Adam Maguire

Yeah, there really are reports at the peak of tulip mania.

One particular variant, the Semper Augustus, which had a striking white and red stripes on the petal, sold for 10,000 guilders, which would have been enough at the time to buy you a very nice canal house in Amsterdam at the equivalent of around 140,000 euro in today's money.

And it actually turns out the Semper Augustus wasn't actually a unique variant.

It was just a bulb that had a virus that caused a split into two colours.

And apparently the virus also weakened the bulb, made it less likely to divide into new bulbs, which is why that type doesn't exist anymore.

But of course, one of the issues with tulips is that they only bloom for a week or two.

So you have this frenzy developing around something that's essentially dormant for most of the year.

That led to people starting to...

build forward contracts.

They were saying, I'll buy bulbs off you next year, I'll buy flowers off you next year.

That led to a speculative market where those contracts were being sold again and again in the months when there were no tulip flowers.

People were kind of willing to pay a premium to get their hands on more flowers.

And that continued into early 1637.

So you have about three years of this frenzy and then it collapsed suddenly because people just weren't able or willing to spend crazy prices on these tulips.

Everyone who had contracts panicked and tried to sell up.

And of course, that pushed the price down even further.

Now, all of this happened kind of on the fringes of the Dutch economy, so it didn't really have an impact on the country as a whole.

But a lot of people did ultimately lose a lot of money because they were holding these expensive contracts for flowers that just weren't worth anything like what they paid for them.

Yeah, some will remember the Cabbage Patch dolls, which blew up in popularity in the early 1980s.

The fact that they weren't made to look like other dolls or human babies seemed to be part of the appeal.