of folded cloth between his skull and granite Billy would call forward the strongest man in the audience to come up and break the stone with a sledgehammer. If the stone was not broken by the first blow Billy would yell, "Harder! harder!, hit harder!" until the stone was broken.       Billy would use stones six to ten inches thick and about two feet square and always insisted he used hard stones and not "soft" ones. His contract with a dime museum usually called for 10 shows a day with 10 stones broken per show but during the eight seasons he was with Barnum & Bailey he gave an average of 23 shows a day!  But it was in  Scotland that Billy set his all time record.