There is a kind of day that always stops me when I work on this almanac. The day someone does something too well, and after it the world is never the same again. August 22, 1851 is one of those days. Off the coast of the Isle of Wight, in the open regatta of the Royal Yacht Squadron, the New York Yacht Club’s boat, the schooner America, shredded the British fleet in a 53-mile race. Fourteen British yachts started, and America won with such ease that when Queen Victoria, watching from her royal yacht, asked who was second, her attendant answered: “Your Majesty, there is no second.”
America was a 101-foot (roughly 31 meter) schooner, designed by George Steers and built by William H. Brown in New York, with a bold clipper bow and steeply raked masts. The prize was a two-foot-tall silver ewer, the Hundred Guinea Cup, which the Royal Yacht Squadron itself described as a “Cup of One Hundred Sovereigns”, a trophy worth about 100 pounds. America finished 22 minutes ahead of the second-place cutter Aurora, and nearly an hour ahead of the third-place Bacchante. In 1857 the syndicate that owned the boat, led by Commodore John Cox Stevens, donated the trophy to the New York Yacht Club under a Deed of Gift. That was the birth of the America’s Cup, the oldest still-active international trophy in sport, predating the modern Olympics by 45 years. The United States defended it for 132 years, until Australia II finally won it in 1983.
I work in software, not sailing. But I know the feeling: something that used to be background suddenly takes over the whole environment, and there is no going back. That is exactly the bridge to tonight’s film.
