3.1 million pounds for Mk.1 Spitfire

[Jeff Hunt]

Restored Spitfire fetches record £3,106,500 at auction

That is a whole lot of money. Great aircraft, great story behind the sale.

Anyone know who has purchased this icon?

Jeff

 

[Wayne Little]

Wow....

 

[GregP]

A rare bird indeed, but that is a LOT of money even for a Mk I Spitfire.

But if you can afford that amount, then it probably really isn't. Once there are so many zeros behind the first digit in your bank account, it's all academic anyway. I doubt if anyone would spend that amount if it left them in financial difficulty.

Let's hope whoever bought it FLIES it or at least allows it to be displayed occasionally. It would be a shame to see it gone to static only display.

 

[mikewint]

Even wowier: 3.1 million pounds is exactly (well almost) what it says, i.e. 3,100,000 pounds of silver. More exactly 3,100,000 TROY pounds of silver.
A fully loaded spitfire came in at 5844 pounds or 2651kg
3,100,000 Troy pounds is 2,550,000 Avoirdupois pounds. Thus our buyer could have taken his silver and made 436 Mk. I Spitfires out of pure silver.
Now pricewise, 2015 silver prices are down to $16.76 a Troy oz or $201 a Troy pound
At 5844 pounds that's 7102 Troy pounds per Spitfire or $1,427,502 per pure silver spitfire

 

[gumbyk]

Even wowier: 3.1 million pounds is exactly (well almost) what it says, i.e. 3,100,000 pounds of silver. More exactly 3,100,000 TROY pounds of silver.
A fully loaded spitfire came in at 5844 pounds or 2651kg
3,100,000 Troy pounds is 2,550,000 Avoirdupois pounds. Thus our buyer could have taken his silver and made 436 Mk. I Spitfires out of pure silver.
Now pricewise, 2015 silver prices are down to $16.76 a Troy oz or $201 a Troy pound
At 5844 pounds that's 7102 Troy pounds per Spitfire or $1,427,502 per pure silver spitfire

huh?

 

[pbehn]

If Raheem Stirling is worth £49,000,000 for his possible ability to be able to kick a ball into a very large net some time in the future then £3,000,000 is a snip, it has "provenance" and is perfectly restored and as a plane to fly as close as you can get to what Mitchell had in mind.

Mr Bean just sold his McLaren sports car for £6m and he crashed it two times.

 

[mikewint]

An English POUND STERLING is called thus because in Ye Olde Days of Yore in the Saxon kingdoms when 240 Sterlings were struck from a lump of silver those 240 Sterlings weighed a pound. Thus a pound of sterlings
Thus one English Pound (£1) or Quid(money) was 20 shillings and each shilling 12 pence and each pence 4 farthings or as above 240 pence made £1.
The Crown (156g of gold) was 5 shillings, the Sovereign, a gold coin (7.322g of gold) was worth £1, the Guinea another gold coin which no longer circulates is 21 shillings.
Now let's work on your measurement skills:
Which weighs more a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?

 

[pbehn]

An English POUND STERLING is called thus because in Ye Olde Days of Yore in the Saxon kingdoms when 240 Sterlings were struck from a lump of silver those 240 Sterlings weighed a pound. Thus a pound of sterlings
Thus one English Pound (£1) or Quid(money) was 20 shillings and each shilling 12 pence and each pence 4 farthings or as above 240 pence made £1.
The Crown (156g) was 5 shillings, the Sovereign, a gold coin (7.322g of gold) was worth £1, the Guinea another gold coin which no longer circulates is 21 shillings.
Now let's work on your measurement skills:
Which weighs more a pound of feathers or a pound of gold?

You missed out the florin (a 2 shilling coin) an early attempt at decimalisation.

Are the feathers from a European or African Sparrowhawk?

 

[Crimea_River]

 

[GregP]

3.1 million British Pounds at the exchange rate of $1.56 USD per British Pound is $4,844,215 USD. Simple and easy.

If Silver is $16.76 per Troy Ounce and we have 3.1 million Troy ounces, it is worth $51,956,000 USD, so something is very wrong here because even if you are bad accountant, $52 million US dollars doesn't add up to $4.8 milion US dollars.

Methinks there is a fly in the ointment somewhere, or perhaps a dirty finger in the stew bowl.

 

[wuzak]

Still doesn't come close to the most expensive car in the world.

Last year a Ferrari 250 GTO (one of 36 made) sold at auction for US$38.115m!

 

[GregP]

The idiot has too much money.

 

[Gnomey]

Lets face it, if we all had that kind of money we would do exactly the same...

 

[Elmas]

Once I knew an Architect in London: I was told by the skipper of his boat that, after a kick of his most beloved horse, he wanted to stop working and sold his Company.
For one billion and seven hundred million pounds.
A number very numerous indeed.
How many Spitfires Mk I could you buy with one billion and seven hundred million pounds sterling?

 

[mikewint]

GregP - that's 3.1 million pounds sterling which would be 37,200,000 t oz of silver provided that the pound was actually backed by something other than a promise.
Privided you could actually get the silver metal, at $16.76 per t oz that would net you $623,472,000 USD

Pbehn - Depending on how far back you want to go in time English coinage was a bloomin nightmare. We have 1/4, 1/2, and 1/3 farthings. Farthing means "fourth part" so the 1/3 farthing coin was a 1/12 of a penny. Then the good olde "ha'penny" or 1/2 penny. The helm or 1/4 florin. Special Maundy coinage: "thrupp'nce" (Threepence) and the Groat or Joey which was 4 pence.
I remember being told that the price was 10 and 6. WHAT?? Well just give me that 1/2 guinea Guvner or seeing a price tag: £4/8/4d WHAT???

 

[pbehn]

GregP - that's 3.1 million pounds sterling which would be 37,200,000 t oz of silver provided that the pound was actually backed by something other than a promise.
Privided you could actually get the silver metal, at $16.76 per t oz that would net you $623,472,000 USD

Pbehn - Depending on how far back you want to go in time English coinage was a bloomin nightmare. We have 1/4, 1/2, and 1/3 farthings. Farthing means "fourth part" so the 1/3 farthing coin was a 1/12 of a penny. Then the good olde "ha'penny" or 1/2 penny. The helm or 1/4 florin. Special Maundy coinage: "thrupp'nce" (Threepence) and the Groat or Joey which was 4 pence.
I remember being told that the price was 10 and 6. WHAT?? Well just give me that 1/2 guinea Guvner or seeing a price tag: £4/8/4d WHAT???

The farthing had ceased to be currency (1956) when I was born (1959) but our house and everyone else's had them all over in tins and saucers. I learned the old £ s d system as a child and it wasnt that difficult. Remember that until post war years few people saw a pound note, my grandmothers wages for a YEAR were 10 shillings. Someone was pulling your leg, half a guinea is 10s 6d.

Alan Turing had this exchange in a restaurant with others from the Enigma project
. But despite the earnest intention of the participants not to raise professional questions, it proved impossible to get completely away from Enigma. Once again, there was talk of the errors committed by German operators and of the perforated sheets, now machine- rather than handmade, which the British sent in series from Bletchley to the Poles working at Gretz-Armainvillers, outside Paris. The inventor of the perforated sheets, Zygalski, wondered why their measurements were so peculiar, with each little square being about eight and a half millimeters on a side.

"That's perfectly obvious," laughed Alan Turing. "It's simply one-third of an inch!"

This remark in turn gave rise to a dispute as to which system of measures and currency, the traditionally chaotic British one or the lucid decimal system used in France and Poland, could be regarded as the more logical and convenient. Turing jocularly and eloquently defended the former. What other currency in the world was as admirably divided as the pound sterling, composed of 240 pence (20 shillings, each containing 12 pence)? It alone enabled three, four, five, six or eight persons to precisely, to the penny, split a tab at a restaurant or pub.

 

[mikewint]

In England we just gave up trying to figure it all out and held out all our bills and coins and told them to take what they needed.
Thank God Alexander Hamilton metricized our money.
My Dad made $14 per week at his job

 

[T Bolt]

A Spitfire made out of silver would weigh lot a more than one made out of aluminum. Is that taken into account?

 

[buffnut453]

Depends if it's an African Spitfire or a European Spitfire.

Yep...coat time again!

 

[pbehn]

In England we just gave up trying to figure it all out and held out all our bills and coins and told them to take what they needed.
Thank God Alexander Hamilton metricized our money.
My Dad made $14 per week at his job

It is just a question of what everyone is used to. I presume you have 7 days in a week, 24 hours in your day, 60 minutes in an hour and 12 months in a year without any great problems? At the time the UK currency went metric my father was making about £5 per week and that was the problem, too many people actually having and using pounds which used to be a unit most people rarely used pre war. Post war as the Pound lost value the system became more and more unuseable. Adding and vending machines finished it off they just couldnt cope.

I used to work in Ultrasonics, all European and American UT shear wave systems work on beam angle, a mathematical normal beam is 0 degrees and the angle increases up to approx 70 degrees. When I worked in China I asked what beam angle the people were using and was told "0.5", it took an age of discussions to figure out that the Chinese dont quote the angle but the cosine of that angle. Just what they are used to doing.

A 60 degree angle has a cosine of 0.5 a defect detected with a 60 degree probe is 0.5 times that indicated on the time base so if the time base reads 30 mm it is 15 mm below the probe in the direction of the beam. Confusing at first but completely logical.