Jeff Bezos – The Intelligent Collector Magazine

Today’s business tycoons would be wise to not forget the past

A statement on Union Iron Mills stationary signed by Andrew Carnegie and dated Sept. 29, 1870, sold for $6,572 at an April 2013 auction.

By Jim O’Neal

It may come as no surprise to learn that virtually all the major cities in California were incorporated in the same year. 1850 was also the year California became the 31st state to join the United States. It is now the most populous state and supports a $3 trillion economy, which ranks No. 5 in the world … larger than Great Britain. However, you probably don’t know that, in terms of land area, the three largest cities are Los Angeles, San Diego and (surprisingly) California City.

This large chunk of land was formed in the boomlet following World War 2 with the intent of rivalling Los Angeles. Southern California was flourishing due to temperate weather, Pacific Ocean beaches and nearby mountains. It seemed logical that with a large influx of people, all that was lacking were lots of affordable housing, automobiles, streets, freeways and plenty of water to drink and as irrigation for the orange groves.

An ambitious land developer spotted this unique opportunity and bought 82,000 acres of prime California City land just north of the SoCal basin. He commissioned a high-power, architectural master-plan community with detailed maps of blocks, lots and streets. Next was hiring a small army of 1,300 salesmen to promote land sales to individuals, while building a 26-acre artificial lake, two golf courses and a four-story Holiday Inn.

This was land speculation on a grand scale; they sold 50,000 lots for $100 million before the market dried up. Some reports claim that only 175 new homes were actually built. The fundamental reason was that Southern California land development primarily evolved south along the coastline toward San Diego and the prime ocean-front property in Malibu, Long Beach and Orange County. Although the scheme failed, California City was finally incorporated in 1965. Today, the 15,000 inhabitants, many from Edwards Air Force base, are sprinkled liberally over 204 square miles.

A prominent No. 4 on the list is San Jose, which narrowly escaped being destroyed in a 1906 earthquake that nearly leveled nearby San Francisco. When we lived there (1968-71), it was a small, idyllic oasis with plum trees growing in undeveloped lots in the shadow of the Santa Cruz Mountains. There were nice beaches an hour away and for $14.15, PSA would fly you 400 miles to LAX in 45 minutes. In addition to the short drive to San Francisco with all its wonders, Lake Tahoe offered gambling, except when it snowed on the Sierra Nevada, a mere 200 miles away.

Nobody dreamed that the miracle of Silicon Valley was on the horizon and the enormous impact of the Internet would result in the boom-bust of the dot.com era in the late 1990s. The stock market was up 400% and then down 80%, wiping out most of the gains. However, post 2002, and the proliferation of the personal computer, there was another technology revolution that would create more wealth than anyplace in the history of the world.

Apple, Google, Facebook, eBay, Intel, Cisco and Instagram are at the core of a technological society that has revolutionized our economy and communications, our lives and, by extension, the world. Smart phones, search engines and social-media giants – plus a community of 2,000 tech firms and venture capitalists – have generated enormous fortunes. Electric vehicles have morphed into driverless cars and trucks that will result in more creative destruction. AI and robotics will obsolete large swaths of production and elevate privacy and anti-trust concerns that will rival early 20th century government action to break up trusts.

Consider when Andrew Carnegie sold his Carnegie Steel Company to J.P. Morgan in 1901 for an astounding $303 million. He became the richest man in America, surpassing even John D. Rockefeller for several years. JPM then merged it with two other steel companies to form the first billion-dollar U.S. company, U.S. Steel. While Rockefeller continued to expand his oil monopoly, Carnegie devoted the last 18 years of his life to large-scale philanthropy. He literally lived by his credo: “The man who dies rich dies disgraced.” President Teddy Roosevelt would lead the trust-busting that became necessary.

Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, the Google gang and Jeff Bezos would be wise to heed George Santayana’s aphorism: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Especially when social media becomes more addictive than crack cocaine.

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].

Department stores once played a vital role in American life

Wanamaker’s Toy World Funnies was produced in 1933 as a promotional item for the department store’s New York location. This sample went to auction in May 2016.

By Jim O’Neal

In the complicated hierarchy of Greek mythology, the Titans were the first 12 children of Gaia (Mother Earth) and Uranus (Father Sky). They ruled during the mythical period of the Golden Age of Greek deities. In astronomy, Titan is the largest moon of Saturn, the second-largest natural satellite in our solar system.

In modern times, the adjective “titanic” derives from Titan. The famous ship Titanic was one of three RMS Olympic-class ocean liners built in the early 20th century. The other two were christened Olympic and Britannic. The Titanic sank in 1912 after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage. Britannic went down to a watery grave in 1916 after hitting a mine laid by a German U-boat during World War I.

Titanic was on its way from Southampton (UK) to NYC after calls in Cherbourg in France and Cobh, Ireland. On board were an estimated 2,224 passengers and crew. It is believed that about 1,500 people perished. Writer/director James Cameron’s 1997 award-winning film of the same name was a blockbuster at the box office. It received 14 Oscar nominations, snagging 11. It is in second place in box-office revenues, right behind Cameron’s other big hit, Avatar.

Titanic was the largest ship in the world and built at a cost of $7.5 million. It was also equipped with the latest in wireless technology. The crew immediately sent out a distress signal that was received in Newfoundland and retransmitted to all ships in the area. Full speed ahead! Unfortunately, none was near enough to reach Titanic before it sank.

Meanwhile, in New York City, the venerable Philadelphia Wanamaker’s Department Store had set up a unique floor exhibit (with wireless) to simply attract shoppers in the highly competitive New York market. A young employee of inventor/electrical engineer Guglielmo Marconi in NYC was routinely responsible for relaying wireless messages in Morse code to anyone in Philadelphia. His name was David Sarnoff and he would become well known for becoming the head of Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and starting the National Broadcast Company (NBC).

John Wanamaker

By chance, Sarnoff had taken a position at Wanamaker’s running the wireless communication operations, which included messages, ordering material and whatever else came along. What came along was the distress message from the Titanic that the ship was sinking and then that it had actually sank! All the newspapers had quit for the night, just after the first distress message came through. Starting early the next morning, Sarnoff was receiving names of both passengers who were rescued and those confirmed dead. The fact that Wanamaker’s was receiving real-time updates from the middle of the Atlantic was a big story by itself.

Eager crowds, not wanting to wait for newspapers with old stories, rushed to Wanamaker’s. Others went to Times Square, where a flashing billboard displayed the latest news. Names kept trickling in for three days and even set off a mini-financial panic involving the insurer Lloyd’s of London and other insurance companies. This obvious coup for Wanamaker’s was not just a lucky accident

John Wanamaker had started a small men’s clothing store in 1861 and was probably the most innovative marketing genius for the next 50-plus years. As the current crop of retail gurus bemoan the decline of retail due to e-commerce and pundits predict the slow death of shopping malls, they would be better served by studying Wanamaker the Retailer and Wanamaker the Employer.

On the retail side, consider that he opened the first retail store in Philadelphia … adjacent to George Washington’s President’s House (location, location, location). He played fine background music in the stores. He introduced orchestral concerts and circular rows of counters that guided shoppers through new merchandise. Even today, the 12-story granite-walled structure known as the Wanamaker Building houses the world’s largest Grand Court Organ with six keyboards and 28,000 pipes that transformed the shopping experience. At a cost of $105,000, it required 13 freight trains to convey it for installation.

Less grandiose was the customary practice to go into a shop and haggle until you got a good price (good luck with that today). John Wanamaker started the custom of putting price tags on every single item in the store … and then boldly advertising with big signs: ONE PRICE AND GOODS RETURNABLE.

For employees, he provided everyone with free medical care, recreational facilities, profit sharing and real pension plans … benefits that simply didn’t exist anywhere! I would love to see John Wanamaker and Jeff Bezos trading philosophies on growing a successful business. It would fascinating, despite the passage of two centuries.

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].

Since the Days of the Pony Express, It’s Been All About Speed

Walter Martin Baumhofer’s oil on board titled *The Pony Express, St. Joseph*, sold for $10,000 at a March 2012 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

On Nov. 19, 2007, I watched Charlie Rose interview Jeff Bezos about the new Kindle that debuted that day and sold out in 5½ hours. Books had been the last bastion of analog holdouts, although there were lots of Ebooks for sale.

The Kindle was something new.

It was a light (10 ounces) device that didn’t require a computer and would store up to 200 books in a library. One hundred and one of the 112 New York Times bestsellers were already available for $9.99, in addition to all major newspapers and magazines. You could order it from Amazon.com for $399 and when it arrived, it automatically recognized the user. Plus, there were lots of other cool features like a 250,000-word dictionary, access to Wikipedia and its 400 million pages, and you could read the first chapter of any book for free before deciding to buy it.

I immediately ordered mine and there was already a two-month waiting time. It is still around somewhere gathering dust, but my new Kindle is on my iPad (with an audio feature).

I guess we have always been an impatient culture with the “need for speed” in our DNA. Until the spring of 1860, it took 20 days for mail to get from St. Joseph, Mo., to Sacramento … far too long for most merchants and businessmen. Stagecoaches were just too slow until one of them – Russell, Majors and Waddell of Leavenworth, Kan. – came up with an idea to cut the delivery time by 50 percent.

For a fee of $2 to $10 per ounce, depending on the distance, you could use their new innovative mail service: the Pony Express. Starting on April 3, 1860, every Wednesday and Saturday one rider on horseback would leave at noon from Sacramento heading east, and another at 8 a.m. from St. Joseph heading west. Averaging about 8 miles an hour, every 10 miles or so, they would change horses at a relay station and continue at breakneck speed.

The typical payload of 20 pounds of letters was tucked into a Mexican mochila (knapsack) with four cantinas (locked pockets) for the oiled silk-wrapped letters that kept them dry when the rider inevitably had to cross streams or rivers. The mochila was designed to slip over the saddle horn and the rider sat on it until the next change of horses. Every 75 to 80 miles was a “home station,” where the incoming rider would pass the mochila to a fresh rider and then bunk down until the mail arrived from the opposite direction. Then, somewhat rested, he was off again, back the way he came.

The young hell-bent for leather riders intrigued the nation and their dedication became a staple for many bedtime stories. Some children heard the tale about 19-year-old Jack Keetley, who rode 340 miles in 31 hours non-stop until taken from the saddle … sound asleep. Fifteen-year-old William Frederick Cody was one of the daring young riders who would later become famous as Buffalo Bill with his own traveling Wild West show.

Still, speed was what mattered and the formal record for the central route’s 1,966 miles is 7 days and 17 hours. This was of special significance since it allowed California newspapers to publish President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address. The Pony Express was, in every way, about speed. Even its history went by in a flash— 19 months, 2 weeks, 3 days and kaput! The bold experiment was finished, partially because it was costing about $30 a letter, but it was really just another victim of a new technology.

The ride lasted from April 3, 1860, to Nov. 20, 1861 … 596,501 miles, 30,700 pieces of mail and only one lost mochila! The Pony Express and its 80 dedicated riders, 400 horses and 190 relay stations all became irrelevant on Oct. 21, 1861, with the completion of the transcontinental telegraph line. That pattern of one innovation, one technology, giving way to another seems to be accelerating as our impatience and expectations continue to grow.

I just ordered four C batteries from Amazon and discovered they won’t be here until tomorrow (bummer!).

Early Automotive Pioneers Among America’s Top Innovators

A Lincoln Motor Company stock certificate, issued in October 1918 and signed by Henry M. Leland, sold for $500 at an October 2013 auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Doctors called it a “chauffeur’s fracture,” the radial styloid or wrist fracture that occurred when a driver tried to start a horseless carriage by turning the crank at the front of the car. If the engine backfired, the crank would spin backward, often causing broken bones. Those early automobiles motoring down the streets of American cities were considered engineering marvels.

But what a challenge to start!

The two requirements were a blacksmith’s arm and a perfect sense of timing. The driver had to adjust the spark and the throttle before jumping out to turn the crank mounted on the car’s outside front grill. Once the spark caught and the motor fired, the driver dashed back to the control to adjust the spark and throttle before the engine could die. Oh, and if the car started, but was in gear, it could lurch forward and run over the cranker!

Sound farfetched?

In 1908, tragedy struck when Byron Carter (1863-1908) – inventor of the Cartercar – died after trying to start a stalled car. The crank hit him in the jaw. Complications with gangrene set in and he died of pneumonia. It was a fluke involving a stalled motorist he was trying to help. The driver forgot to retard the spark. Whamo!

The car involved was a new Cadillac, one of the premier luxury brands, and Carter was good friends with the man who ran Cadillac, Henry Leland (who also owned Lincoln). When Leland found out his friend had been killed, he vowed: “The Cadillac car will kill no more men if we can possibly help it!” Cadillac engineers finally succeeded in manufacturing an electric self-starter, but were never able to scale it for commercial use.

Enter Charles Franklin Kettering (1876-1958), a remarkable man (in the same league as Thomas Edison) whose versatile skills included engineering and savvy business management. He was a prolific inventor with 186 notable patents. One of them was a self-starter small enough to fit under the hood of a car, running off a small storage battery. A New York inventor (Clyde J. Coleman) had applied for a patent in 1899 for an electric self-starter, but it was only a theoretical solution and never marketed.

After graduating from Ohio State College of Engineering, Kettering went to work for the invention staff at National Cash Register (NCR) company. He invented a high-torque electric motor to drive a cash register, allowing a salesperson to ring up a sale without turning a hand-crank twice each time. After five years at NCR, he set up his own laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. Working with a group of engineers, mechanics and electricians, he developed the new ignition system for the Cadillac Automobile Company.

Leland sold Cadillac to General Motors in 1909 for $4.5 million and there is no record of any Cadillac ever killing another person, at least from turning a crank to start the engine! Since Cadillac had been formed from remnants of the Henry Ford Company (the second of two failed attempts by Ford), it was renamed for Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac (the founder of Detroit 200 years earlier).

Later, Leland would sell Lincoln, his other marque luxury brand, to Ford Motor Company for a healthy $10 million, while Kettering and his crew formed Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co., which became Delco, still a famous name in electronic automobile parts. Kettering went on to have a long, sterling career and was featured on the cover of Time on Jan. 9, 1933 … the week after president-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt was named the magazine’s Man of the Year (Jan. 2).

My only quibble is the work Kettering did with Thomas Midgley Jr. in developing Ethyl gasoline, which eliminated engine knock, but loaded the air we breathe with lead (a deadly neurotoxin) for the next 50 years. And he developed Freon … a much safer refrigerant, but which released CFCs, which will be destroying our atmospheric ozone for the next 100-200 years.

I don’t recall ever personally turning an engine crank. My cars went from ignition keys to keyless and I plan to skip the driverless models and wait for a Jet-Cab … unless Jeff Bezos can provide an Uber-style version using one of his drones.

Things change.

Carnegie Coveted Crown of Richest Man in the World

This Andrew Carnegie photograph – inscribed, signed and dated Dec. 11, 1917 – realized $1,015 at a September 2011 Heritage auction.

By Jim O’Neal

Jeff Bezos of Amazon is the world’s richest man, with an estimated net worth of more than $100 billion. A hundred years ago (1916), John D. Rockefeller became America’s first billionaire, which in today’s economy would be two to three times greater than Bezos’ fortune. In the late 19th century, Andrew Carnegie coveted this crown and saw steel as his road to stardom.

In the post-Civil War era, America grew rapidly as railroads crisscrossed the country and extended their reach to all four corners. Electricity arrived to light up buildings and homes, oil supplemented kerosene and coal, iron and steel production grew as demand soared to keep up with rapid economic expansion. Occasional booms/busts occurred since the markets were unregulated and coordination was difficult.

Carnegie had led the growth in the American steel industry and his ambition to snatch Rockefeller’s crown became more acute. One of the key industry developments involved the construction of a steel bridge to connect St. Louis and East St. Louis on opposite banks of the mighty Mississippi River. The Eads Bridge, named for its designer, engineer James B. Eads, relied heavily on steel for its revolutionary design. It was set to become the first significant bridge using steel girders and a cantilever form.

A young Carnegie supplied the financing and the steel, despite skepticism over the sturdiness of the structure after it was completed. A man named John Robinson came up with a clever way to dispel any doubts. Elephants were believed to have good instincts about where they stepped, so Robinson borrowed a fully grown one from a traveling circus. On June 14, 1874, he led the beast across the length of the bridge, with crowds on both ends going wild. Later, a convoy of locomotives were driven back and forth as a further (and final) test of soundness.

On July 4, 1874, the bridge officially opened with General William Tecumseh Sherman driving the last spike as 150,000 people looked on. Demand for steel exploded, forcing Carnegie to develop creative ways to boost production. One was a modified vertical production technique that maximized factory output. But that was still not enough. It became obvious that a 12-hour, six-day workweek was needed. The only problem was that workers’ health couldn’t keep up. Carnegie hired tough managers to impose the onerous schedule and he left for Scotland to escape the critics. Later, his guilty conscience led him to an unprecedented binge of philanthropy after he sold the Carnegie Steel Company to J.P. Morgan for $480 million. It became U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation in the world.

John D. Rockefeller took an even more devious strategy to his domination of the oil-refining industry. In 1872, he formed a shell corporation: the South Improvement Company (SIC). He then struck an agreement with large railroad companies whereby they sharply raised freight rates for all oil refineries, except those in the SIC (notably Standard Oil), which received substantial rebates – up to 50 percent off crude and refined oil shipments. Then came the most deadly innovation – SIC members also received “drawbacks” on shipments made by rival refineries. So when Standard Oil made shipments from Pennsylvania to Cleveland, they received a 40-cent rebate on every barrel, plus another 40 cents for every barrel of oil shipped by every competitor!

It has been called “an instrument of competitive cruelty unparalleled in industry.” In fact, it was collusion on a scale never equaled in American history. And it was only one of several techniques employed. But it did help Mr. Rockefeller and his investors achieve a 90 percent share of the entire U.S. oil business.

All Bezos has is the internet.

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].