The Man Who Collected the World by the Ton

Sir Henry Wellcome built one of the largest pharmaceutical empires of the Victorian age. He coined the word "Tabloid." He supplied medicine chests to royalty and polar explorers. He funded research that would eventually produce Nobel laureates. By the time of his death in 1936, his company was on its way to becoming GlaxoSmithKline.

He also collected things.

He collected Napoleon's toothbrush. He collected Darwin's walking stick. He collected shrunken heads, 17,500 amulets, fragments of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and a preserved piece of William Burke's brain. He instructed his agents to ransack pawn shops, blacksmith shops, and rag-and-bone dealers across four continents. "Priests can do much for you," he advised. In some years his spending on acquisitions exceeded the British Museum's.

The collection eventually outgrew any method of counting individual objects. Staff took to describing its contents by the ton.

At the time of his death, the collection was estimated at five times the size of the Louvre's holdings. Virtually none of it was on display. Most of it sat in 12,000 packing cases across eight London warehouses, wrapped in old newspaper, uncatalogued. The principal storage facility in Willesden was wedged between a tannery and an anchovy essence factory. One imagines Fridays were particularly atmospheric.

The cleanup required twenty-seven auctions. Five tons of photograph albums were scrapped. Six tons of weapons were carted off. Three tons of safe doors.

Wellcome never stopped buying.