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How an ‘Oops’ Turned Into a Popular Magazine Feature

This signed Charles Lindbergh photograph realized $3,883 at a September 2007 auction.

By Jim O’Neal

In 1928, Time magazine was chagrined when they realized they had left Charles Lindbergh off the cover after he made his historic transatlantic flight.

So the editors came up with a novel provision and literally created a new feature: “Man of the Year.” Naturally, the first was Lindy, and it started an exciting new trend that also boosted sales.

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In 1920, The New York Times wrote a scathing editorial that scoffed at the idea of rockets being launched into space. They opined that “they would need something better than a vacuum against which to act.”

Forty-nine years later, after Apollo 11’s 1969 launch, the Times published a retraction. “It is now definitely established a rocket can function in a vacuum as well as in an atmosphere.” The Times regretted the error.

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On Jan. 1, 1902, Michigan beat Stanford 49-0 in what would later become the Rose Bowl. This first game was called the “East-West” and Stanford was so beat up (physically) that they quit with eight minutes left to play.

The attendance was so poor (8,500) the promoters dropped football for the next 14 years. They switched to polo, chariot races, ostrich races and even an elephant-camel race.

The first official Rose Bowl was 1923.

That first Michigan team, dubbed the “Point a Minute Team,” won all 10 games with combined scores of 555-0.

I suspect this may have included the first serious college recruiting efforts. (Do you think?)

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In 1973, a Florida shipbuilder by the name of George Steinbrenner bought the New York Yankees from CBS for $10 million. Four years later, he paid right fielder Dave Winfield $20 million for one season.

Last year, the team franchise was valued at $3.2 billion – second only to the Dallas Cowboys at $4+ billion.

In his initial press conference, Steinbrenner promised he would not interfere in the day-to-day operations of the team. (However, he did not specify how long this would last. My guess is sundown on day two.)

In Texas, that’s called the Golden Rule – “He who has the gold, makes the rules.”

Intelligent Collector blogger JIM O’NEAL is an avid collector and history buff. He is President and CEO of Frito-Lay International [retired] and earlier served as Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

The Blunder Before the Genius

This inscribed photograph of Albert Einstein, taken during his first visit to America, realized $26,290 at a February 2010 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Albert Einstein called it “the greatest blunder of my life.”

Since he was not a cosmologist, he had accepted the prevailing wisdom that the universe was both fixed and eternal. As a result, when he was formulating his general theory, he dropped into his equations something called the “cosmological constant.” It was designed to arbitrarily counter the effects of gravity.

Typically, history books tend to forgive Einstein for this lapse but in reality, it was a terrible piece of scientific work … and he knew it.

Fortunately, Vesto Slipher at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona was taking spectrographic readings of distant stars and noticed a Doppler shift. That proved, beyond any doubt, that the universe was NOT static. The stars were moving away from Earth, which implied an expansionary condition. This was simply astounding and reversed all conventional thinking about a fixed universe.

Unfortunately, Edwin Hubble took all the credit for this remarkable discovery. It is what propelled him into becoming the most outstanding astronomer of the 20th century. (Maybe more on him later since he had such an inflated view of his importance.)

Now, however, flash back to a young Einstein and we find he was a mere assistant clerk in the Swiss patent office. He had no university affiliations, no access to a lab and only a modest library at the patent office.

He had been rejected for an assistant teaching position and was passed over for promotion until “he learned more about machine technology.”

He had a lot of spare time, which he used to gaze out his window and just think.

Then in 1905, he published a series of five scientific papers, of which three, according to C.P. Snow, “were among the greatest in the history of physics.”

The first would earn Einstein a Nobel Prize. The second provided proof that atoms DID exist – a fact that had been in dispute.

The third simply changed the world.

To learn more, read “Einstein: His Life and Universe” by Walter Isaacson (2007).

Physicist Richard Feynman Crucial to Challenger Answers

A NASA color lithographed print of the Space Shuttle Challenger (STS-51-L) Crew, signed, was featured in a May 2012 auction.

By Jim O’Neal

On Jan. 28, 1986, I was chairing a board meeting in New York when we learned that the NASA Space Shuttle orbiter Challenger had disintegrated 78 seconds after its launch over the Atlantic Ocean. Seventeen percent of Americans had witnessed the launch live and within an hour, 85 percent were aware of the disaster. Much of the interest was due to crew member Christa McAuliffe, a payload specialist and the first teacher headed into outer space. An O-ring failure caused a breach in the right solid rocket booster, which led to a structural failure.

Aerodynamic forces finished the job. A special Blue Ribbon Commission, appointed by President Reagan, determined that this design defect had been known for several years and repeated warnings were disregarded. What was not highlighted was that the space vehicle had never been certified to operate in low temperatures … specifically, the conditions that existed at the launch site on the day the flight was scheduled for liftoff. Enter theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, a distinguished member of the Commission and one determined to expose the truth to the American public. I can still vividly recall his now famous demonstration on live TV and elucidation of the cause of the Challenger space shuttle disaster. It included a very dramatic point where he dropped an elastic band (the O-ring) into a glass of ice water. Case closed. What opened was my mind. Next post, an example on Richard Feynman on a very small thing: an atom.