New York, March 31—As a freshman at college I was taught economics by a young socialist, an enthusiast for Henry Wallace For President. He didn’t call himself that—very few people did in those days, and not all that many do so today, Professor Galbraith being a notable, noble, exception. Our instructor taunted the class with the odds against the commercial success of any novel enterprise, given the heavy breathing of the oligopolists who surround us. It didn’t matter, he said, what the novel enterprise was: service, manufacturing, invention, you name it—you come up with a good idea, and somebody will steal it from you. Suppose you invent a terrific new mousetrap—the Upjohn Mouse Trap—and try to peddle it? Forget it: some shark in a smoke-filled room in Chicago will run you out of business and get the patent for nothing.
My Upjohn professor’s strictures floated through my mind when, last June, a forty-year-old Miami lawyer told me he and a partner in the travel business had conceived the idea of a round-the-world trip on a Concorde with this special zinger: travel would all be over water. There have been round-the-world trips on Concordes before, but none without hours and hours overland, where you are not permitted to fly more than six hundred miles per hour.
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