The Book of Lists

THE 11 MOST UNUSUAL OBJECTS SOLD ON eBAY

• Gulf Jet Stream — $4.9 million (the most expensive item sold on the site)

• Lady Thatcher’s handbag — £103,000

• Max the Mammoth (prehistoric skeleton) — £61,000

• Joanna Lumley’s Ferrari — £35,000

• Decommissioned nuclear bunker — £14,000

• A date with Penny Smith (GMTV presenter) — £9,000

• David Beckham’s Range Rover — £24,000

• Ronan Keating’s leather trousers — £5,000

• FA Cup Final football medal Bradford City 1911 — £26,201

• Jamie Oliver’s scooter — £7,600

• Wedding dress (modelled by ex-husband — the highest viewed item in the history of eBay — over 17 million) — £2,125

20 VERY ODD JOBS

Digs up live ants for use in plastic ant farms.

Tends the machine that crushes animal bones that are used in the manufacture of glue.

Inserts stays (bones or steels) into prepared pockets of women’s foundation garments, such as corsets or brassieres.

Applies bleaching liquid to bottom of leather outsoles of lasted shoes, using brush or cloth, to lighten colour outsoles.

Places animal head on a table or on hooks in a slaughterhouse, splits the skull, and picks out the brains

Inserts a light to examine the sex organs of chicks, then separates the males from the females. A university degree in chick sexing is offered in Japan.

Smells eggs after they are broken open to check for spoilage.

Hairdresser who sets waves in with fingers.

Inspects cloth in a textile mill for defects by using a hooking machine which folds the cloth.

Tends vacuum or pressure tank that impregnates powdered-metal parts with lubricating oil or molten plastic.

Arranges and mounts letters, logos, and numbers on paper backing to make signs and displays

Operates cooker and mashing tub to combine cereal and malt in the preparation of beer.

Repairs metal phonograph record ‘mother’ by removing dirt and nickel particles from sound-track grooves. Records are mass-produced by being pressed by the metal mother record.

Tends machine that washes prunes preparatory to canning, packaging, or making speciality foods.

Raises queen bees.

Operates refrigeration or air-conditioning equipment aboard ships.

Tends agitation tanks that mix copper or slime and acid solution preparatory to precipitation of copper.

Sniffs people’s body parts to test the effectiveness of foot and underarm deodorants.

Tends machine that automatically forms lollipops of specified shape on ends of wooden sticks.

Tends toe-punching machine that flattens toe seams of knitted seamless socks.

4 UNFORTUNATE PRODUCT NAMES AND 1 HONOURABLE MENTION

A corporate or product name can symbolise more than intended, especially when that name is used in other lands. Today’s multinational markets require sensitivity to other cultures, as many companies have learned the hard way.

Hunt-Wesson introduced its Big John products in Canada before realising that the name, which translated to Gros Jos, was French-Canadian slang for ‘big breasts’. However, sales did not suffer from this translation.

The Ford Pinto suffered image problems when it went on sale in Brazil — pinto is Portuguese slang for ‘small male genitals’. For Brazilian buyers, Ford changed the name to Corcel, which means ‘horse’.

When Coca-Cola expanded into China in the 1920s, the company chose Chinese characters which, when pronounced, would sound like the English name for the drink. Those particular Chinese letters, though, actually translated to ‘bite the wax tadpole’ or ‘wax-flattened mare’. The company now uses characters that mean ‘good mouth, good pleasure’ or ‘happiness in the mouth’.

The Johnson Company retained the American name of the wax product when it was introduced in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, in Dutch it means ‘piss’, making it difficult for shoppers to ask for Pledge. The product survived because most Dutch retail stores converted to self-service.

The Yokohama Rubber Company was forced to withdraw hundreds of tyres from the sultanate of Brunei when Islamic authorities complained that the tread design resembled the word for Allah.

12 LIBRARIANS WHO BECAME FAMOUS IN OTHER FIELDS

British philosopher, economist, and historian, Hume spent the years 1752–57 as librarian at the Library of the Faculty of the Advocates at Edinburgh, where he wrote his History of England.

At the climax of his career in 1785, the inestimable womanizer began 13 years as librarian for Count von Waldstein in the chateau of Dux in Bohemia.

The Swedish author of the classic drama Miss Julie was made assistant librarian at the Royal Library in Stockholm in 1874.

After 19 years as a member of the College of Doctors of the Ambrosian Library in Milan, he was appointed chief librarian. In 1911 he was asked to reorganize and update the Vatican Library. From 1922 until his death in 1939, the former librarian served as pope.

Before launching his art career, Duchamp worked as a librarian at the Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve in Paris.

After the Russian Revolution, the future author of Doctor Zhivago was employed by the library of the Soviet Commisariat of Education.

Playwright, poet, lawyer, assistant secretary of state, winner of three Pulitzer prizes, and a founder of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization (UNESCO), MacLeish was appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as librarian of Congress in 1939 for five years.

In 1918 he worked as an assistant to the chief librarian of the University of Beijing. Overlooked for advancement, he decided to get ahead in another field and eventually became chairman of the Chinese Communist party.

His first job as a young man was that of messenger and cataloguer in the Library of Congress.

After his father’s death in 1938, Borges (who later became Argentina’s most famous author) started his first regular job, as an assistant in a small municipal library in Buenos Aires. In 1946, he was fired for signing an anti-Peron manifesto. After Juan Peron was overthrown in 1955, Borges was named director of the National Library of Argentina.

The English poet, author of The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974) spent his entire working life as a university librarian, at the University of Leicester (1946–50), Queen’s University, Belfast (1950–55) and at the Brynmor Jones Library in the University of Hull (1955–85).

British author of Room at the Top (1957), Braine worked as assistant librarian at Bingley Public Library (1940–51), branch librarian at Northumberland Country Library (1954–56) and branch librarian at West Riding of Yorks Country Library (1956–57).

15 FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO WORKED IN BED

This French King was ugly, fat and sickly but also ruthless and clever, earning the title of the ‘universal spider’. He introduced the custom of the lit de justice (‘bed of justice’), a ceremonial appearance of the monarch, in bed, before le parlement with the princes of the realm on stools, the greater officials standing, and the lesser ones kneeling. No one is sure exactly why he began the practice, but it caught on and lasted until the French Revolution. Fontenelle, a critic of Louis XV, was asked on the eve of the Revolution, ‘What, sir, is a “bed of justice”?’ He replied, ‘It is the place where justice lies asleep.’

Leonardo earned a unique fame as an artist and scientist, and according to his Notebooks, he spent some time each night ‘in bed in the dark to go over again in the imagination the main outlines of the form previously studied… it is useful in fixing things in the memory’.

In the last year of his life, the diabolically clever and scheming cardinal took to his bed and stayed there because of his rapidly deteriorating health. This did not prevent him from working — he directed his highly efficient secret police in exposing the treasonous machinations of the youthful royal favourite Cinq-Mars. Nor did it hinder the peripatetic cardinal from travelling — his servants carried him about in his bed, and if the door of the house he wanted to stay in was too narrow, they would break open the walls.

Hobbes, the great British political philosopher, was renowned for his mathematical approach to natural philosophy and found bed a comfortable and handy place to work on his formulas. He wrote the numbers on the sheets and, when he ran out of room, on his thighs. He wrote his 1661 Dialogue on Physics or On the Nature of Air entirely in bed. Hobbes also sang in bed because (according to Aubrey’s Brief Lives) ‘he did believe it did his lungs good, and conduced much to prolong his life’.

Throughout his life Longfellow suffered from periodic bouts of severe insomnia. Out of desperation he decided to put his sleepless nights to some good use, and he began to write poetry in bed — including his 1842 classic ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’.

Twain loved the luxurious comfort of writing in bed and there composed large portions of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. He seems to have been the first person to point out that working in bed must be a very dangerous occupation, since so many deaths occur there.

Best known for his portrait groups, especially Homage á Delacroix, this French painter worked in bed out of necessity when he could not afford wood for a fire. William Gaunt, in The Aesthetic Adventure, describes him propped up in bed, ‘Shivering, mournful, persistent… in a threadbare overcoat, a top hat over his eyes and a scarf round his mouth, balancing a candle on the edge of his drawing board and sketching with numbed, gloved hand.’

For years Stevenson was wracked by coughing spells caused by tuberculosis, and consequently he wrote most of Kidnapped and A Child’s Garden of Verses in bed at his home in Bournemouth, England. Bed sometimes brought him inspiration in the form of dreams. One night his subconscious mind spun ‘a fine bogey tale’, as he called it, based on a real-life criminal he had read about. Stevenson’s dream became Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author (Age of Innocence, 1920) Edith Wharton wrote primarily about the upper class into which she was born. Her perspective on the good life was no doubt sharpened by her works habits — she wrote in the mornings, finding inspiration in the comfort of her bed. So accustomed was she to this routine that she once suffered a fit of hysterics because her hotel room bed did not face the light, so she could work.

Bundled in sweaters, a hot-water bottle at his feet, the French author worked to refine his series of novels called A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (‘Remembrance of Things Past’) while lying virtually flat in bed in a cork-lined room. He had all the necessities within arm’s reach — more than a dozen pens (if he dropped one, he refused to pick it up because of dust), all of his notes, notebooks and manuscripts; even fumigation powder, which he believed helped his asthma. In spite of all his precautions, he died of pneumonia at the age of 51.

Churchill loved to lie abed in comfort while dictating letters and going through the boxes of official state papers for several hours each morning. Although he much preferred to write his books while standing up, declining health in his later years forced him to write and correct most of The Second World War and History of the English Speaking Peoples in bed.

The legendary sex queen with the hourglass figure was famous for her double-entendre lines. She wrote several of her own screenplays, including Diamond Lil, and in 1959 she published her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It. She did all her writing in bed, she reported, noting that ‘Everybody knows I do my best work in bed.’

While in the White House, First Lady Mamie Eisenhower did away with an office but not with the office routine. She held bedside conferences, dictated to her secretary, paid the bills and signed letters while ensconced in her pink-ruffled bed.

During the last two years of his life, while writing The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald found that he could work longer hours by staying in bed. He’d retire to bed with a dozen Coca-Colas (which had replaced alcohol in his drinking habits), prop himself up on pillows, and using a lapboard, he’d work for about five hours a day. A fatal heart attack prevented him from completing The Last Tycoon.

It seems appropriate that a man who made his fortune in sex should have done so in bed. For decades, Hefner controlled the Playboy empire from a massive bed in his Chicago mansion, where he stayed awake for 60-hour stretches, fuelled by amphetamines and Pepsi.

EARLY CAREERS OF 6 SELF-MADE BILLIONAIRES

Growing up the son of a US Representative from Nebraska, Buffett was an energetic paperboy for the Washington Post, covering several routes simultaneously. He also retrieved lost golf balls from a suburban course and sold them. When he was 11 years old, he and his sister began playing the stock market on a modest scale. A year later, he published a horse-racing handicapping sheet, and, while in high school, he and a fellow student were partners in a small pinball machine business that grossed $50 a week.

As a business undergraduate (he earned a BS from the University of Nebraska and an MBA from Columbia), Buffett studied with Benjamin Graham, who taught students to seek out undervalued stocks and wait patiently for them to rise. After Buffett formed his own investment fund, he scored one of his first big coups by following Graham’s advice. In 1963, shares of American Express were selling cheaply because the company, then the victim of a major swindle, was considered near bank ruptcy by many on Wall Street. Buffett, noticing that customers in Omaha shops and restaurants were using their American Express cards just as much as before the scandal had broken, ignored the Wall Street gossip and bought 5 per cent of the company’s stock. Over the next five years, the value of the stock quintupled. Buffett’s fortune has since grown to $42 billion.

When he was 12 years old, Dell used the money he earned working at a Chinese restaurant to start a stamp collection. He then made $2,000 re-selling the stamps through mail order. By the time he was 16, he had saved enough money to buy an Apple computer. He used the computer in his next business venture, selling subscriptions to the Houston Post. Reasoning that many new subscribers would be people setting up new households, such as newlyweds, he obtained lists of marriage licence applicants from local courthouses. Then, using the computer, he sent out personalised letters with subscription offers. He earned $17,000, which he used to buy his first BMW.

Dell’s parents wanted Michael to become a doctor. When he entered the University of Texas in 1983, he obliged his parents by enrolling in pre-med courses. But he began a new business on the side — selling computers. Operating out of his dorm room, he bought remaindered IBM and IBM-clone computers from local dealers, upgraded them, and sold them both door-to-door and through mail order. When his parents found out, they were upset and asked him to quit. A compromise was reached: Dell would put his business on hold until he finished the school year; if sales during his summer break weren’t good, he would return to school. During the last month of his break, Dell sold $180,000-worth of computers. He dropped out of college, set up shop in Austin, Texas, and achieved sales of $6 million in his first year. He soon pioneered the concept of ‘direct selling’ to customers, which established computer companies had resisted in the belief that buyers of expensive equipment would not be willing to make a purchase without a hands-on inspection. Dell Computers grew into the third-largest computer seller in the United States and Michael Dell’s net worth is now $13 billion.

Gates attended Lakeside School, a private Seattle establishment with rigorous academic standards. In 1967, the school’s mothers’ club used the proceeds of a rummage sale to buy a digital training terminal that was linked by phone to a computer at a local company. Gates was hooked immediately and, with three like-minded friends, formed the Lakeside Programming Group and hung out at the computing centre day and night. Gates and his friends were so enamoured of computers that they rummaged through the rubbish bins at the nearby Computing Centre Corporation (CCC), looking for scraps of paper left by the programmers. After searching for errors in the company’s programs, the group produced a 300–page manual, The Problem Report Book, that landed them on the CCC payroll. Later, the members of the Lakeside Programming Group formed their own company, Traf-O-Data, to sell a traffic monitoring program. Within a year, Traf-O-Data had earned $20,000, but business fell off when customers learned that Gates, the company president, was only 14 years old. During his senior year of high school, Gates was permitted to suspend his studies to accept a position as a programmer for TRW.

In 1975, Gates, who had enrolled at Harvard as a pre-law major, and Paul Allen, a former member of the Lakeside Programming Group who was working for Honeywell, set about designing software programs for the Altair 8800, the first commercially available microprocessor. They contacted the president of MITS, the manufacturer of the Altair, and told him they had successfully adapted the computer language BASIC for the Altair, even though they had yet to begin. When the president asked to see their program, they started working day and night in Gates’s dorm room. Although neither Gates nor Allen had ever seen the Altair 8800 first hand, their program worked and became the industry standard for the next six years. Gates dropped out of Harvard to form Microsoft with Allen. The company was so successful that Gates became a self-made billionaire at 31. He is now the world’s second richest man, worth $46 billion (the world’s richest man is Ingvar Kamprad, Swedish founder of IKEA).

While he was in high school, Jobs attended lectures at the Hewlett-Packard electronics plant in Palo Alto, California. One day he phoned William Hewlett, the company president, and asked for parts to build a frequency counter for a school project. Hewlett not only complied, he also gave Jobs a summer job.

In college, Jobs teamed up with his future partner in Apple Computers, Stephen Wozniak, to sell ‘blue boxes’ that allowed people to illegally make free long-distance calls. Jobs supplied the parts, Wozniak provided the labour, and they sold hundreds of the devices for $150 each in University of California dorms and through a friend in Beverly Hills. After dropping out of Reed College, Jobs landed a job as a technician at Atari. One of his first tasks was engineering on the computer game Breakout. When Jobs was unable to meet the deadline, he asked Wozniak for help. ‘Steve wasn’t able to design anything that complex,’ said Wozniak later. ‘I designed the game thinking that he was going to sell it to Atari for $700 and that I would receive $350. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that he had actually sold the game for $7,000.’ Jobs used the money he received to travel to India, searching for spiritual enlightenment. Back in the United States, he spent time at an Oregon farm commune. After returning to California in 1975, he met up with Wozniak again and suggested that they start their own computer company. To raise the $1,000 they needed, Wozniak sold his prized HP-65 calculator while Jobs sold his VW van. The Apple Computer company set up shop in the Jobs family garage. Their Apple II was the first computer designed for home use and set off the personal computer revolution. Although Jobs had a contentious relationship with Apple — he was forced out of the company in the late 1980s, then brought back in 1998 — the company remains the centre of his $2 billion fortune.

Perot got his first job at the age of six, working for his father, a cotton dealer and horse trader, breaking horses to the saddle for a dollar or two apiece. At 12, he worked out a deal with the Texarkana Gazette by which he would establish a paper route in the city’s predominately black slum area and in return would receive 70 per cent, rather than the standard 30 per cent, of subscription fees collected. Setting out on horseback at 3:30 each morning. Perot covered 20 miles a day and was soon earning $40 a week.

After high school, he attended Texarkana Junior College for a year before obtaining an appointment to the US Naval Academy in 1949. Although Perot loved the navy, he was less than enamoured of the promotion and seniority systems, and so decided not to sign on for another hitch. While serving aboard the aircraft carrier Leyte, Perot had been invited by an IBM executive to look him up after his discharge. Perot did so, and got a job selling computers. During his fifth year at IBM, he sold his entire quota for the year before January was over, and was promoted to a desk job at the corporation’s Dallas office. While there, Perot became convinced that there was a market for a company that would design, instal and operate processing systems on a contract basis. He left his IBM job to strike out on his own, and, on his 32nd birthday, used $1,000 of savings to found Electronic Data Systems. Perot’s net worth is now $3.8 billion.

After graduating from the University of Missouri with a BA in economics in 1940, Walton took his first job in retailing — as a JC Penny sales trainee. A few years later, Sam and his brother James became franchisees of the Ben Franklin variety store chain. As franchisees (the brother eventually ran 15 stores in Arkansas and Missouri), Sam Walton travelled throughout the eastern and midwestern United States and noticed that the large retail chains always placed their stores in or near large cities. Walton felt that smaller towns could successfully support a large retailer, but he received no encouragement from Ben Franklin’s management when he brought up the idea. Undaunted, Walton launched the project himself, and in 1962 opened the first Wal-Mart in Rogers, Arkansas. Although the chain struggled early on — David Glass, who later became Wal-Mart’s CEO, called the second Wal-Mart ‘the worst retail store I had ever seen’ — by 1991, Wal-Mart had passed Sears as America’s largest retailer and Walton was worth more that $8 billion.