Ghost Mail Weekender

Happy Sunday Voornaam,

It's amazing how camera phones have become totally entrenched in our lives. Half the time, people spend more energy trying to capture the moment rather than actually enjoying it!
At least the technology has a sweet origin story. The first camera phone picture ever taken was of its inventor’s newborn daughter. Phillippe Kahn took the (really blurry) photograph of his daughter Sophie a few hours after her birth on 11 June 1997.
Kahn had been working for almost a year on a web server-based infrastructure for pictures, which he called Picture Mail. While his wife was in labour, Kahn jury-rigged a connection between a mobile phone and a digital camera right at her bedside. He snapped the famous photo of Sophie and sent it in real time to the picture messaging infrastructure he had running in his home.
Kahn later said: "I had always wanted to have this all working in time to share my daughter’s birth photo, but I wasn’t sure I was going to make it. It’s always the case that if it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would ever get done."
Fortunately for Kahn, his wife laboured for 18 hours - otherwise he might never have met that deadline!
Speaking of special moments, we all enjoy a restaurant meal from time to time. For many, food is a hobby, as evidenced by the wild popularity of reality shows and documentaries about cuisine. At the centre of this world sits the coveted prize of Michelin Stars, an award that shows how creative brands can be with encouraging people to use their products. Dominique Olivier tells the story of the award and its dark side in this piece>>>
Read on for a story of a sailor who became a king of cannibals (yes, really) and Dominique's fast facts about extraordinary things that people put in their wills.
Have a lovely day and enjoy what we've brought you!

The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)

What does a tyre business know about fine dining?

The Swedish king of the cannibals

TL;DR: We all know the adage about life and the inevitable lemons it hands out. When it was Carl Emil Pettersson’s turn for a lemon, he didn’t just make lemonade - he opened an entire lemonade factory.
Carl Emil Pettersson was a Swedish sailor who went from shipwreck survivor to king of Tabar Island in Papua New Guinea. Yes, you read that right - king.
The story begins in 1904 when Pettersson, who had been at sea since his teenage years, found himself employed aboard the Herzog Johan Albrecht, a ship sailing through the Pacific. On Christmas Day, the ship sank off the coast of Tabar Island, leaving Pettersson shipwrecked and washed ashore, where he got himself tangled up in a hibiscus hedge.
Carl was soon discovered by the local islanders, who, rumour has it, were cannibals (as many tribes in Papua New Guinea were at the time). Fortunately for him, the islanders were so fascinated by his blue eyes that they decided to show him to their king instead of making him the centrepiece of a beach braai. It was during his first audience with King Lamy that Carl’s baby blues worked their magic once more - this time on the king’s daughter, Princess Singdo, who fell for the strapping Swede at first sight.
Carl was spared death by barbecue, and he and Princess Singdo were married in 1907. Never one to resist the lure of opportunity, Carl approached his father-in-law with a proposition to clear part of the island and start a coconut plantation. From his history of travel and trade, he knew that there was money to be made from copra, the dried white flesh of coconuts. Carl’s idea was a success, and in no time his coconut plantation was doing a roaring trade and enriching his new island home in the process.
When he wasn’t busy in the coconut plantation, Carl was very busy at home. He and Princess Singdo eventually had 9 children, and then on top of that, his father-in-law’s passing resulted in him being named king of the island. His reputation for physical strength earned him the nickname "Strong Charley," but it was his respect for local customs (minus the cannibalism, we hope) and care for his workers that made him beloved by the islanders.
Princess Singdo passed away in 1921, and with 9 children to look after plus the ever-present risk of being part of the snacks served at the memorial, Carl knew he needed a new wife ASAP. He returned to Sweden the following year, looking not only for a new wife but also to reconnect with old friends. That’s where he met Jessie Louisa Simpson, an Anglo-Swedish woman who soon joined him back on Tabar Island as his second wife.
Unfortunately, things weren’t going as smoothly on the island as they once had. Carl’s coconut plantation had fallen into disrepair during his absence, and financial troubles, paired with malaria, left the newlywed couple struggling. After Jessie fell ill and returned to Sweden, where she passed away in 1935, Carl’s health also declined. He left Tabar Island but never returned to Sweden, passing away in Sydney in 1937.
Carl passed the crown to his eldest son, Frederick. At the time of Carl’s death, Frederick was living in New Zealand, on a path to becoming a doctor, not a king. But when word came that his father had passed and he was next in line for the throne of Tabar, Frederick faced a tough choice: continue with his medical career or take up the family crown.
Frederick made the decision to leave his studies behind and return to the island where he’d grown up. But after a taste of life in New Zealand, the idea of being king on a remote Pacific island quickly lost its appeal. It turns out, trading in modern comforts for the challenges of a developing nation wasn’t what he had in mind.
Desperate to offload the burden, Frederick came up with a bold plan - he tried to sell Tabar Island to Sweden. When the Swedes politely declined, Frederick offered them money to take it off his hands. Still no luck. In the end, the island ended up under Australian control, leaving Frederick free from the responsibilities of royalty and, no doubt, relieved to return to a more ordinary life.

Dominique's fast facts: The stuff we leave behind

An assortment of facts that will take you only a minute to read.

When John Stawovy passed away in 2016, he left his children the town of Reduction, Pennsylvania, which he bought for $10,000 in 1948. Unwilling to bear the burden of the town’s 60 residents, the Stawovys listed the town for sale and are asking $1.5 million for the whole shebang as of early 2018.

​In 1899, Solomon Warner died and left behind a wooden trunk, which eventually passed through his descendants. Inside that trunk was something that must’ve seemed pretty mundane to Warner himself: a pair of original Levi’s jeans, which are estimated to have been made in 1893. Currently in the possession of Warner’s great-great-grandson, Jock Taylor, those jeans are now thought to be the oldest unworn pair of Levi’s on earth. As of 2017, Levi’s offered Taylor $50,000 for the jeans, but he is holding out for $100,000.

Rather than leaving his family a monetary gift upon his passing in 1930, T.M. Zink decided to leave behind a whole lot of misogyny. Zink put $50,000 in a trust for 75 years, requesting that it eventually go to the construction of the “no-women-admitted” Zink Womanless Library. Fortunately for the state of Iowa, family members made sure that library remained just a dream of the man who personally claimed an “intense hatred of women”.

​In 1928, an anonymous donor left £500,000 to the British government to be used to pay off the “entire national debt.” While the generous donation is nowhere near enough to pay off such a vast sum completely, it is now worth about £350 million, which is still enough to make a dent. The current fund managers at Barclays have tried to find some legal grounds to release the funds from the long-deceased good Samaritan to the Treasury, but as yet, their struggle has been to no avail.