THE GOLDEN AGE OF TURNTABLES!

But turntables? No my friend. That is now.

If the "golden age" is now, i understand why we must pay almost in gold for those modern and ugly belt drive high-end turntables  

Hi,
we are comparing the golden age of industry vs the golden age of individuals.

The Dutch Golden Age was between 1575 and 1675, so roughly the 1600's and not the 16th century as I wrote. Apologies for this stupid mistake..... 😕

@edgewear It was all about Tulips!

In 1636, according to an 1841 account by Scottish author Charles MacKay, the entirety of Dutch society went crazy over exotic tulips. As Mackay wrote in his wildly popular, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, as prices rose, people got swept up in a speculative fever, spending a year’s salary on rare bulbs in hopes of reselling them for a profit.

Mackay dubbed the phenomenon “The Tulipomania.”

“A golden bait hung temptingly out before the people, and one after the other, they rushed to the tulip-marts, like flies around a honey-pot,” wrote Mackay. “Nobles, citizens, farmers, mechanics, sea-men, footmen, maid-servants, even chimney-sweeps and old clothes-women, dabbled in tulips.”

When the tulip bubble suddenly burst in 1637, Mackay claimed that it wreaked havoc on the Dutch economy.

Tulip price index from 1636-1637. The values of this index were compiled by Earl A. Thompson in Thompson, Earl (2007), "The Tulipmania: Fact or artifact?", Public Choice 130, 99–114 (2007).

Public Choice/CC BY-SA 3.0

“Many who, for a brief season, had emerged from the humbler walks of life, were cast back into their original obscurity,” wrote Mackay. “Substantial merchants were reduced almost to beggary, and many a representative of a noble line saw the fortunes of his house ruined beyond redemption.”

But according to historian Anne Goldgar, Mackay’s tales of huge fortunes lost and distraught people drowning themselves in canals are more fiction than fact. Goldgar, a professor of early modern history at King’s College London and author of Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, understands why Mackay’s myth-making has endured.

Tulipmania was the frenzy of the booming 17th century Dutch merchant economy. Not unlike the speculative financial ’products’ in our current global economy, that wreaked havoc in 2008.

Are you suggesting Turntables are today’s Tulips? 😂