Cleopatra's Barge
✜ History’s first superyacht owner was Ptolemy IV, who ruled Egypt from 221 to 205 B.C.E. Among his royal fleet was a 300-foot catamaran that towered 60 feet above the Nile, propelled by thousands of enslaved men. But it was his descendant Cleopatra, reigning nearly two centuries later, who has captured the imaginations of poets, playwrights, and Hollywood producers. Cleopatra’s barge was the first nautical fashion statement, a blazing vessel that included silver oars, colorful sails, and a goldencrusted hull.
Shakespeare’s reference in Antony and Cleopatra was so inspirational to George Crowninshield Jr., who hailed from a wealthy merchant family in Salem, Mass., that he named his yacht Cleopatra’s Barge when it launched in 1816. At a time when no one cruised for mere recreation, the 83-foot schooner was considered America’s first superyacht. The wooden hull and ostentatious interior reportedly cost $100,000, or $2 million today.
Inside, Cleopatra’s Barge was a pleasure palace of ornate paneling, gold beams, velvet ropes, fireplaces, and chandeliers. The formal dining room used the best porcelain, silver, and crystal. The year after taking delivery, Crowninshield and his crew sailed for Europe and, as a goodwill gesture, opened the vessel to the public. While it was in port at Barcelona, thousands boarded. Crowninshield died seven weeks after returning to Salem, and Cleopatra’s Barge was eventually sold to Hawaii’s King Kamehameha II, who owned it until it wrecked on Kauai off 1824.
Despite just eight years afloat, it established a precedent for modern gigayachts, from Aristotle Onassis’s lavish 325-foot Christina O, converted from a WWII Canadian naval frigate, on up to Jeff Bezos’s recently launched 417-foot Koru, the world’s biggest sailing yacht.
Keeping Up With the Joneses
✦ The urge to live as large as our well-to-do friends and neighbors was enshrined in a comic strip, “Keeping Up With the Joneses,” by Arthur R. “Pop” Momand, which ran in American newspapers from 1913 to 1938 and is responsible for popularizing the phrase. But the saying’s origin may date back roughly a century earlier, when a New York family by the name of Jones took control of Chemical Bank and began to eclipse even the other extraordinarily wealthy clans in the fastgrowing city in terms of capital—or, at least, the willingness to show it off. (None other than Edith Wharton, that consummate chronicler of Manhattan’s Gilded Age upper crust, was born a Jones.)
Whether the expression had taken root in some patrician quarters by the time Momand penned his satire is moot. The strip encapsulated what was, is, and will ever be one of the main drivers of the luxury industry: envy.
Cupholder
✶ For many car enthusiasts, the cupholder represents the beginning of the end. And, fair enough: It’s certainly more down-market than a saloon’s glossy, veneered seat-back tray—you don’t need a receptacle for your Champagne flute when your driver is working the wheel— and it doesn’t exactly send the message that your car is a dedicated performance machine, which is why elite German and Italian brands pretended it didn’t exist until buyers forced their hands. It was an American invention (naturally) that debuted in minivans (of course) in the ’80s and has since proliferated, well, everywhere, from Porsches and Ferraris to freaking motorcycles.
But the real genius of the cupholder is the way in which it foresaw the automotive cockpit not as a workstation but as a home-away-from-home that coddled the pilot via creature comforts. Today you can dictate your grocery list to Apple CarPlay, delve into a relaxation session in your Mercedes EQS, or play Mario Kart on your Tesla’s touchscreen, and things will only get comfier whenever true self-driving tech arrives—thanks to the humble cupholder.
Adler Bicycle
❖ When 23-year-old Bauhaus graduate Marcel Breuer returned to the school to teach in 1925, one of the first things he did was purchase an Adler bicycle. The young lecturer and master carpenter took long rides around the city of Dessau, where the Bauhaus had relocated from Weimar. Even though his medium of choice was wood, he couldn’t help admiring the bike’s tubularsteel frame, which was durable but also flexible and lightweight. He wondered if it could be fashioned into furniture.
Adler rejected his idea to collaborate, so the budding designer decided to go it alone—though he needed a plumber to help weld the tubing. The first model had a back, a seat, and arms made from strips of canvas stretched across the nickel-plated frame, eliminating traditional cushioning and creating a sleek new silhouette that Breuer named the B3. Although he would tinker with the radical design for a couple of years, with the B3 (later renamed the Wassily chair in honor of his friend, abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky), Breuer had hit on a pared-down, easy-to-produce piece of furniture that would trigger a stylistic shift in the industry and help to usher modernism into offices and living rooms on a global scale.
Plating Tweezers
✧ Like so many of the cuisines American diners claim as their favorites, plating tweezers originated abroad. In the mid-1990s, European chefs started using small surgical forceps to assemble intricate plates whose tiny, delicate ingredients offered a fresh visual impact. The utensils gave these cooks the same control their
