Hello beaders! I'm Zack, the jolly Beadaholique customer service representative. Not only do I answer your questions, but those inquiries often inspire my own. And let me tell you, these are the really important questions. Burning questions. Case in point: A few fellow employees and I were discussing the value of my recent haircut. To say it was botched would be a gross understatement. Maybe the scissors were dull; maybe the barber's lack of digits had some thing to do with it, but we all agreed that it wasn't worth a lot. The most intriguing comment during the marathon roast was, "That trim wasn't worth the beads that bought Manhattan." I couldn't take this kind of insult lying down, so I hit the books to find the straight dope.
As it turns out, in 1626, a group of Native Americans known as the Canarsee met with Peter Minuit, a representative of the Dutch West India company, to conduct a little business on the island we now call Manhattan. The story has it that Minuit traded sixty guilders, the equivalent of about 1.5lbs of silver, in beads, buttons, and mirrors to the band in exchange for the 20 square mile island. Now, a person could argue for years (383 to be exact) about who actually owned the island, the clash of cultures, and misunderstandings in general, but I'm interested in more important business-- how many beads is the island worth today?
First, we have to do a little math. In 2005, the entirety of Central Park's 843 acres was valued at $528,783,522,000. That means the 12,800 acres that make up the island are worth approximately $8 trillion. If we were to take a modern bead, say a bag of eight clear, eight millimeter Swarovski bicones retailing for $2.25, we would need nearly 18 trillion bags. Since there are eight beads per bag, we're looking at 144 trillion individual beads. That's enough beads to wrap around the Earth 28,000 times. If you were to line up each bead end to end, they would extend over 700 million miles. The last bead would almost reach the rings of the planet Saturn. That's a lot of wampum!
So what can we draw from all of this? Even if we can't agree on how the island was acquired or the actual current worth of Manhattan, there's no denying beads make better jewelry than currency. Then again, now that my haircut is valued at around $8 trillion, its sharp angles and sudden bare patches almost seem worth it. Almost.
