Elon Musk – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

Astonishing technologies will continue upending our world

Thomas Hart Benton’s ink, pencil and watercolor on paper titled “Poking Stick in Cotton Gin,” circa 1930, sold for $12,500 at a May 2018 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

A Luddite is an obscure term loosely used to describe people who dislike new technology. After a superficial self-assessment, I’ve concluded I’m probably a modern-day Luddite at heart. The evidence is abundant since I’ve scrupulously avoided Facebook, have zero interest in posting pictures or video on Instagram and consider Twitter an enormous thief of time. Social media is not a place I’m interested in wasting my remaining time on.

That said, I don’t know how to account for my iPhone 11, iPad Pro or the 75-inch Sony 4K LED that dominates our den (or the six other cable boxes on three floors). With my iPad, I rarely use my desktop computer except to print documents. I abhor texting and still have a Netflix account that sends me DVDs by snail mail. After spending the past 60 years questing for ever-larger TV screens, the idea of squinting at a cellphone or watch-size TV program is mildly abhorrent. Even more annoying is the spate of robo-calls offering new Medicare options. I routinely turn off my devices for hours (ah … peace).

The original Luddites were British weavers and textile workers who objected to the increased use of mechanized looms and knitting frames. It is popularly claimed that they named themselves after Ned Ludd, a young apprentice who was rumored to have personally wrecked a textile apparatus (“in a fit of rage”) in 1779. There is no evidence Ludd actually existed, but he eventually became the mythical leader of the movement. They even issued manifestos and threatening letters under his name.

The first major instance of malicious machine breaking took place in 1811 in Nottingham. The British government moved to quash the uprisings by making machine breaking punishable by death. The unrest finally reached its peak in April 1812 when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. Finally, the army deployed several thousand troops and dozens of Luddites were either hanged or transported to Australia.

In the intervening years, astonishing new technologies have increased productivity, lowered costs and created hundreds of millions of new jobs. A few of the more obvious include:

The cotton en(gin)e that turned a marginally profitable farm crop into a bonanza by minimizing labor by over 90 percent while increasing workers from 700,000 to 3.2 million. Historians point out the South gained a 75 percent share of world demand, but also doomed them to remain an agricultural economy (with slaves). Others contend this single invention led directly to the Civil War.
Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper helped convert millions of acres to food production and developed Midwest family farms with “wheat fields shining from sea to sea.” Presumably, American Indians, buffalo, dense forests and pristine rivers and lakes were unimpressed.
The Wright Brothers gave man the gifts of flight, aircraft factory jobs, cargo shipments and holiday travel for the masses. It also enabled two world wars and the ability to destroy entire cities.
Commercialization of the Bessemer process to supply the enormous steel demand for railroad tracks that crisscrossed the nation and enabled high-rise buildings with Otis elevators and office workers too numerous to count.
Henry Ford’s assembly line made automobiles affordable … in turn, creating more workers to stay up with demand and higher wages to buy the product. This was followed by oil-gas, tires, paved roads, motels and Uber/Lyft). Also smog, toll roads and clogged freeways in every city.
The Internet is obsoleting retail stores and shopping malls, while enabling Apple, Google, Amazon and global outsourcing that has raised 500 million people out poverty.

We are now challenged to reconcile population growth with climate change and plastic oceans; and robots and artificial intelligence with displaced workers and a K-12 Education System that is failing so many currently. Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 theory of Creative Destruction is still valid.

The London Mensa Organization just accepted a 3 year old with an IQ of 142+. There will also be more Elon Musks and they will figure it out. One suggestion is to simply operationalize what’s known as “5G-based” nuclear power plants, which are 100 percent green (it will shut itself down if needed) and run on spent fuel stockpiles. Imagine unlimited clean power that will desalinate sea water and gobble up current waste. Bill Gates is an investor in the technology.

Just a casual idea as we watch the Washington Circus and the people we rely on for leadership.

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 chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

Artists, writers tapped into America’s traveling spirit

Robert Crumb’s original illustration of Jack Kerouac sold for $33,460 at a February 2011 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

While we lived in London, I was always fascinated by one common employee characteristic. Irrespective of the school – be it Eton, Oxford or the London School of Economics – every curriculum vitae (CV) included an explanation of a student’s foreign travels the year following graduation. Asia and Australia were the most popular; only rarely did it include the United States. After all the studying, cramming for exams and other typical activities on campus, they felt an overwhelming compulsion to just travel for as long as a year.

America was like that one time not too long ago. Novelist/journalist James Agee (A Death in the Family) wrote about it in Fortune magazine in 1934: Hunger for movement, he said, was “very probably the profoundest and most compelling of American racial hungers.” The road could help satisfy that hunger. Just put the hood ornament on the center line, the speedometer on 80 and let ’er rip. The urge was there before the car … long before … and invariably sent the country westward. As Huck Finn said: “But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

The road was our nation’s ticket to ride and, more precisely, to ride away on. Maybe it was away from who we were, but it was, for sure, away from where we were. To where? Who knew? How about just a fresh start? We could put it all behind us as fast as the car could go.

Novelist/playwright William Saroyan, who liked getting behind the wheel of his Buick, wrote about his desire to hit the road: “It isn’t simply driving at night, it’s going on … to find out what’s out there now, not so much along the highway, in the terrain, under the sky, but in the interior of the driver himself.” Romance with the road was all about get up and go. Wherever you want to go, whenever you want to leave. There were no schedules and no reservations. Time of arrival? Whenever.

Lolita’s Humbert Humbert chose to hit the road to find his interior. Humbert’s creator, the Russian lepidopterist/novelist Vladimir Nabokov, spent two summers on America’s highways, chasing butterflies. A great year for the road was 1957. It was the year painter Edward Hopper gave us his classic Western Motel, the stark symbol of mobility and restlessness. The year that Jack Kerouac, out of the grim mill town of Lowell, Mass., weighed in with his novel On the Road. The road was Kerouac’s characters’ means of escape like the Mississippi was for Huck and Jim. On the Road captured the energy of trying to satisfy that hunger for movement.

The true north of the road was west. The West owned those lonesome, inexhaustible roads with few-and-far between motels designed so that cars could be parked about 20 feet from the beds. There was a lot of nowhere for these roads to cover. Distance was measured by hours (18 hours from Amarillo to Santa Monica), providing time to think. Playwright Sam Shepard used the road for writing and that may explain how he got the West so right.

John Steinbeck wrote that our “Mother Road” was Route 66. The Okies (including my whole family) called it their highway to heaven because it got us to California. We didn’t pick fruit like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath. We bought real estate in Southern California that had its own fruit trees. I picked peaches and apricots off our three acres and I sold them in front of our house for 50 cents and $1 a lug. One uncle was a carpenter and he bought an entire block, built two houses, sold one for a tidy profit and lived in the other with a semi-alcoholic aunt.

My mother’s three brothers all found great jobs building airplanes and my father bought Pacific Cold Storage in Central Los Angeles (after he divorced my mother). I had two paper routes that netted me $60 a month after expenses (bicycle tires and rubber bands). I could also play night league softball in Huntington Park (we lived in Downey, home of the first Taco Bell 25 years later), and one-on-one basketball every spare minute.

My friends and I lived vicariously through TV shows like Route 66 with Martin Milner and George Maharis playing drifters in a Corvette – the only fictional series that shot all over North America – with their stories of working in shipbuilding, oilrigs and shrimping from Chicago to Los Angeles. (Corvette sales doubled). This was followed by Michael Parks in Then Came Bronson and the classic Easy Rider with Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper.

We had scratched our itch and found gold fast (sunshine, beaches, long-legged tan girls), but it was still fun watching others make their way west.

I wonder if space travel is what itches Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos?

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

Let’s Not Forget What Colonists Created 400 Years Ago

This 1976 Gold Bicentennial Medal, graded PR64 NGC, sold for $23,500 at a July 2017 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

We live on a landmass currently called North America that is relatively young in its present incarnation with most estimates in the range of 200 million years. In periods before, a large portion of it was called Laurentia, which drifted across the equator joining and separating from supercontinents in various collisions that shaped it. There are thick layers of sedimentary rocks that are up to 2 billion years old. Eventually, it was surrounded by ocean and anti-passive margins (i.e. no boundaries by tectonic plates). Then an island chain slammed into it, raising mountain ranges. For perspective, the Appalachians were as tall and majestic as today’s Himalayas.

For tens of millions of years, there was not a single human being in North America, primarily because it was covered by a thick sheet of ice and it was before mankind had evolved. As the Ice Age ebbed, adventurous souls began walking across land bridges as glacial movements changed the landscape. There were multiple migrations in and out of other areas of the world, but people who moved into the Americas were generally on a one-way ticket. In modern times, there is no consensus on who “discovered” America first.

North American exploration spans an entire millennium, with the Vikings in Newfoundland circa 1000 A.D. through England’s colonization on the Atlantic Coast in the 17th century. Spain and Portugal squabbled over the discoveries of Juan Ponce de León and Vasco da Gama, as France and the Netherlands had their own claims to litigate. But our America is really a British story starting with Jamestown, Va. (1607) that gradually grew into 13 colonies. They grew tired of the English yoke and declared independence in 1776 and conquered the British Army in a well-known story of revolution. They formed a somewhat imperfect union called the United States of America, with a constitution and a smallish national government that is still struggling with the line between states’ rights.

French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi attended the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Bartholdi had a strong personal passion for the concepts of independence, liberty and self-determination. He became a member of the Franco-American Union organization and suggested a massive statue to commemorate the American Revolution and a century of friendship between our two countries. A national fundraising campaign was launched that included traditional contributions, as well as fundraising auctions, lotteries and even boxing exhibitions.

Bartholdi collaborated with engineer Gustave Eiffel to build a 305-foot-tall copper and iron statue, and after completion, it was disassembled for shipment to the United States. Finally, on June 17, 1885, the dismantled statue – 350 individual pieces in 200-plus cases – arrived in New York Harbor. It was a fitting gift, emblematic of the friendship between the French and American people. It was formally dedicated the following year in a ceremony presided over by President Grover Cleveland, who said, “We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected.” The statue was dubbed “Liberty Enlightening the World.”

In 1892, Ellis Island opened as America’s chief immigration station and for the next six-plus decades, the statue looked over more than 12 million immigrants who came to find the freedom they were seeking and the “Streets of Gold” in NYC. A plaque inscribed with a sonnet titled “The New Colossus” was placed on an interior wall in 1903. It had been written 20 years earlier by the poet Emma Lazarus.

Gustave Eiffel was given little credit, despite having built virtually the whole interior of what would become the Statue of Liberty and he vowed not to make that mistake again. Perhaps that is why his magnificent Paris landmark is simply an incredible skeleton framework with none of the conventional sheathing of most tall structures of that era.

One thing is certain: We may not know who discovered America first, but there is little doubt that whoever follows us will be aware of what those few people huddled along the East Coast 400 years ago were able to accomplish. Maybe Elon Musk will have a colony on Mars that is still functioning when the ice or oceans envelop Earth again.

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 chair and CEO of PepsiCo Restaurants International [KFC Pizza Hut and Taco Bell].

We Should Let Geniuses Do What Geniuses Do

This signed photograph of Thomas Alva Edison, taken sometime around 1910, realized nearly $3,900 at an April 2013 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Thomas Alva Edison was awarded about 1,100 patents in the United States and more than double that worldwide.

They are generally grouped into categories that include electric power, telegraphy/telephony, recorded sounds, batteries, cement and motion pictures. His practice of keeping meticulous records to protect his intellectual property became the “gold standard” for future scientists, engineers and inventors in general.

Naturally, he made a lot of money, which proved useful when some of his ideas turned out to be expensive commercial failures. At times, he appeared to lack practical sense or perhaps he lacked the “Steve Jobs gene” when it involved customer preference. Another more plausible explanation is that he simply did not care, period.

One of the more interesting examples is his refusal to adopt the concept of movie theaters (people might sneak in without paying), so he held out for hand-crank, peep-show boxes. In 1908, he confidently predicted that airplanes had no viable future (the Wright brothers disagreed).

Then he became mesmerized by the possibilities for concrete and formed the Edison Portland Cement Company and built a huge factory. By 1907, Edison was the fifth-largest cement producer in the world and had four dozen patents to make a better cement, some of which was used to build Yankee Stadium.

But his abiding passion was to fill the world with cement houses.

The concept was to pour concrete into giant molds to form walls and floors, followed by baths, sinks, cabinets, toilets and even picture frames. A four-man team could build a new house every two days for $1,200 (one-third the cost of traditional structures).

The concept was scheduled to be showcased at a cement industry convention in 1912 in New York. However, when the show opened, the Edison exhibit was empty and Thomas Edison never discussed the issue publicly. There was also no word on the fate of the cement piano that was scheduled to be exhibited.

He was now interested in modernizing war and casually predicted he would be able to induce comas in enemy troops through the use of “electrically charged atomizers.” It is not clear how this idea was abandoned. He also worked on a plan to build giant electromagnets to catch enemy bullets in flight and then “return to sender.” It was another mysterious project that was abandoned.

One last example was a heavy investment in an automated general store where customers would insert coins into slots and then bags of coal, onions, nails or potatoes would come sliding down the chute. The system never worked. It never came close to working.

If you believe in reincarnation, then there is a good chance Thomas Edison is back. This time his name is Jeff Bezos, who had a nutty idea about selling books over the internet and now owns a major print newspaper and is in a race to conquer outer space, since NASA has scaled back. Elon Musk has managed to find time to enter the rocket business, too, while he tinkers with electric cars and batteries.

Our country seems to be blessed when it comes to producing geniuses. Let’s hope the government doesn’t put up too many regulations or red tape as we go hurtling into the future.

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].