[GreenKeys] Flooding The Market?

[Steve Hilsz]

Interesting story about the cache of radios found in storage, and the decision of the owner to destroy them.

 Let me relate a story about rare telephones. After World War II, Robert Prosser of Turtle Lake, Wisconsin, commissioned a buyer to grab up all of the obsolete telephones that were being discarded in European countries. Bob paid a dollar each for the phones and the buyer got a dollar commission. Among the thousands of phones were 600 desk sets made by L. M. Ericsson and commonly called "Eiffel Tower Sets" due to their skeletal construction.

The Eiffel Tower Set was an icon, eagerly grabbed up by telephone collectors. Trouble was, there were not 600 collectors at the time, so Bob let the phone out one at a time and finally passed away with hundreds of the "rare" sets still in crates. Today, his heirs are still trying to figure out what to do with them.

Personally, if I found a ton of rare radios (or telephones), I would give many to museums, then sell the rest to the people who previously couldn't afford them because the Deep Pocket Boys had bid them too high to begin with. This would give many people pleasure and would also show the falsehood of the New Golden Rule: "He who has the gold, rules," as applied to collectibles.

Steve Hilsz