Of course everyone on Steemit is aware of the current Cryptocurrency mania (with Steem prices having gone up 300% in the past month, it's been hard to miss), and it mirrors one of the earliest known financial manias: Tulipmania. But what's astounding, is that Tulipmania was actually caused by an infectious disease. Could an infection really have made people mad for tulips? Could crypocurrency mania be an infectious epidemic too?

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons By Hisa Fujimoto

What Was Tulipmania

In case you haven't heard of Tulipmania, it's a lot like it sounds; people going crazy for tulips! People went SO crazy for tulips that, at its height, the highest confirmed price of a single bulb of the most prized specimen sold for 5200 Dutch guilders. At the time, Dutch guilders were real money, being comprised of 0.77 grams of gold per guilder, incidentally making it the soundest money in the world, which attracted to Holland the wealth that allowed the disposable income Tulipmania required ^(1).

This means the total amount of gold for a single sale of one bulb was 128 troy ounces, or what would be about $166,656 with the price of spot gold at $1302/troy ounce on January 1, 2018! Absolutely incredible! A year after the mania began, tulip prices had crashed to pre-mania levels, and have been a mainstay of Dutch culture ever since.

A Bit of Background on Tulipmania

Tulipmania started after a botanist brought some Tulip specimens back to Austria with him from their native home in the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey), and sold some to a rich Dutchman named Dr. Adriaen Pauw. Pauw, the director of the East India Company, often showed off his dozen or so specimens of Semper Augustus varietals, virtually the only specimens of this varietal in the world, to guests at his estate near Haarlem in Holland ⁽²⁾. When people offered higher and higher prices to buy the bulbs, his refusal to sell at any price is the purported spark for the ensuing financial mania.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In the small cramped gardens of the Dutch city dwellers, a boastful owner of a costly specimen might have a single flower as the centerpiece of the entire garden, and grace it with mirrors to multiply and amplify it's beauty.

Tulips were so desirable that, when that year's specimens went into the ground, people began financial speculation for first rights on the bulbs when they came out of the ground, just as futures traders might do today for corn and soy. But these were FLOWERS, what could cause this madness for just a flower?

Broken Tulips Fueled the Fire

One of the reasons for the mania of particular tulips was their rarity. For reasons unknown at the time, about 1 in 100 flowers would depart from the normal solid candy colored brilliance we are familiar with, and become variegated with colored streaks, an occurrence known as 'breaking'.

"[The Semper Augustus tulip] is white with carmine on a
blue base, and with an unbroken flame right to the top.
Never did a Blommist see a more beautiful one than
this: no Tulip has ever been in greater esteem."
Nicolaes van Wassenaer. 1624

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons.
This tulip is what caused an entire financial bubble.
Would you have chosen this single flower, or a luxury house on the canal?

Some of the most beautiful and prized flowers were streaked even to the point of wild party dress and flaming patterns, like the Semper Augustus pictured above in a drawing from the time. These broken tulips could not be predicted, but because of their extreme beauty and rarity, became the most prized of all the tulips on the market.

What About the Infectious Disease

What tulipmaniacs could not have known at the time, but was finally discovered in 1927 by Dorothy Cayley of the John Innes Horticultural Institution in Norfolk, England, was that tulip breaking was caused by bulbs becoming infected with a virus carried by an aphid (Myzus persicae) ⁽³⁾ that commonly infests peach trees!

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The green peach aphid unknowingly helped to start the biggest financial bubble of all time.

The Tulip Breaking Virus (TBV) works by damaging the cells that produce pigments called anthocyanins. When these color producing cells are suppressed, the underlying white or yellow color of the photosynethic producing plant tissue, known as the mesophyll, show through in the streaky variegated patterns the Dutch went mad for ⁽⁴⁾.

"And this also I have observed, that any tulip thus changing
its original colour is usually ruined afterwards and wanted only to
delight its master's eyes with this variety of colours before dying,
as if to bid him a last farewell."
Carolus Clusius, A Treatise on Tulips (1601)

While the broken tulip's offspring would also have the beautiful variegation, in a tragic irony that fueled the flower market even more, the disease that caused the tulip's great beauty also caused it to weaken and shorten its generational life, only allowing a small and finite number of the most prized tulips to ever be cultivated.

While Tulipmania was caused by a communicable disease, this virus does not infect humans, so we can all be secure in knowing that Crypomania is almost certainly not caused by a communicable disease, or at least not the same disease that caused flowers to become worth more than gold, jewelry, and real estate in the 1600's, but Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is a mysterious concept we are still not exactly sure of the cause.

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