Ed Toutant

Ed Toutant, a resident from Austin, Texas, was a contestant on season 2 of the U.S. version of the show on January 28th, 31st, 2001. After originally winning only $1,000 due to a bad question, he was invited back to the show on September 7th, 2001 and he would then walk away with $1,860,000, the amount he was playing for on his first run as Millionaire because at that time had an increasing bonus of $10,000 on top of the $1 million top prize for each episode there was no millionaire, as there had been a drought of top-prize winners for five months.

Fastest Finger Question
From the 8 remaining contestants, 6 got it right, but Ed (with a time of 3.68 seconds) was the fastest to correctly answer B-C-A-D, making it into the Hot Seat.

Ed's Run to the Million
Originally, Ed was deemed to have given the wrong answer, having to walk away with $1,000. However, after his run was over and doing some research, he discovered that the experiment had been done in Scotland, not England; and that an Oxford professor, Dr. Marc Knight, had been doing research glowing tomato plants, thus rendering his original answer valid.

After sending the show an e-mail detailing this, they decided to bring him back, to give him a new $16,000 question, and to reaward him the 'Ask the Audience' lifeline he used in his flawed question. Furthermore, during his original run, there was an accumulating jackpot that increased by $10,000 for each successive show in which none of the contestants could answer all fifteen questions correctly. So, to be fair, the show gave him a chance to win the million dollars plus the $860,000 jackpot bonus he was at that time playing for; for a grand total of $1.86 million.

Trivia

 * Ed Toutant's $1.86 million win made him the second biggest winner on a gameshow at the time, just behind Kevin Olmstead, a contestant who played in the interim between Toutant's flawed and final run who won $2.18 million ($1.18 million came from the progressive jackpot that kept on going after Toutant's flawed question).
 * He was a FF contestant on January 2000. This means that Ed Toutant has appeared on the show on 4 different episodes.
 * He won $11,401 in his solitary Jeopardy victory in 1989, finishing second the next day.
 * He was a contestant on GSN's gameshow Grand Slam in 2007. Seeded fourth into the tournament, he lost to Leszek Pawlowicz in the first round.