-
- Jay
Telfer may have handed over the reigns of the Wayback Times to
Sandy and Peter Neilly, but he is still going to be visible in
the newspaper.
-
- The
longtime resident of Prince Edward County will be writing Jay's
Blog, a column on his ongoing love of antiques and life in the
Quinte Bay area.
-
- Jay's
Wayback Times, founded in 1995, published 1.7 million papers
in 11 years and more than 258,000 kms
- were
traveled for visits
- and
deliveries to antique
shows, stores and markets.
-
- Jay
Telfer's final issue
|
|
|
- Ad Rates / Articles
/ Classified Ads / Editorial
/ Home / Links
/ Showtime
-
- Jay's Wayback Blog
- About lives, then
and now
-
- By Jay Telfer
- The reasons why some Chinese
merchants from 2500 BC are paying for my sadly damaged VW.
-
- Insurance is gambling. It is
a highly reformed bit of “average” gambling, but you
pay money to make sure that your house is not blown away.
-
- In the 2nd and 3rd millennia
BC, Chinese merchants traveling treacherous river rapids would
redistribute their wares across many boats to limit the loss
due to capsizing.
-
- The Babylonians developed a
system which was written in the famous Code of Hammurabi, c.
1750 BC, and practiced by early Mediterranean sailing merchants.
If a trader received a loan to fund his shipment, he would pay
the lender an additional sum in exchange for the lender's guarantee
to cancel the loan should the shipment be stolen.
-
- Achaemenian (Iranian) monarchs
were the first to insure their people and made it official by
registering the insuring process in governmental notary offices.
The insurance tradition was performed each year in Norouz (beginning
of the Iranian New Year.) The heads of different ethnic groups
as well as others willing to take part, presented gifts to the
monarch. The most important gift was presented during a special
ceremony and when a gift was worth more than 10,000 Derrik -
an Achaemenian gold coin - the gift was registered in a special
office. This was a relief to those presented such special gifts.
For others, the presents were fairly assessed by confidants of
the court. Then the assessment/gift was registered in special
offices.
-
- Having a gift registered by
the court meant that if the owner was in some kind of trouble
and had a registered gift, the monarch and the court would help
him or her. Jahez, an historian and writer, writes in one of
his books on ancient Iran: "... and whenever the owner of
the present is in trouble, or wants to construct a building,
set up a feast, have his children married, etc., the one in charge
of this in the court would check the registration. If the registered
amount exceeded 10,000 Derrik, he or she would receive an amount
of twice as much."
-
- A thousand years later, the
people of Rhodes invented the concept of the 'general average.'
Merchants whose goods were being shipped together would pay a
proportionally divided premium which would be used to reimburse
any merchant whose goods were jettisoned during storm or sinkage.
-
- The Greeks and Romans introduced
the origins of health and life insurance c. 600 AD when they
organized guilds called "benevolent societies" which
acted to care for the families and funeral expenses of members
upon their death. Guilds in the Middle Ages served a similar
purpose. The Talmud deals with several aspects of insuring goods.
Before insurance was established in the late 17th century, "friendly
societies" existed in England, in which people donated amounts
of money to a general sum that could be used in case of emergency.
-
- Separate insurance contracts
(i.e. insurance policies not gathered up with loans or other
kinds of contracts) were invented in Genoa in the 14th century,
as were insurance pools backed by pledges of landed estates.
These new insurance contracts allowed insurance to be separated
from investment, a separation of roles that first proved useful
in marine insurance.
- Insurance became far more sophisticated
in post-Renaissance Europe, and specialized varieties developed.
-
- In the late 1680's, Mr. Edward
Lloyd opened a coffee house, which became a popular haunt
of ship owners, merchants and ships’ captains, and thereby
a reliable source of the latest shipping news. It became the
meeting place for parties wishing to insure cargoes and ships,
and those willing to underwrite such ventures.
-
- Today, Lloyd's of London remains
the leading market for marine and other specialist types of insurance,
but it works rather differently than the more familiar kinds
of insurance.
-
- Insurance policies, as everybody
knows them today, can be traced to the Great Fire of London,
which in 1666 devoured 13,200 houses. In the aftermath of this
disaster, Nicholas Barbon opened an office to insure buildings.
In 1680, he established England's first fire insurance company,
"The Fire Office," to insure brick and frame homes.
-
- In 1732, the first insurance
company in the U.S. provided fire insurance and was created in
Charles Town (modern-day Charleston), South Carolina.
-
- Benjamin Franklin was instrumental in popularizing and
making standard the practice of insurance, mainly against fire
in the form of perpetual insurance. In 1752, he founded the “Philadelphia
Contributionship for the Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire.”
Quite the title. If you were insured, the house could be burnt
down simply by telling the firemen the name of your insurance!
-
- Franklin's company was the first
to make contributions toward fire prevention. Not only did his
company warn against certain fire hazards, it refused to insure
certain buildings where the risk of fire was too great, such
as all wooden houses. And thus began the great “general
averaging.”
-
- With the devastation of Hurricane
Katrina, and the multiple problems that policy holders have gone
through, I read that there were still insurance cases brought
to court 20 years after the San Francisco earthquake in 1906.
-
- While reading more on the history
of Insurance, I learned that in 1901, Swiss Re was the first
company to take up Motor Third Party Liability reinsurance business.
-
- I discovered that the first
motor car accident in Toronto happened in 1905, when a car ran
into a pedestrian brick light standard on Glen Street in Rosedale.
-
- I remember reading an article
in Toronto in 1980 that a policy still existed on fire prevention;
that every house in the city was to have a ladder, a bucket of
cold water and a bucket of sand. All this was due to the 1904
Toronto Fire in the business district.
-
- What we did on July 29, 2006
- Myself and Cindy, my wife, decided
to go out for lunch. It looked like it might rain, so we stored
all the pool cushions into the container. We backed out at 1:10
pm, and it began spitting, and I said, “good, it will fill
up the wells” (one of which had run dry) and fill up the
pool.
-
 At
1:12 p.m., we were two kilometres down Rednersville Road and
we were in one of the worst storms ever - we could not see a
thing for the deluge from the north. Trees were flying on by.
-
- Approaching Hwy 62, there was
a tree across the road and I could not go over it. So, I put
the car in reverse, turned my head to the right, backed up, and
.... the second tree hit us.
-
- Cindy shouted, (worried about
my heart) "ARE YOU OKAY!" I was fine, save for three
minor scratches on my arm. The window had been broken and in
two seconds, the rain had doused my clothes where I sat. Cindy
screamed at me to get out of the car so I climbed out her side,
over the glass, and we ran into the "hurricane" and
took shelter under the Water Treatment Store on the north side
of the road. We waited there until the noisy storm shut itself
down. While waiting, Cindy approached a van (completely sodden
herself) and asked the driver if she could sit inside to call
the police on her cell phone, without all the storm noise.
-
- About 1:20 p.m., the storm had
stopped, the weather had cleared, the sun was shining and the
sky was blue. The storm was described as a micro-burst.
-
- The car looked very bad. There
were dings on the two passenger doors, the roof, both roof pillars,
the hood and my bug deflector. The side window was gone, as well
as the front window and the radio wouldn't work. I loved that
car.
-
- After giving police the information
about me running into a pedestrian tree, we left for home and
got there at 2:45 p.m., after covering only 5 kms.
-
- Cindy told me to take off my
clothes in the garage. (She's sometimes like that.) She found
glass in my shirt, glass inside my pants, my hair and some in
my sopping wet socks. The worst of it was in my shorts and if
questioned further by the police, it might have looked like I'd
been smuggling diamonds.
-
- Cindy and I both agreed; if
I had turned my head to the left, I would have had a face full
of glass. We know one of us would have been killed if we had
been driving Cindy's convertible Thunderbird - even with the
top up. (As my friend called it afterward, a "Tree-Bird.")
-
 Oh yes,
I‘d had $400 in my pocket to pay the contractor to finish
off all the rest of our rental house painting. It was as wet
as the rest of me. Thus, the laundering of money.
-
- Cindy made up a nice bacon and
egg lunch and then we both had a lovely nap - with no nasty dreams
about our great day.
-
- I think of the Red-River wagon
trains a hundred plus years back and what might have happened
to them in a storm of that nature. With trees flying and the
wind whipping off the top of the wagon, boxes would have been
blown off and much of their china and glass shattered. Wheels
might have been stuck in the mud ... there would be no insurance,
just the remains of what they had brought with them from the
old country, wherever that might have been. It would probably
have taken them a couple of days to get back on the road.
-
- In comparison, today we are
so fortunate. The insurance company will pay up with my $500
deductible. The police had arrived at the scene in about 45 minutes
- despite falling trees, downed hydro lines, car accidents, fires,
etc. We told them we were both uninjured and we could wait. We
were insured.
-
- After the entire ordeal, we
were back home in an hour and a half. I might have been pining
for my VW for a week, but the car survived. It’s hard to
believe that all this happened because of a 10-minute micro burst.
-
Other articles by Jay Telfer
-
-
|
-
-
- Return to
top of page
-
- This Is Livin' Publishing
© 2007
- 581 8th Line West, RR1
Hastings, ON, K0L 1Y0
- Phone/Fax: 705-696-1833
-
- webmaster
|
|