Some of the most important landmarks in world history sold at Christie's New York auction of the Paul G Allen Collection today, many of them smashing auction records, while some lots inexplicably sold well below existing market value.
The adage "a rolling stone gathers no moss" does not pertain to the price of storied objects, as each new custodian adds "provenance", and with the vendor at this auction being Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and each item having been purchased as a perfect example of a "landmark technology first", the items were expected to sell for significantly more than any prior examples. Some did, some didn't.
Here's a quick summary of the biggest surprises of the sale, both above and below estimate, with links to the auction and perspective on the background of each.
1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Estimate: US$4,000,000 - $6,000,000
Price Realized: $3,922,000
Auction Page Link
This letter made global news headlines in the lead up to this auction but it didn't sell for anywhere near what it might have given its role in world history.
In 1939, Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd wrote a two-page letter to President Roosevelt warning him that Nazi Germany might harness nuclear research to create an atomic bomb. The letter catalyzed the Manhattan Project and introduced the atomic age, nuclear warfare and an existential threat to humanity that remains to this day.
When Paul Allen purchased this letter at auction (being sold by Malcolm Forbes, rampant entrepreneur and founder of Forbes magazine) for $2,096,000 in 2002, it became the first 20th-century historical document to top $1 million at auction.
In an address to students at Columbia University in 2017, Warren Buffett said, “If you think about it, we are sitting here, in part, because of two Jewish immigrants who in 1939 signed the most important letter perhaps in the history of the United States.”
The provenance of both Forbes and Allen could reasonably have been expected to add to the value of the letter. Curiously, 22 years after it sold for $2.1 million, it sold for $3.9 million. Bank interest would have returned a better ROI and the although this document is of immense historical importance, its price would not get anywhere near a place in the top 100 paintings sold this year. As we've been preaching for a quarter century, our sense of historical importance is perhaps in need of recalibration.
Portolan Chart Of The Mediterranean, Northern Europe, and the Northwest Atlantic Ocean circa 1575-1600
Estimate: $70,000 - $100,000
Price Realized: $302,400
Auction Page Link
Portolan charts were a very practical type of nautical navigational chart, the origins of which are not yet understood. They first appeared around the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages and were so named as a derivation of the Italian "portolano", meaning "related to ports or harbors." The seeming simplicity of a Portolan in being an easily understood "ready reckoner" for sea captains 700 years ago belies the scaled accuracy of the Portolan ... or where they came from.
This Portolan Chart tripled its high estimate to become the most expensive Portolan ever sold at auction, though in a tale that reads like the plot of a best-selling novel, the previous record holder (which sold for $239,400), turned out to have been misdated, and the eagle-eyed President of Barry Lawrence Ruderman, a San Diego-based map dealer, recognized it for what it was, and the $239,400 map was subsequently sold for $7.5 million.
1867 Malling-Hansen Writing Ball
Estimate: $50,000 - $80,000
Price Realized: $100,800
Auction Page Link
You don’t need to look back too far to see how far we’ve come, and this auction of a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball (the world’s first production typewriter) illustrates society’s rapid advancement over the last 150 years.
Just two human life spans ago, the typewriter was a hot new technology, and it bears some thought that every book written prior had been produced by the written hand ... Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi was the first ever novel completed on a typewriter in 1883.
Reverend Rasmus Malling-Hansen was the Director of the Institute for the deaf and mute in Copenhagen, and when he realized that his students were able to phonetically spell with their fingers faster than they could write by hand, he began work on a machine that would enable his flock to “speak with their fingers.”
The “writing ball” was his answer, and considering there was little prior work upon which to build, it is a monument to ingenuity and dogged perseverance.
It was also received to great fanfare, being the star of two world fairs: the 1873 World’s Fair in Vienna, and the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris. In 1881, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche purchased a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, becoming the product's most famous user. The International Rasmus Malling-Hansen Society offers the most complete repository of information on this gorgeous technological landmark.
Ultimately though, the Writing Ball's hand-built production made it far too expensive for the common man, and the Sholes and Glidden Typewriter was more affordable and became the first commercially successful typewriter – it also helped that the production was undertaken by Remington, which had been producing armaments and had mastered the metallurgy and failsafe mechanisms required to make it reliable. The Sholes and Glidden typewriter introduced the world to the QWERTY keyboard layout that has blighted humanity ever since.
Despite coming from the collection of Microsoft Co-founder Paul Allen, and being sold as a prime specimen of the first commercial typewriter, the price achieved by this lot doesn't come close to the record price for a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball at auction. As nearly all of the Writing Balls were sold in Europe, Europe's premier technology auctioneer, Team Breker, has sold all of those to have gone to auction, and Breker's record keeping prior to 2002 has been lost. Hence, although the record is believed to be in the vicinity of €150,000 (approximately US$170,000), we can't be specific about the date and final price. Several other Writing Ball specimens have sold for more than this result of $100,800.
Curiously, approximately 180 Writing Balls were produced, with only 35 machines extant, and this lot represents one of the five not currently owned by museums. In the history of the written word, this machine is of immense importance and it is yet another example of collectors failing to grasp the gravitas of one of one of history's most important inventions.
One hundred years from now, this machine will be near priceless.
"Enclosed Is Your First Apple Computer ..." by Steve Jobs (1976)
Estimate: $50,000 - $80,000
Price Realized: $302,400
Auction Page Link
If there was ever a document that authentically portrayed the infancy of the computer industry, it's this. It's so early in the evolution of the industry that RTFM didn't mean anything because there was no FM ... and it has Steve Jobs' handwriting. Pure GOLD!
Steve Jobs’ Apple-1 (1976)
Estimate: $500,000 - $800,000
Price Realized: $945,000
Auction Page Link
This is now the world's most expensive Apple-1 computer ever sold at auction, or anywhere else for that matter, though it only crawled past the previous record of $905,000 thanks to the addition of the Buyer's Premium. The previous most expensive Apple-1 did not have any distinctive provenance. This Apple-1 was the first commercial product of the world's biggest company AND the personal Personal Computer of one of the giants of world history ... as I wrote in the preview of this sale, "this is the gunman's gun!"
It ultimately didn't become the first million-dollar personal computer, and it didn't create the "perfect storm" as we predicted.
I still believe that it might ultimately become the bargain of the sale – there was only one Steve Jobs, and this was his personal Apple-1.
1941 Four-Rotor Enigma Cipher Machine
Estimate: $250,000 - $350,000
Price Realized: $718,200
Auction Page Link
One the most significant machines in the history of computing, not to mention the world of espionage and counter-intelligence, the M4 Enigma was an electromechanical cipher machine specifically developed for use by the U-boat division of the German Navy (Kriegsmarine) for communication with the naval bases, where it played a pivotal role in the Battle of the Atlantic. Admiral Karl Dönitz, the commander of the U-boat fleet seriously doubted the security of the M3 Enigma after several unexplained losses, and had the secret M4 model developed specifically for his fleet. The M4 was ready around May of 1941, and by February of 1942 all M4 machines had been distributed with the new operating procedures placed into effect.
The code was cracked by the Allied forces in what has become one of the most celebrated espionage stories ever documented, enabling access to much critical information and shortening the war by several years.
Despite the Paul Allen Provenance, this M4 Enigma machine did not match the world record price of $800,000 set by Sotheby's in 2019.
The popularized story of the Enigma machine and the sad story of Alan Turing is well told in the 2014 movie, The Imitation Game.
1971 Computer Space Arcade Game
Estimate: $5,000 - $8,000
Price Realized: $69,300
Auction Page Link
Computer Space (1971) was the first arcade video game as well as the first commercially available video game and it was produced by a company known as Syzygy Engineering. Shortly thereafter, the company's principals (Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney) changed the company name to Atari. As is obvious in retrospect, that fiberglass cabinet was styled by a friend of Bushnell's who made Jacuzzis and the space race between the USSR and the USA was the focus of every news report. 723 million people watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon in 1969, and the USSR launched the first space station in April 1971.
Earlier this year, we published an article entitled Dawn of the arcade game: Three pivotal video games from the early 70s, in which we eulogized the importance of three priceless relics from gaming antiquity that were going to auction: the world’s first video arcade game (Computer Space - 1971), the game it inspired (Pong - 1972) and the sequel to Pong (Space Race - 1973) which used a computer joystick. In actual fact, they weren't exactly priceless, as the price estimates from RR Auctions of $20,000+ for Computer Space, $10,000+ for Pong and $10,000+ for Space Race.
When the auction happened, the $20,000 expectation for the Computer Space arcade console turned into a new record for the museum piece at $69,773.
Hence, this particularly fetching yellow Computer Space Arcade Game went within $473 of a new record, but most importantly, it now legitimizes these arcade games as valuable collector pieces.
For those unaware of the magnitude of gaming in modern society, it has already emerged as the primary form of entertainment on planet Earth. Over half our time online is spent on mobile phones. Two thirds (65%) of all Americans and three-quarters (76%) of all Americans under 18 play at least one hour a week. Three-quarters (75%) of all American game-players spend more than four hours a week gaming and the average for all American game players is 12.8 hours a week. Gen Z boasts the highest percentage of regular gamers at 66% and 42% of Americans have been playing video games for more than 20 years.
Now given that the movie, music, sport and entertainment categories have been going a lot longer, gaming will eventually dominate all those categories to such an extent that its memorabilia prices should be at least on a par with those other industries one day.
1968 Engelbart Mouse And Chorded Keyset
Estimate: $10,000 - $15,000
Price Realized: $30,240
Auction Page Link
Okay, this is me writing to acknowledge the "egg on my face." My preview of this lot was entitled Get set for the beatification of the original computer mouse and I got it entirely wrong. If you read that article, you'll see why I figured that the mouse was finally going to get the recognition it deserves. Apart from being one of the key factors in humanity's adoption of the computer, we detailed the price progression of the prior sales of Engelbart mouse prototypes: $34,479 in 2020, $49,751 in August 2021 and $54,904 in March 2022. Finally, our write up of the March 2023 auction, which saw the price rise to $178,936, noted “the value is finally beginning to reflect the historical status of the pioneering device.”
So for some inexplicable reason, this mouse became the cheapest Engelbart mouse ever sold. Go figure!
DNA Double Helix Signed By Crick, Watson, And Wilkins
Estimate: $3,000 - $5,000
Price Realized: $37,800
Auction Page Link
Decoding the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was a landmark breakthrough in scientific understanding the likes of which come along just a handful of times in history, putting Crick, Watson and Wilkins in the same league as Copernicus, Newton and Einstein. They shared the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material."
Crick died in 2004, and his family decided to sell his Nobel Prize medal a decade later and it rightfully smashed all records at auction, selling at Heritage Auctions in April, 2013 for $2,270,500.
From our article entitled The most valuable Nobel Prize Medals at Auction: When co-recipient James Watson saw the price fetched, he decided to sell his Nobel Prize medal as he'd fallen on hard times. Despite a long and distinguished career, his fortunes had fallen when he linked race to intelligence during an interview in 2007, the media picked up a stray remark and in an epidemic of political correctness, Watson lost his board seats and was outcast by the establishment.
It also wasn't such a long time ago that the British Government chemically castrated Alan Turing because the brilliant mathematician and father of computer science was homosexual. Times change.
In a fairy tale ending, Christie's sold James Watson's medal for $4,757,000 in December, 2014, more than doubling Crick's record price, then the Russian billionaire who purchased the medal gave it back to him.
This signed digital image clearly isn't as significant as one of those Nobel Prizes, but it is a bargain given the consequence of the discovery.
Some other fascinating technology landmarks sold during the auction. Here's a brief guide to those we considered for this "top 10."
1965 Gemini IV Spacewalk Checklist, Flown And Annotated
Estimate: $60,000 - $80,000
Price Realized: $201,600
Auction Page Link
1980 PAC-MAN Arcade Game
Estimate: $2,000 - $3,000
Price Realized: $10,710
Auction Page Link
The Matchless Canyon Diablo Meteorite
Estimate: $100,000 - $150,000
Price Realized: $214,200
Auction Page Link
1976-78 Cray-1 Supercomputer
Estimate: $150,000 - $250,000
Price Realized: $1,020,600
Auction Page Link
1975 Atari Pong Home Console
Estimate: $3,000 - $5,000
Price Realized: $20,160
Auction Page Link
1968 Apollo 8 James Lovell Handwritten Flown Crew Log
Estimate: USD 60,000 - 80,000
Price Realized: $277,200
Auction Page Link
