Welcome back to A Little Wiser. A quick word on The Athenaeum before today's lessons, because another partner has just come on board!

When the doors open, every member will unlock a full year of free membership to World History Encyclopedia - the trusted reference used by millions of students, teachers, and history enthusiasts every month. Your twelve months include:

✦ An ad-free experience across the entire World History Encyclopedia site
✦ World History Insider, their monthly digital magazine, plus the full back-catalogue
✦ Monthly video lectures from historians, again with the entire back-catalogue to explore

We’ll have plenty more to share when the doors open. Until then, today's wisdom explores:

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Newton and the South Sea Bubble
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The Only Unsolved Skyjacking
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The Impossible Journey of the Salmon
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Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

In the early 18th century, Britain was drowning in debt from decades of war, and a joint-stock company promised a dazzling way out. The South Sea Company was founded in 1711, and in exchange for taking on a huge chunk of the government's national debt, it was granted a monopoly on British trade with the Spanish colonies of South America. The promise was intoxicating, since the slave trade and the riches of the New World had made vast fortunes over the previous two centuries. Investors imagined an endless flow of gold and silver. The reality was far shabbier, because Spain, still a rival power, permitted Britain only a trickle of trade and even took a cut of the profits. The company's actual business was almost negligible, yet this inconvenient fact was buried beneath the glamour of the story.

Then came 1720, the year the madness took hold. The share price began the year at around £128, and through a mix of clever promotion, political bribery, and pure collective delusion, it caught fire. As the well-connected made visible fortunes on paper, ordinary people scrambled to buy in, terrified of missing out, and the price rocketed past £1,000 by August, an eightfold rise in months. It was in this year that the word "bubble" was first attached to a soaring stock. Among the eager investors was Sir Isaac Newton, then Master of the Royal Mint and the most brilliant scientific mind alive. Newton bought in early and, sensibly, sold in April with a tidy profit of around £7,000. Had the story ended there, he would have been remembered as a shrewd investor. It did not end there.

The bubble burst in September 1720, as insiders quietly cashed out and confidence collapsed with stunning speed. Investors who had bought on borrowed money found themselves unable to repay their loans, panic swept through London, and by December the shares had crashed back to around £124, roughly where they had begun the year. Thousands were ruined, banks failed, suicides rose, and public fury forced Parliament into an investigation that exposed deep corruption reaching into the government itself, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer imprisoned. Newton was among the casualties. Having taken his early profit, he watched the price keep climbing and, unable to bear the sight of others growing rich, plunged back in near the very peak, then rode the stock all the way down. He lost around £20,000, a sum worth millions today, and the loss pained him so deeply that he could reportedly not bear to hear the company's name spoken for the rest of his life. He is said to have summed up the whole affair in a single rueful line, that he could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people. It remains the perfect epitaph for every bubble since, a reminder that raw intelligence offers no protection at all against the oldest force in finance, which is the fear of watching your neighbour get rich without you.

On the afternoon of 24 November 1971, a quiet, nondescript man in a dark business suit and black tie approached the Northwest Orient counter in Portland, Oregon, and paid cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle. He gave his name as Dan Cooper, and a press mix-up later mangled it into the name that would become legend, D.B. Cooper. He looked utterly ordinary, a man in his mid-forties, and once aboard Flight 305 he calmly ordered a bourbon and soda. Shortly after take-off he handed a note to a flight attendant named Florence Schaffner, who slipped it unread into her pocket, assuming it was a lonely businessman's phone number. He leaned over and murmured that she had better look at it. The note claimed he had a bomb, and when he opened his briefcase to show her a glimpse of wires and red sticks, the most famous unsolved crime in aviation history was underway.

Cooper was chillingly composed and professional throughout. He demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes, and when the plane landed in Seattle, authorities handed it over in a bag of 10,000 twenty-dollar bills. True to his word, he released all 35 passengers and most of the crew, keeping only enough people to fly the plane onward toward Mexico. Somewhere over the dark, freezing wilderness of southwestern Washington, at around eight o'clock that night, Cooper lowered the aircraft's rear staircase. With the ransom strapped to his body, he stepped out into a thunderstorm and disappeared. When the plane landed in Reno, the back stairs were down, and Cooper, the money, and two parachutes were simply gone. He was never reliably seen again.

The FBI launched one of the most exhaustive investigations in its history eventually weighing more than 800 suspects over 45 years without ever proving the identity of a single one. Cooper had been oddly careful, taking his bomb note back from the flight attendant, though he left behind a clip-on tie, some cigarette butts, and a few hairs, none of which yielded a usable fingerprint. For nine years there was nothing at all, until in February 1980 an eight-year-old boy named Brian Ingram, smoothing sand for a campfire on the bank of the Columbia River, unearthed three rotting bundles of twenty-dollar bills bound with rubber bands. The serial numbers matched the ransom exactly, and to this day that $5,800 is the only physical trace of the money ever found. Theories have never stopped multiplying, the strongest pointing to a copycat hijacker named Richard McCoy who pulled off a near-identical stunt months later and died in an FBI shootout, though the Bureau could never confirm it. No one knows who Cooper was, whether he spent the money, or even whether he survived the jump into that stormy night. He is the only person ever to hijack a commercial airliner in America and get away with it.

Few life stories in nature are as improbable as that of the salmon, a fish that is born in freshwater, grows up in the salt of the open ocean, and then, years later, fights its way back to the exact stream where it hatched to breed and die. Salmon are what biologists call anadromous, meaning they cross between two utterly different worlds, and doing so requires a wholesale rebuilding of the body. A young salmon hatches in a river or stream, spends its early life there, and then undergoes a dramatic transformation called smoltification, in which hormonal changes completely rewire its ability to regulate salt so that it can survive in the sea. It then rides the current downstream to the ocean. Here it will roam for years, feeding and building the muscle it will need for the ordeal to come. When the urge to reproduce finally seizes it, the salmon turns for home, sometimes from thousands of miles away.

How it finds that home is one of the great marvels of animal navigation, and it works in two distinct stages. For the vast open-ocean crossing, salmon appear to rely on the Earth's magnetic field, imprinting as juveniles on the unique magnetic signature of their home coastline and using that internal map to steer back to the right stretch of coast years later. Scientists have found that tampering with the magnetic field around salmon leaves them disoriented, and that natural drifts in the field subtly shift the routes returning fish take. The second stage is even more astonishing, because once a salmon nears the coast, it switches to its extraordinary sense of smell. As a youngster leaving home, it memorised the precise chemical scent of its native stream (a particular blend of minerals, sediment, and dissolved compounds). Following the faint scent trail upstream, it can distinguish its own birth stream from countless others.

The final leg is a punishing, one-way race against death. On entering freshwater, most salmon stop eating entirely, committing every last reserve of energy to the journey ahead. They hurl themselves upstream against powerful currents, leaping waterfalls and dodging predators like the waiting bears for which the salmon run is such a feast. Their bodies change grotesquely along the way, shifting colour. By the time they reach the gravel beds where they were born, they are battered, starving, and quite literally rotting alive, which has earned the exhausted survivors the grim nickname of "zombie salmon." There the females dig nests and lay their eggs, the males fertilise them, and then, for all five species of Pacific salmon, the story ends the same way. Having spent everything to get home, they die within days, their carcasses feeding eagles, bears, and the very river itself, enriching the water with ocean nutrients that will nourish the next generation about to hatch in the same gravel.

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The A Little Wiser Team