When Private Investors Met the Space Age

On May 26 astronauts at the International Space Station unloaded cargo from the Dragon capsule, a privately-owned spaceship. Here's a timely ad from the brokerage firm Francis I. duPont. It appeared in the July 16, 1966, issue of The New Yorker.

"Spaceology is the name of the game today," duPont proclaims. With the onset of commercial space flights, brokers are probably thinking the same way this year, although the term spaceology has not caught on.

In 1966 few realized how communications satellites would transform how people lived and worked. Live television from distant lands was the first electronic marvel. In 1969 a Foreign Affairs article observed

Only seven years [after the first transatlantic television broadcast] nearly half the land mass of the world was interlaced with communications facilities that made it possible for virtually all television viewers everywhere to watch live pictures from the surface of the moon. We have progressed to the point where a worldwide communications system is in full operation….

Foreign Affairs  also foresaw the first seeds of the next marvel: "data transmission, from computer to computer." As this 1961 City (Citi) Bank ad indicates, well-to-do travelers used to be a natural market for trustworthy investment help. Investors needed someone back home to keep an eye on their wealth.

These days, all they need is an iPhone.

Even so, a trustworthy investment adviser is a most desirable luxury. How can substantial investors enjoy traipsing around the Pacific Rim if they also have to worry about restructuring their portfolios to withstand a financial meltdown in Europe?