Slightly Macabre Idea

In 1840 Morris Angel was a cemetery keeper in London. He suggested to women burying their dead husbands that he take the clothes from the body and if he could sell the clothes he would pay the widows. 

The result was that he collected a lot of clothes. He also acquired tailors samples from Savile Row.

Contemporary actors needing costumes for the latest role began to rent clothing from Morris and so was born "Angels The Costumiers”. 

If you’ve watched a period piece movie its likely at least some of the clothing came from Angels. 32 Best Costume Oscars involved clothing from Angels.

This perhaps shows how hard it is to see the possibilities of ideas. Had Angels started from a  different POV and posed the question “should we start a business to hire clothing to actors’ the answer might well have been ‘no’. After all where would you get a supply of clothes, and if you have a source then could you have raised the necessary capital to buy the clothes? It might not have occurred to them to utilize the clothes from the deceased.

You can find a fuller history on Angels on Wikipedia and you can glimpse the racks of clothing in this clip from CBS This Morning:

Creating Value Out Of Nothing

A short piece in the WSJ got me thinking about valuation creation. Since we broke out of the Malthusian Trap innovation has steady increased the standard of living for an increasing amount of the worlds population. Clearly in the industrial revolution and far beyond the value creation was about material things but since we created computers we have seen an increasing amount of value created through software. We can create objects that work, think the process of designing airplanes. We use software to help make decisions or analyze complex situations. 

What struck me about this is that the tools to do the job are all intangible. Okay this wouldn’t be possible without the  physical computers but it is the software that does the work. When you look back over the last 1000 years I think this quite amazing and shows the incredible creativity of the human mind. Imagine telling a medieval nobleman who relied on farming his large estate that in future value would created in the ether.