Josiah Wedgwood
thehustle.co
Josiah Wedgwood
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Re: Josiah Wedgwood
#2hacker news is shadow banning ? how low can hn go ?
Re: Josiah Wedgwood
#3> By the time Josiah died in 1795, he’d amassed a fortune of £600k pounds (more than US $100m today), and was the 4th richest man in all of England.
I found this to be an interesting point about how much the wealth of society has increased since those times. $100m today would not put you anywhere even remotely close to the top of that list.
Re: Josiah Wedgwood
#4> By the time Josiah died in 1795, he’d amassed a fortune of £600k pounds (more than US $100m today), and was the 4th richest man in all of England. I found this to be an interesting point about how much the wealth of society has increased since those times. $100m today would not put you anywhere even remotely close to the top of that list.
Converting historical currency to modern values becomes increasingly meaningless the longer the time span, and 1795 is a sufficiently different world to today with a different basket of goods that I don't think that's a valuable comparison.
Re: Josiah Wedgwood
#5"he's been largely forgotten by time"
Perhaps he himself is not well known, but the eponymous company he started in 1759 was the watchword for high-end ceramics for more than two centuries and is still sold to this day.
Towards the end of the 20th century, consumer tastes changed and the company faced stiff competition from cheaper imports. Wedgwood merged with another luxury goods company Waterford Crystal in 1987, to become Waterford Wedgwood. The combined companies fared no better as a unit and went into administration in 2009 though the Wedgwood brand survives after being purchased by a private equity company and now a Finnish consumer goods company.
Re: Josiah Wedgwood
#6> By the time Josiah died in 1795, he’d amassed a fortune of £600k pounds (more than US $100m today), and was the 4th richest man in all of England. I found this to be an interesting point about how much the wealth of society has increased since those times. $100m today would not put you anywhere even remotely close to the top of that list.
I've just started reading Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 and it mentions that the richest Dukes had incomes in the hundreds of thousands per year and, of course, huge capital assets - so that 4th place does seem rather surprising.
Re: Josiah Wedgwood
#7Nice article, but I find it strange that not once was the gorilla in the room mentioned- China. Wedgwood was working in a world that had been re-shaped by Chinese export porcelain, one of the first examples of a truly global product and marketing "brand". Chinese porcelain was of extremely high quality (some of it unrivaled even today), technologically advanced, culturally complex, and cherished by the European nobility. European potters like Wedgwood were desperately trying to re-create the purity and beauty of the Chinese product. I would argue that what Wedgwood came up with was not only technologically inferior but also a strange cultural mishmash of influences with less cultural value than Chinese porcelain.
I highly recommend Joseph Needham's "Science and Civilisation in China" Volume 5, Part 12, covers Ceramic Technology: https://books.google.com/books?id=mabcHwmAD5oC
Re: Josiah Wedgwood
#8> By the time Josiah died in 1795, he’d amassed a fortune of £600k pounds (more than US $100m today), and was the 4th richest man in all of England. I found this to be an interesting point about how much the wealth of society has increased since those times. $100m today would not put you anywhere even remotely close to the top of that list.
The goods available are very different. It would be interesting to compare what that buys you in terms of land and property though.
The potteries business of Stoke-on-Trent is so thoroughly vanished that it was a few years ago promoting the sale of houses at £1 to anyone willing to fix them up and live there. Sic transit gloria mundi, I suppose.
Re: Josiah Wedgwood
#9> By the time Josiah died in 1795, he’d amassed a fortune of £600k pounds (more than US $100m today), and was the 4th richest man in all of England. I found this to be an interesting point about how much the wealth of society has increased since those times. $100m today would not put you anywhere even remotely close to the top of that list.
I've just started reading Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800-1906 and it mentions that the richest Dukes had incomes in the hundreds of thousands per year and, of course, huge capital assets - so that 4th place does seem rather surprising.
FWIW I can't find a reference to him being the 4th richest anywhere else but the article, so they probably just misread something in their sources.
Re: Josiah Wedgwood
#10Interesting they didn't mention that Charles Darwin was his grandson. The pottery business funded Darwin's voyage on the Beagle.