And if they filled up the entire train with, you know, the sides of the train with telephone books, it was pretty much impregnable and bullet-proof. And they made this very fortuitous and kind of wonderful discovery that the bandits would shoot through the side of the train with these high-powered bullets.īut the Manhattan "White Pages" were just the right size so they could fit inside the partitions of the train.
In 1935, apparently they'd been getting kind of hijacked by bandits - their payroll train. SHEA: The thing that kind of drew me to it more than anything else is that there was this wonderful story that I found about a fruit company in Central America. ROBERTS: So what did you find when you started poking into the history?
But pretty much, everybody has had some experience with the telephone book and yet, nobody has ever written anything about it. I mean almost everybody - maybe not people who were born within the last few years. SHEA: Well, I thought it was kind of appalling that this is the book that everybody has been touched by in some way. ROBERTS: So you've already proved what a word nerd you are by reading "The Oxford English Dictionary." Did you really have to take on the phone book? AMMON SHEA (Author, "The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads"): Hi. So, in the course of "The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads," you will also learn about delivering mail by torpedo, and the habits of the cuttlefish, and Huey Long's recipe for Roquefort cheese salad dressing.Īmmon Shea joins me now from our New York bureau. What makes Ammon Shea's book "The Phone Book" more interesting than reading the actual phone book is the fact that Shea loves nothing more than a juicy tangent. Today, Elon Musk is worth $34.2 billion, according to Forbes.It sounds like a punchline, but Ammon Shea has written a history of the phone book, really. Kimbal invested in and serves on the boards of Tesla and SpaceX.
He also owns indoor farming company Square Roots and started foundation Big Green, which teaches farming to children. In 2004, Kimbal shifted industries and co-founded The Kitchen Restaurant Group, which owns three farm-to-table restaurant chains: Next Door, The Kitchen and Hedge Row. In 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for $1.5 billion.Įlon went on to start SpaceX in 2002, and became a Tesla investor in 2004 and CEO in 2008. In 2016, he founded Neuralink, and a year later, he created The Boring Company. In 1999, Elon and Kimbal reportedly sold Zip2 for roughly $300 million and Elon used that money on a second start-up X.com, which later became PayPal. Zip2 ultimately won over The New York Times, Knight Ridder and Hearst Corporation, who not only partnered with Zip2 but together invested a total of $50 million in the business, according to Ashlee Vance's book, "Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future." "And we were like 'OK, I guess we'll just build it.'" How dare you even suggest this,' Elon said. You'll still own all the content and everything.' And they'd just throw us out of the office, 'No. "We said like, 'Listen, it costs very little. When Elon and Kimbal would try to get funding or partner with other companies, they were forced to explain the internet.
"At that point, very few people were in the internet, so it was really a question of, 'Is the internet going to succeed?' Which we were huge believers in, and these guys were not." Maye Musk tweets pic of her, Kimbal & Elon at Zip2. "Most people didn't have an email address or ever went online."
#Manhattan white pages new york full
"And picked up the Yellow Pages – this book, this big thick book full of ads, this multibillion-dollar risk industry – and threw it at me and said, 'You ever think you're going to replace this?'"īut the response was a typical one at the time, as "most businesses didn't know what the internet was" back then, Elon said on the podcast. Let's be one of your partners to put the Yellow Pages online.' "I remember talking to the head of the that owned the Yellow Pages ," Kimbal said on the Third Row Tesla podcast.
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