I fear it’s my fault Apple’s outstripped the whole FTSE 100
Think David Blaine’s latest stunt was barmy? Read the tale of ‘Lawnchair Larry’, the amateur who tied 42 balloons to his garden seat... and shot 3 miles high over Los Angeles
FRANKLY, I blame Barbara for initiating me into the cult of Apple and sparking an addiction I’ve been unable to shake off since. It was six years ago this autumn when the PA, whose services I shared with a handful of colleagues, took one look at the antiquated mobile phone I’d been allocated by my employers and shook her head in dismay.
‘Nothing but the best will do for my boys,’ she told me (the average age of her ‘boys’ at the time was a little over 60). ‘Just you leave this with me and I’ll make sure you get a proper phone.’
As it happened, I was perfectly happy with the reconditioned model that so horrified her. True, it wasn’t a thing of beauty, its camera wasn’t very sophisticated and its general performance was a little sluggish. But since all I asked of a smartphone was that it should enable me to make and receive calls and messages, it seemed perfectly adequate for my needs.
Miraculous
Yet there was no point in arguing with Barbara. Once she had decided that my mobile was an affront to my dignity as a senior journalist, nothing would shake her determination to make the management issue me with something better.
Sure enough, a few days later she presented me with a spanking new iPhone 6 — at the time, the last word in cuttingedge technology (although I note that no fewer than 14 models have been released over the six years that have passed since, each claiming to be more miraculous than the last).
Reader, it was love at first sight of its beautifully designed packaging — that simple white box, adorned only with the globally recognised logo of a bitten apple, whose lid fitted so perfectly that it slid open with the gentle whisper of a Chippendale drawer.
Never mind that as a fully paidup member of Technophobes
Anonymous, I knew very well I’d master only a handful of the hundreds of extraordinary things it could do. Nor did I care when one of my sons sneered that entrusting me with an iPhone 6 was like handing a Ferrari to an orang-utan.
All that mattered to me was that it looked lovely and was completely reliable. It made me happy just to feel it in my pocket, knowing that, for the first time in my life, I was the envy of my young.
The trouble is that, from the day I took delivery of that iPhone, I’ve been hopelessly hooked on Apple products, shelling out a fortune on a desktop, a laptop, an iPod and now my third new iPad (but I’ll come to that in a moment).
I must, therefore, be held partly responsible for this week’s astonishing news that the stock value of Apple Inc has overtaken the combined worth of all 100 companies in the FTSE’s bluechip index put together. As recently as August 2018, it became the first publicly traded U.S. firm to be valued at more than $1 trillion. Just two years later, it had broken through the $2 trillion barrier.
Then on Tuesday this week, its shares rose another 4 per cent, increasing its total worth to $2.3 trillion. Call that £1.7 trillion — or roughly the entire national output of Canada in 2019, as reported by the IMF.
Secret
Truly, Apple has come quite a way since Steve Jobs sold his VW Microbus for a few hundred dollars to co-found the company back in 1976. So what is its secret, and how can we learn from it?
As it happens, on the very day that Apple overtook the FTSE 100, I had my first, eye-opening experience of the ethos that sets Apple apart from any other company I’ve encountered.
I was on my way to lunchtime drinks with friends in Central London, when I stupidly left my iPad Mini on the train.
Either that, or somebody picked my raincoat pocket on the Tube, but I find that less likely, since social distancing and half-empty public transport have put all sorts of difficulties in the way of the capital’s pickpockets.
Anyway, it was only when I discovered it was missing that I realised how much I had come to depend on it. As withdrawal symptoms kicked in, I couldn’t face the thought of a day without my iPad, while I waited on the offchance that some kind soul would hand it in at Lost Property.
So I went straight from my drinks to Apple’s flagship shop in Regent Street, 20 minutes away,
THIS was certainly one way to beat the rush-hour traffic. Nonchalantly clutching 52 gas-filled balloons in one hand, illusionist David Blaine soared almost five miles into the bright blue sky above Arizona, instantly writing another chapter in his colourful life as a publicity-loving performer of flamboyant stunts.
When he finally let go — at the cruising altitude of a passenger jet — and floated back to earth on a parachute, Blaine, 47, who once spent 44 days suspended in a glass box 30 ft above the Thames, claimed that he had been inspired by childhood memories of the 1956 French film Le Ballon Rouge (The Red Balloon), which tells the enchanting story of a young boy following a balloon, which seems to have a mind of its own, around the streets of 1950s Paris.
On social media, however, fans likened Blaine’s exploit to something more contemporary — the plot of the hugely successful 2009 animated Hollywood film Up, in which an irascible elderly widower floats off in a house fastened to hundreds of balloons.
But yesterday an altogether more intriguing explanation emerged, suggesting that the showman had fact rather than fiction on his mind when he lifted off from a desert airstrip in Page, Arizona.
Indeed, many are now wondering if his latest feat is grounded in a strikingly similar case of daredevilry carried out by an American truck driver over California almost 40 years ago.
Larry Walters achieved what the Los Angeles Times patronisingly called ‘dubious fame’ when he strapped a garden chair to 42 weather balloons and rocketed 16,000 ft above Long Beach, California, before careering dangerously through the bustling airspace of Los Angeles LAX international airport and plunging into power lines — blacking out an entire neighbourhood. Miraculously, he alighted from his adventure unscathed. W
HEN asked why he did it, Larry replied: ‘A man can’t just sit around.’ Lawnchair Larry, as he was immediately dubbed, was propelled to the status of heroic fool, appeared on coast-to- coast chat shows and even starred in a commercial for Timex watches.
Unlike David Blaine with his safety harness, oxygen and ground crew live-streaming the enterprise on YouTube, Walters’s imagination owed more to the wing-anda-prayer charms of Heath Robinson, the pre-war illustrator of eccentric contraptions.
Fired by a lifelong dream to fly, but rejected by the air force because of poor eyesight, he had the simplest of machines. He pumped the balloons full of helium, lashed them to the aluminium outdoor chair, using plastic bottles of water as ballast, and packed an air pistol with which he was going to shoot the balloons one by one to descend slowly to the ground.
In all, he planned to rise to about 100 ft, level off and perhaps take some pictures, eat a sandwich and drink some beer, then return to ground in his girlfriend’s backyard. It didn’t work out like that.
Of course it didn’t. The guy rope attaching his ‘craft’ to a friend’s 1962 Chevrolet snapped, pitching Larry forward so violently his glasses flew off as the untethered chair raced skywards at 800 ft a minute as if shot from a cannon.
Later, he recalled: ‘The higher I went, the more I could see, and it was awesome. Sitting in this little chair and, you know, man, unreal . . . I could look up the coast, like, for ever. At one point, I caught sight of a little private plane below me. I could hear the buzz of its propeller — the only sound. I had a camera but I didn’t take any pictures. This was something personal. I wanted only the memory of it — that was vivid enough.’
But, suddenly, Larry was hurtling so high he was soon in commercial airspace. A TWA pilot spotted him and calmly radioed that he was passing a man in a lawn chair with a pistol in his hands.
And a Delta airline pilot reported an incredible sighting of a chair crossing the primary approach corridor to LAX, saying: ‘We have a man in a chair attached to balloons in our ten o’clock position, range five miles away.’
According to Larry’s altimeter, he began levelling out at 15,000 ft. ‘The air was getting thin,’ he said. ‘ “enough of the ride,” I thought. I’d better go into a descent.’
He estimated that he needed to pop seven balloons to control his glide to earth and pulled out his gun. Then he was hit by a sudden gust of wind tilting the chair forward and the gun fell from his grip. Larry started climbing again. He was now at 16,500 ft, more than three miles high, and later said he was ‘ about 15 seconds’ from hauling himself out of the chair and pulling the parachute ripcord. B
UT as a novice with only one jump to his name, it would have been a huge risk. And then the fates intervened again. The balloons started to leak and the hiss of escaping helium saw him begin gliding earthwards. By now, it was cold. ‘ My toes got numb,’ he recalled.
At 13,000 ft, he switched on his citizens band radio to speak to an operator at an emergency rescue unit who kept asking what airport he had taken off from. Larry kept repeating it wasn’t an airport but the back garden of his girlfriend Carol’s mother’s house.
‘ The balloons are orange. I’m in a bright blue sky. They should be highly visible,’ he said, adding: ‘ And I probably have 35 left. Over.’
The operator squeaked: ‘Did you say you have a cluster of 35 balloons?’ Larry replied: ‘Just tell Carol that I love her,’ and snapped the radio off. At 2,000 ft with the ground racing up, he slashed with a penknife at the water-filled bottles strapped to the side of the chair, sending 35 gallons cascading down. Still the ground was getting closer and closer. ‘I could see these rooftops coming up and then these power lines,’ he said.
The remains of the burst balloons snagged on the wire, blacking out the Long Beach neighbourhood for 20 minutes. ‘I nestled into the power lines, hanging about 8 ft under the bottom strand. If I’d come in a little higher, the chair would have hit the wires. I could have been electrocuted.’
Instead, a stepladder was produced and Larry, without a scratch, clambered down.
His two-hour adventure left him with a £1,000 fine from the Federal Aviation Administration, top prize from the Bonehead Club of Dallas and international admiration. He was even flown to New York for David Letterman’s chat-show.
His trailblazing triggered a host of imitators. In 2007, Kent Couch, an Oregon gas station proprietor, ‘flew’ 240 miles in a lawn chair powered by balloons. Ten years ago, American Jonathan Trappe crossed the english Channel suspended by a cluster of balloons.
But not all were successful: in 1992 a Japanese adventurer took off from near Kyoto and was last located 500 miles offshore over the Pacific. He was never seen again.
Larry’s own story, which so easily could have ended in catastrophe, began in July 1982. He had dreamed of a balloon flight ever since a visit to Disneyland, aged eight, where he saw someone holding what seemed like ‘a zillion Mickey Mouse balloons’.
Later, he calculated how much helium he would need to lift his favourite garden chair. Once the balloons were inflated, the whole contraption stood 150 ft high.
But, unlike David Blaine, Larry Walters did not pursue fame. eleven years later, he hiked into Angeles National Forest and shot himself in the heart. He was unmarried, had no children and left no note to explain the motive.
Little could he have imagined that more than 25 years later, his extraordinary feat would become inextricably linked with one of the most famous daredevils alive.