History’s Bargain Treasures
GOING ONCE, GOING TWICE... NOT GONE! From Princess Diana’s dancing dress to a classic Porsche, these historic pieces shockingly didn’t get snapped up right away
It’s exciting when an iconic item heads to an auct ion house. Not only is it cool to see what’s out there, but everyone starts buzzing about just how much it might fetch. What may be even more fascinating, though, is when it doesn’t sell at all. Check out these historic pieces that somehow failed to pique buyers’ interest.
A letter from Charles Darwin
Letters penned by naturalist Charles Darwin have garnered both big attention and big bucks. In 2015, a letter Darwin wrote addressing the question of whether he believed in the New Testament or not sold for US$197,000, three times the price of a previously auctioned letter Darwin wrote to his niece, according to CBSnews. com. In case you were wondering, Darwin’s answer was a big N-O.
Then, just one year later, and hoping to raise a price in the vicinity of what’s called the ‘ Bible Letter’, another letter Darwin wrote was put up for auction in 2016 – but it failed to sell. This letter to a marine biologist was penned in 1860, a year after Darwin’s famous book, On the Origin of Species, was published. In the letter that didn’t sell, he writes about
plans to revise his famous book, according to Live Science. Auctioning one of his books may have been a different story, so to speak.
‘Grassy knoll’ photos
On that fateful day on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, US President
John F. Kennedy was assassinated as he was driving in a convertible in a motorcade.
According to Today, Dallas housewife Mary Ann Moorman went with a friend to see Jackie Kennedy and snapped a Polaroid photo of the motorcade as it drove past. At that exact time, shots rang out, and when
the film was developed, it revealed the injured president slumped on his wife. It is allegedly the only photo that shows both the president’s car and the ‘grassy knoll’ area where many conspiracy theorists have tried to place a gunman.
In 2013, 50 years after the assassination, the photographer (a then 81-year- old Mary Ann Moorman Krahmer) placed the photo up for auction. But it didn’t meet its reserve price, according to Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati. Before this auction, Moorman Krahmer had tried to sell it through Sotheby’s, but intervention from the Kennedy family influenced the house to decline selling the photo, saying it was “too sensitive to auction”.
Einstein’s scientific paper
E= mc2. That ’s the world’s most famous equation, and an early version of it was jotted down on a 72page academic paper penned by Albert Einstein.
According to The Scientist, the 1912 paper was one of the earliest and biggest papers on relativity created by the famed physicist. Even though some view the paper – which was written in German on unlined paper – as a precursor to his work on relativity, the paper remained in obscurity until it was auctioned in 1987 through Sotheby’s for US$1.2 million.
A highlight of the manuscript is the equation ‘EL=mc2’. Einstein crossed the ‘L’ out, showing the process by which he finally arrived at his most famous legacy.
Sotheby’s attempted to sell the paper again in 1996, but even though bids reached US$ 3.3 million, the anonymous owner refused the offer. The paper did eventually sell for an unnamed amount and was donated to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, home to the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The world’s first microchip
Dubbed ‘the birth certificate of the modern computing era’, the world’s first computer chip was invented in 1958 by engineer Jack Kilby. He invented the unassuming chip while working at Texas Instruments (TI), and in 2000, he received the Nobel Prize in physics for his work. While at TI, he also worked with teams that developed the pocket calculator and the thermal printer.
Kilby died in 2005, and in 2014, the chip (which is no bigger than a fingernail) was up for auction at Sotheby’s. Bids got up to US$850,000, but no one met the reserve price and the auction was stopped.
For a device that paved the way for mobile phones and computers, and powers everything from TVs to cars, microwaves and hearing aids, the chip should be priceless.
The controversial Beethoven score
Sotheby’s thought it was going to score big with a rare music sheet from Beethoven himself. But it seems that a pesky musical historian got in the way. According to the BBC, Professor Barry Cooper, a Beethoven scholar who had a deep familiarity with the composer’s manuscripts, claimed there were inconsistencies within the 1817 piece, Allegretto in B Minor. Cooper’s ‘hunch’ is that it was “copied shortly after it was composed”. While Sotheby’s defended its work, other scholars came out in favour of Cooper, and the score didn’t sell.
A first edition of Hamlet
How much would you pay for a copy of Hamlet that was printed in 1611 – while its author, William
Shakespeare, was still alive? Christie’s was hoping for up to US$2 million, but it was not to be.
The rare copy was in the hands of a private collector, the Viscountess Mary Eccles of New Jersey. The viscountess was a famed bibliophile and amassed quite the collection of books in her private library. But this first edition of Hamlet owned by Eccles was the oldest to be privately owned. It was not surprising that Christie’s had such high hopes for it; in 2001, another first-edition Hamlet from the 17th century sold for $3.4 million.
Although Christie’s was able to sell 98 per cent of the books and manuscripts from the viscountess’ estate, Hamlet failed to sell. We think it madness, but maybe there was a method to it?
‘Duelling’ dinosaurs
Exhumed out of the Montana Badlands, a pair of intertwined dinosaurs – a new ceratopsian herbivore and a tyrannosaurus-like predator – was a rare find. According to Live Science, experts believe that the dinosaurs were fighting when a landslide entombed them. In fact, they are so well preserved, they still have some skin on them. Estimated to sell for between US$7 to US$9 million, the highest bid for the fossils topped out at $5.5 million, and the old bones look like they’re old news.