Moody's point of view

In 1807, Portland, Maine, was home to a smart guy named Lemuel Moody. I'm calling him smart because he figured out how to make a lot of money off something that other people shrugged off as just an inconvenience of life in Portland. Life was a little inconvenient in those days for area residents, particularly for local merchants, because the topography of the Portland peninsula blocked everybody's view of approaching maritime traffic until the ships were all the way into the harbor and pulling up at the wharves. In other ports, where ships could be seen long before they actually docked, merchants could get their wagons down to the water and unload cargo as soon as it arrived. In Portland, ships would pull up to the wharves and sit and wait while the merchants got ready to receive their cargo. Time was wasted.

Moody made money off the merchants' impatience by taking advantage of another feature of Portland topography--a hill just beyond the harbor, with a cow pasture on top. He built a 70-foot tower in Munjoy's pasture, called the Portland Observatory, which offered a vew far out to sea and across the entire downtown part of the city. He set up a telescope in the top of the tower, which made it possible to identify particular ships while they were still far outside the harbor. Merchants could subscribe to his services for an annual fee. Moody would climb the tower every hour or so to check for ships; when he saw a vessel of interest to a subscribing merchant, he would raise that merchant's flag on the tower. The merchants, in order to get their money's worth, would have to keep stepping outside their establishments and looking up the hill to check for flags. They evidently decided that the inconvenience of paying an annual fee and then repeatedly checking for a flag was less onerous than the inconvenience of being surprised by a ship's arrival.

The business model must have been a good one, because the Portland Observatory stayed in business for more than a hundred years, until the telescope was stolen in 1939.

The b&w picture shows the tower in 1936. The color picture is evolved from what Ted and I saw of downtown Portland (looking away from the harbor) when we went up in the tower in August 2008.