The suspicious claim seems to have originated in a flapper-era study conducted by a biologist named John Bauman. Poe’s story of the scalp-pulling orangutan struck Bauman as being “grotesquely impossible.” In 1923, he noted that every expert in the field believed apes were vastly stronger than humans—yet none had ever tried to prove it. So he packed up a device used to measure pull strength, called a dynamometer, and set out for the Bronx Zoo.....It appeared that chimpanzees really could be more than five times stronger than humans.
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...But the “five times” figure was refuted 20 years after Bauman’s experiments. In 1943, Glen Finch of the Yale primate laboratory rigged an apparatus to test the arm strength of eight captive chimpanzees. An adult male chimp, he found, pulled about the same weight as an adult man. Once he’d corrected the measurement for their smaller body sizes, chimpanzees did turn out to be stronger than humans—but not by a factor of five or anything close to it.
