At 21, with help from his father, Norton opened his own ship supplies business, but it went bankrupt within 18 months. Things went from bad to worse over the next few years, and by 1848, both of Norton's parents and two of his siblings had died.

The following year, Norton left South Africa, and after a short stop in South America, landed in San Francisco in late 1849.

Norton arrived in a lawless, Wild West version of San Francisco. The Gold Rush transformed a small town of a few hundred people to a bustling metropolis of 25,000 within a few years.

It was also a town of constant rebirth. People were making and losing their fortunes in the blink of an eye. The city was almost destroyed by fires seven times between 1849 and 1851.

Norton, who had already built and lost a business in South Africa, fit right into this boom-and-bust town. He established himself as a successful businessman selling commodities like rice and flour. He invested in real estate, erecting buildings on three of the four corners of Sansome and Jackson streets -- one of the most popular intersections in town -- plus plots in North Beach and a lucrative waterfront property.

"He made a great amount of money and was very influential," Lumea says of Norton's early days in the city. "He was in with all the right people, attended all the right clubs and all the right restaurants."

Riding high, Norton planned his next business move. With a rice famine underway in China, Norton was presented with a chance to corner the rice market by buying up a shipload of Peruvian rice. Expecting rice prices to soar, Norton went in with a couple of business partners in 1852 and staked $25,000 on the venture.

And then it all went wrong.

"Within a [few] days, ship after ship after ship of rice comes in, and so the bottom falls out of the market," Lumea says. "This idea, which at one point seemed so great, now isn't so great."

The deal, and the subsequent years of legal wrangling, ruined Norton. By the time Norton was 38, in 1856, he was bankrupt for the second time.

An imperial transformation

After his financial ruin, Norton went quiet for a few years. He moved out of his prestigious home, and fell out of favor with some members of the social elite.

He re-emerged on Sept. 17, 1859, on the pages on the San Francisco Evening Bulletin newspaper. Earlier in the day, he had walked into the paper's offices and presented the editor with a short notice he asked to have published in that day's edition.

"At the peremptory request of a large majority of the citizens of these United States, I, Joshua Norton, formerly of Algoa Bay, Cape of Good Hope, and now for the last nine years and ten months past of San Francisco, California, declare and proclaim myself Emperor of these United States," the notice began.

At age 41, three years after losing everything, Norton christened himself Emperor of the United States. When France's Napoleon III invaded Mexico in 1861, Norton added "Protector of Mexico" to his imperial title.

This astonishing transformation has always fascinated Bay Curious listener Jacobs.

"I majored in psychology, so I couldn't help thinking he must have had some kind of a nervous breakdown or something happened in those few years," she says. "I was thinking schizophrenia or bipolar disorder maybe."

There are no sure answers about Norton's mental health before or after his imperial declaration, but some people think his money troubles led him into a deep depression and that becoming Emperor Norton was a coping mechanism.

"There's a sense in which the persona of the Emperor actually saved him in a way," Lumea says.

Later in his declaration, Norton called on representatives of all the states to assemble the following February to establish his empire and "to make such alterations in the existing laws of the Union to ameliorate the evils under which the country is laboring."

Unsurprisingly, nobody showed up.

But that didn't stop Norton. He had declared himself emperor. And he was going to act like it for the next 20 years.

Emperor of the United States, Protector of Mexico

Norton continued issuing imperial proclamations on items big, like calling for the end of presidential elections, and small, like chastising the skating rink operator who wouldn't let him use a pair of skates.

Even though he was Emperor of the United States, his proclamations were often very local in nature. He didn't hesitate to call out San Francisco's police and elected officials. Perhaps his most well-known proclamations were the ones calling for the construction of a bridge connecting Oakland and San Francisco through Yerba Buena Island -- what we recognize today as the Bay Bridge.