Thursday afternoon. Six tabs open, one of them work, and I have just spent eleven minutes deciding whether a message needed a reply or a thumbs up.

Anyway. Here’s three things worth knowing, none of which will help you at work.

Wall Street once lent $150 million against tanks of seawater with an inch of salad oil on top.

• Bayonne, New Jersey, 1963. Tino De Angelis, a butcher, had moved into vegetable oil.
• Oil floats on water. Fill the tank with seawater, pour oil on top, invite the inspector.
• The tanks were plumbed together, so the same oil could be pumped ahead of him and counted twice.
• 51 lenders held receipts for 1.8 billion pounds of oil. Actual stock: about 110 million.
• At the peak he claimed more vegetable oil than the whole United States was thought to hold.
• Allied went bankrupt on 19 November 1963. Three days later, Kennedy was shot.
• Two brokerages went under. American Express halved. Buffett bought in on the way down.

Wikipedia →

A statistics department once reported that it could not send email more than 500 miles. It was right.

• North Carolina, mid-nineties. The chairman had waited days before calling, to gather enough data.
• His geostatistician had already mapped the radius. A little over 520 miles.
• New York, 420 miles: fine. Providence, 580 miles: failed. Every time.
• A consultant had patched the server, which quietly downgraded Sendmail 8 to Sendmail 5.
• Sendmail 5 didn’t recognise the newer config options, so it set them all to zero.
• Including the connect timeout, which now gave up after slightly over three milliseconds.
• Light travels 558 miles in three milliseconds.

Trey Harris, 2002, who admits he tidied it up →

San Francisco spent twenty-one years humouring a bankrupt rice trader who declared himself Emperor.

• 17 September 1859. Joshua Norton walks into the Evening Bulletin with a notice he wants printed.
• They print it. He is now Emperor of these United States. He adds Protector of Mexico in 1861.
• He dissolves Congress by proclamation. Congress ignores it. In 1869 he abolishes political parties.
• He issues his own currency. Bars and restaurants around the city accept it.
• Arrested for lunacy in 1867. Public outcry, an apology from the chief, then an imperial pardon.
• Officers saluted him after that. The 1870 census recorded his occupation as Emperor.
• In 1872 he ordered a bridge built to Oakland. One opened in 1936, along much of that route.
• He died broke in 1880. Ten thousand people came to the funeral.

The Emperor Norton Trust →

The longer one

The man who left his money to a race

Charles Vance Millar was a Toronto lawyer who held that every man has his price and the only interesting question is what it is. His favourite trick was leaving dollar bills on the footpath and watching who pocketed them.

He wrote his will in 1921. It opens by declaring itself “necessarily uncommon and capricious”, on the grounds that he had no dependants and so no duty to be sensible. He then demonstrated the point. Shares in a Catholic-owned brewery went to a group of Protestant ministers and temperance campaigners. A holiday house in Jamaica went jointly to three lawyers who could not stand one another, on condition they share it.

Clause nine was the one that mattered. Ten years after his death, the remainder of the estate was to be turned into cash and handed to whichever woman in Toronto had given birth to the most children in the intervening decade.

Millar died at his desk on Halloween, 1926. The clock started.

What followed was a decade of newspaper arithmetic and then two years of lawyers. His relatives sued. The Attorney General of Ontario argued the clause was contrary to public policy and would push up infant mortality. A judge upheld it in 1936. The Supreme Court of Canada upheld it again in 1937.

In 1938 the money was split four ways, between women who had each had nine children in ten years. Roughly $125,000 apiece, in the middle of the Depression.

A prank becomes policy the moment enough people are obliged to argue about it.

Wikipedia →

Course materials

One favour

Pick one person. Not a channel, not the whole team — one person who would have replied to one of these.

Forward this, or send them thursdayarvo.com.

Your staff number won’t move — it only improves when someone ahead of you leaves. What moves is the number of people behind you, which is the only promotion going this quarter.

That’s it. Go home.

Professional Development  ·  sent Thursdays, when it stops mattering
Issue 03