Christie's

It is less than 150 years since photography went mainstream. Prior to that, human illustration was all we had. This story is about a collection of the very finest and most important examples of printed human illustration.

At the "Buzz Aldrin: American Icon" auction yesterday, Sotheby’s sold the jacket worn to the moon by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin yesterday for $2,772,500, smashing all sorts of auction records in the process.

This is the second part of our overview of the 2021 auction year – a year where investors channeled more of their wealth into “investments of passion” than ever before. It covers the 150 science, sci-fi and technology artifacts that sold for more than $100,000

The 2021 auction market was quite extraordinary, with unprecedented levels of participation and sales. From cars to colt revolvers to multi-million-dollar NFTs, this sweeping look at the highlights is full of fascinating tales and astonishing prices.

A 54-page document handwritten in 1913-1914 by Albert Einstein and Swiss engineer Michele Besso, sold earlier today for €11.6 million. It’s the most paid in nearly eight decades for an autograph document by history’s most celebrated scientist.

It would be reasonable to expect a slow year at auction for science, technology and science-fiction, but 2021 is on track for a record, with a slew of knowledge-related objects of note hitting the auction block in recent weeks.

One of the most valuable scientific documents in history changed hands this week, when an autographed Isaac Newton manuscript of revisions to the first edition of the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica sold at Christie's for £1,702,500.

The world-record price for a camping chair more than doubled this week when Christie's Hong Kong sold a 17th Century Chinese Folding Horseshoe-Back Jiaoyi for $8.5 million, far exceeding the highest price previously fetched by a Chinese Jiaoyi.

A previously unknown first edition copy of Nicolas Copernicus’ landmark scientific text, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), has sold at auction for £277,200 ($391,767).

A wine that spent 14 months on the International Space Station (ISS) is being offered up for sale by auction house Christie's. One of a dozen bottles of vintage Pétrus 2000 sent to the station, it could bring an estimated US$1 million.

A digital artist called "Beeple" is now one of the top three most valuable artists alive – in any medium – after he sold a JPG file of his work for US$69,346,250. Welcome to the crazy world of NFTs, and the internet's latest wild gold rush.

An almost-complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton has sold for over US$30 million. Nicknamed Stan, the rex was the star attraction in Christie’s Evening Sale of 20th Century Art on Oct. 6, and it's fetched the highest amount ever paid for a dinosaur fossil.