In September 1926, London newspapers reported that a millionaire had rented two giant aircraft and fitted them out as flying offices, complete with desks, filing cabinets and typewriters, so that busy financiers and traders could keep working while airborne, according to a report resurfaced by the Romanian outlet Ziarul de Iași.
The aircraft let passengers receive stock exchange information over wireless telegraph while in the air and dictate orders to buy and sell shares directly from their seats, without waiting to land. For readers a century ago, the report added, this offered a glimpse of a world in which even a flight was no longer wasted time.
The original 1926 report
Journalists at Ziarul de Iași traced the story to the Ziarele Arcanum digital newspaper archive, where the item had been preserved in its original form. It described how a London millionaire was equipping two gigantic aircraft with desks, files, typewriters and other items a modern businessman would need. He planned to use them to carry hurried financiers and traders between cities, people capable of working even while travelling, who would receive messages from every stock exchange by wireless telegraph during the flight and keep sending the buy and sell orders they dictated.
The mid-1920s were still an early period for commercial aviation, with passenger flight only beginning to establish itself after the First World War, and wireless telegraph stood at the cutting edge of long-distance communication, linking stock markets across cities in something close to real time.
A second story about treasure in the sea
Two days after the flying-office item ran, the newspaper Lumea published its own calculations, this time about how much gold and silver lay dissolved in the world's seas. Working from an estimated total volume of 1,330 million cubic kilometres for the planet's oceans, the paper worked out that each cubic metre of seawater held, on average, 10 milligrams of silver and 50 milligrams of gold.
Set against a global population of 1,500 million people, the figures were, in the paper's own words, staggering: roughly 1.8 million francs' worth of silver for every person on the planet and, in theory, 46,000 kilograms of gold each.
The original article, as quoted by Ziarul de Iași, explained that chemists had identified 24 different elements in seawater, including gold and silver, and that numerous experiments had been carried out to work out how much of each metal could realistically be drawn from the sea. On silver, analysis had found an average of 10 milligrams for every cubic metre of seawater. Given the ocean's total volume of 1,330 million cubic kilometres, the amount of silver theoretically recoverable would be considerable. Divided equally among the world's population of 1,500 million people, each person's share would be worth 1,800,000 francs, or about 11 million lei, using the pre-war price of silver factored into the calculation.
Gold in every tonne
On gold, the newspaper reported that chemical analysis found an average of 50 milligrams in every tonne of seawater. The article concluded that being able to extract gold and silver from the sea would represent an incalculable fortune, but added that the cost of extraction would exceed the value of the metal recovered, which is why the idea went no further than the page.
As Ziarul de Iași noted, the two stories, published within days of each other, capture two different directions in which the world of 1926 imagined its future: greater speed in travel, and access to resources whose existence was already known but which were, in practice, almost certainly impossible to use.
