Model 1896 McClellan saddle rig, complete with the saddlebags, lariat, and carbine boot for a Krag carbine, estimated to sell for $3,000-$4,000. Image courtesy Cowan’s Auctions. Collectors of relics from American history, especially those interested in American militaria, may find a unique collecting opportunity in the accoutrements associated with the U.S. Cavalry. The scope of collecting in this field is large and can include flags, headgear, uniforms, firearms and sabers. The Cavalry is synonymous with the horse, and just collecting saddle-related items is a large category of interest in itself. The Indian Wars era (1866-1898) was the high point in the history of the U.S. Cavalry, and collectors compete enthusiastically for items from that period.
The U.S. military suppliers were obviously required make items that we commonly associate with the Cavalry, such as saddles, stirrups and bits. However, the suppliers also needed to make peripheral items, to be used during the campaigns, which attached to the saddles. Even today, many of these items are available in the market for collectors who are seeking them.
Indeed, when one looks at a historic military saddle on display in a museum, one may at first be bewildered by all of the articles that go with the saddle; there seems to be an excess of arcane objects hanging from it. For a collector with a modest budget, these “peripheral” items allow him to accumulate separate objects that can be used to create a complete “rig,” just the way the saddle would have looked while in use more than 100 years ago.
Attached to the sides of the saddles would be conveyance items such as saddle bags for carrying provisions, saddle holsters, saddle scabbards, and carbine boots. A collector should look for the “U.S.” stamping on the leather that is proof that the item was U.S. military issue. Other more esoteric items include picket pins, tent covers, rain jackets, canteens and even lariats. Some of these may not have the “U.S.” markings, but would have been essential items for the soldiers.
Underneath the saddle, saddle blankets were used to protect the horse’s coat from constant rubbing. These blankets were usually made out of wool and sometimes would have the Cavalry unit’s designations on them. A “shabraque,” a cover designed to go over the saddle, is a rare accessory and were not in common use by the U.S. Cavalry. Gen. Robert E. Lee was presented a shabraque during the Civil War by the ladies of Richmond, Va. Lee, being a gracious man, accepted the gift, but used it only one time in his career, at a military review.
Behind the saddle, a valise would be attached for carrying provisions. The “Grimsley leather horseshoe pouch,” carrying a spare horseshoe and nails, was the “emergency roadside kit” of the day.
Cavalry accoutrements provide a range of material for everyone – from the novice to the sophisticated collector. For the beginning collector interested in American military history, they can be a unique and affordable niche on which to focus; having a goal of constructing a complete “rig” can be a fun lifelong pursuit.
Wes Cowan is founder and owner of Cowan’s Auctions Inc. in Cincinnati. An internationally recognized expert in historic Americana, Wes stars in the PBS television series History Detectives and is a featured appraiser on Antiques Roadshow. He can be reached via email at info@cowans.com. Research by Joe Moran.
ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE
M1885 leather U.S. saddlebags, displaying the U.S. stamp and maker’s name, sold for $633 in April 2009 at Cowan’s. Image courtesy Cowan’s Auctions. Two rifle scabbards sold as a single lot for $403 in November. Image courtesy Cowan’s Auctions. A 1908 service saddlecloth is estimated to sell for $500-$700. Image courtesy Cowan’s Auctions. Considered rare, a Civil War officer’s shabraque is estimated to bring $2,000-$3,000. Image courtesy Cowan’s Auctions. Cavalry officer’s saddle valise from the late Indian Wars is estimated to sell for $500-$700. Image courtesy Cowan’s Auctions.
Original polychrome paint highlights this one-cent Watling Treasury Bell slot machine from the mid-1930s. It sold for $2,100 plus premium in 2008. Image courtesy Cowan’s Auctions and LiveAuctioneers archive. COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) – An antique slot machine manufactured in Columbus sold this month for $37,500 at an auction in Las Vegas. Gus Snyder would probably marvel at such a payout.
In the 1920s and ’30s, he owned Superior Confection, a South Side company that made the machine.
If and when modern slot machines arrive in Columbus as a result of statewide ballot issues, they won’t exactly be entering virgin territory: Snyder was cranking them out 70 years ago.
“He operated a candy company,” said Phil Frey, a Dublin collector of antique slot machines who has researched Snyder. “Most machines back in the ’30s dispensed candy. That’s how they got around the law.”
The plan wasn’t foolproof: Snyder was eventually charged with evading $12,000 in income taxes.
The story, according to Frey, is that Snyder was unrepentant, saying at his trial, “I just want to tell you that it was a hell of a lot more than $12,000.”
He died in 1938 after undergoing appendix surgery in prison. His family had wanted the operation performed in a hospital.
Frey, who owns 17 vintage devices, has a few of Snyder’s machines on display in his house. Combined with a life-size cutout of Marilyn Monroe, a pool table and a couple of pinball machines, the slots give Frey’s basement a ’50s Rat Pack ambience.
He particularly likes Snyder’s Superior Confection machines.
“When everyone else was making boring, sedate machines, he painted them bright yellow.”
The slot machine as we know it was invented in about 1899 by Charles Fey of San Francisco, said David Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Mechanical poker machines already existed, but they couldn’t dispense jackpots. Winners had to wait for someone in the establishment to verify the win and distribute the money.
“The big prize is going to come to somebody who would invent a machine that automatically paid out,” Schwartz said.
Fey was the first to produce the classic slot machine with three spinning reels. When the right combination of symbols showed on the reels, it rewarded the player with instant cash.
Slot machines quickly spread throughout the country. To get around laws, many of them dispensed gum, mints or coupons good for fruit. That’s probably where the tradition of fruit symbols on the reels started, said Schwartz, who wrote Roll the Bones, a history of gambling.
The machines were common in bars, clubs, cigar stores and other places until 1951, when Congress passed a law that made transporting them across state lines illegal. That pretty much confined them to Nevada, where gambling was legal, said David Burritt of Colorado, who runs an online price guide for slot machine collectors.
Burritt, who owns 60 antique devices, said he once bought a dozen slot machines from an Eagles club in Wyoming that had hidden them in walls.
Mechanical machines began giving way to electronic devices in the 1970s. Now they’re mainly collector’s items.
Snyder was a minor player in slots manufacturing, making fewer than 1,000 machines, Burritt and Frey said. But that makes Snyder’s machines scarce, sometimes leading to high prices at auctions.
The machine that sold recently had a horse-race theme. The reels rotated horizontally instead of vertically so that the horses seem to be racing across the face of the device.
It’s rare, and the machine still works, as vintage ones tend to do, Burritt said.
“These things were built very, very well. They’re made out of steel. There’s no plastic, and the fact that they’re sealed up – so people couldn’t get into them – protects them from the elements.”
Slots were hot collectibles in the 1980s, but prices fell after that burst of interest, Burritt said. The market is segmented today: Common machines might go for as little as a few hundred to a few thousand dollars. The rarest and most desirable slots can sell for $200,000.
Frey, a salesman, became interested in mechanical slot machines after playing them on a trip to Las Vegas in 1968. He bought his first collectible machine in 1980. He taught himself how to repair them, so his home holds an array of slots that still dispense jackpots.
Ohio law allows people to own slot machines, but they can’t be used for gambling, Frey said. So when visitors want to play, he supplies them with the coins.
Frey’s vintage devices are the forebears of the electronic ones on the verge of entering Ohio legally. Ohio voters approved a casino for the Arena District of Columbus last year.
Ohio voters can also cast ballots in November on allowing slot machines at horse tracks.
Frey, who said his biggest jackpot in Las Vegas reached about $1,000, is glad that Columbus might soon have a casino.
“I might even suggest to them they might want to have a display of antique slot machines.”
___
Information from: The Columbus Dispatch, http://www.dispatch.com
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
AP-CS-03-28-10 1240EDT
ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE
Mills’ 1938 War Eagle is a classic mechanical slot machine. This 10-cent version sold for $2,500 plus auction premium in 2005. Image courtesy Morphy Auction and LiveAuctioneers archive. A nickel-plated front highlights this 25-cent Fancy Front Double-Jackpot slot machine by Pace. This 1940s mechanical slot sold for $2,500 plus premium in 2007. Image courtesy Clars Auction Gallery and LiveAuctioneers archive. Watling Scale Co., Chicago, produced the popular Rol-A-Top in the 1930s. This nickel slot machine sold for $1,600 plus premium last year. Image courtesy Bill Hood & Sons and LiveAuctioneers archive.
A soft-paste Sevres Waterleaf ewer and bowl, 1759-1769, is one of the stars in the ‘Sevres Then and Now’ exhibition at the Hillwood Museum in Washington, D.C., through May 30. Courtesy Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. “Widely imitated, rarely equaled” could easily be the motto for Sevres porcelain. Serious collectors began buying the exquisitely decorated forms shortly the French factory started production in 18th century. Enthusiasts continued to snap up examples for public and private collections throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. For connoisseurs with the best taste, Sevres was at the top of the ceramics collecting food chain.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Collectors can buy well-documented examples of Sevres at the best auctions and antiques fairs, but catalogs are filled with lots hedged by qualifying phrases such as “Sevres-style” or “in the fashion of Sevres.” Other French, European and English factories made quite similar wares, sometimes very fine in their own right. Hands-on experience and critical thinking are needed to sort out the real Sevres from the rest. Many collectors focus on period Sevres, but there are also wealthy buyers for showy late-19th-century porcelain that only pays stylistic tribute to the original French factory. Each to his own.
Truth be told, the European porcelain-making world of the mid-18th century was a battle of competitive copyists. When the French works – established at Vincennes in 1740, moved to Sevres in 1756 – began, the enterprise was most anxious to compete with the products of the Meissen factory in Germany. And Meissen had been desperately trying to reproduce the qualities of Chinese porcelain. Meanwhile, independent makers around Paris and factories across the channel in England geared up to challenge Sevres.
What makes collecting Sevres so compelling is its development of a unique style, determined by the texture of the porcelain and the creativity of its decorators. To better understand the development of Sevres in its first 100 years, plan a pilgrimage to one of the great collections. Queen Elizabeth II has the best, thanks to an acquisitive ancestor. “The Royal Collection boasts the finest collection of 18th-century Sevres porcelain in the world,” states the official guide. “It was largely formed by King George IV who began collecting when he came of age in 1783.”
George was not really buying “antiques” but new luxury goods ranging from useful table services to ornamental vases. What makes the collection so special was his selection of objects: “He liked the unusual and the rare, the exotic and the extravagant. He was not deterred by price.” While some pieces are on view in the State Rooms or Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace, see them all in French Porcelain in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen by Geoffrey de Bellaigue, issued by Royal Collection Publications in 2009. Although a hefty $1,000 for the three volumes, it will be a staple of ceramics reference libraries. More affordable from the same publisher, French Porcelain for English Palaces by Joanna Gwilt costs around $30.
The choice pieces in the Royal Collection include examples of both soft-paste and hard-paste porcelain. The factory experimented with different formulas when trying to achieve the right balance between beauty and durability. Sevres is celebrated for the vivid colored grounds applied to the forms – rose, green, lavender, dark and light blue, brick red. Reserved white areas contain delicate paintings of flora, fauna and scenery. Both table and decorative wares are lavishly accented with gold; gilding was a high art form at Sevres.
If you make the trek to London, see more 18th-century Sevres as well as Italian maiolica and other decorative arts at the Wallace Collection in Hereford House on Manchester Square, free of charge, seven days a week. Sevres, including the famous Service Egyptien. is also on display at Apsley House, the residence of the Dukes of Wellington on Hyde Park Corner. Time your visit to coincide with Art Antiques London, the successor of the long-running International Ceramics Fair, June 10-16. The show features an excellent lecture series on ceramics, including a talk on Sevres by the director of the Wallace Collection.
On this side of the Atlantic, view one woman’s personal collection of Sevres in the intimate setting of the Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens in Washington, D.C., once the residence of heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973), now a house museum. Sevres Porcelain at Hillwood by Liana Paredes, the museum’s Curator of Western Art, contains information on the formation of the collection and an outline of production at the factory. View publications available from the Museum Shop at www.hillwoodmuseum.org.
“What we have here is what Mrs. Post collected, and she really collected very prime examples of Sevres,” said Paredes. “She was a lover of porcelain and she gave it a lot of exhibit room in the house. She made it one of her primary collecting areas. This is a private home with specifically designed spaces to showcase porcelain.”
Paredes organized the current exhibition, Sevres Then and Now: Tradition and Innovation in Porcelain, 1750-2000, which runs through May 30. The show brings together more than 90 objects from the collection and numerous lenders including the Smithsonian and the Musee National de Ceramique at Sevres, France. As the title promises, the exhibition and its accompanying catalog covers the entire history of Sevres production. The curator said, “This is the biggest loan show that Hillwood has ever done. It was quite a bit of work for an institution our size and a great collaborative effort.”
Paredes stressed that Sevres was always in the vanguard of style: “While previous museum exhibitions have focused on a particular period or century of production, this exhibition will be the first to reveal the sustained creativity and unparalleled innovation that unifies the factory’s output over time, from its inception in 1740 all the way into the 21st century.”
Among her favorite pieces in the show, Paredes points out a Waterleaf ewer and bowl, 1759-1760, which she calls “an explosion of Rococo design.” From the 19th century, she cites the tea and coffee set decorated with almost photographic views of Egypt that Napoleon presented to the duchesse de Montebello, 1810-1812. She said, “It speaks to the connection of Sevres with the politics of the moment and the main historic events of the time.”
Most viewers will be less familiar with the 20th-century material. A pair of plates made in 1913, which depict characters from the Russian ballet, was spotted by Paredes at an antiques fair in London and secured for Hillwood’s permanent collection. From recent production, the curator likes the boldly geometric Reform vase, a 1995 work in soft-paste by artist Richard Peduzzi with facets of bright contrasting color.
Collectors just beginning to enter the Sevres market rely on offerings from reputable dealers and auction houses, which take pains to accurately describe porcelain offered for sale. In any given sale of French porcelain, the offerings will distinguish between well-documented genuine Sevres pieces, items “in the Sevres style,” Sevres-type forms with “spurious” marks, and lots described as “later-decorated.”
In the first half of the 19th century, the Sevres factory sold off undecorated, often-outdated porcelain blanks from their warehouse to raise cash. As Liana Paredes explained in a catalog chapter called “A Word About Fakes,” “Decorators and dealers bought these blanks by the wagonload and proceeded to decorate them in the Sevres manner, often giving them spurious marks to deceive the public even further. … As early as the 1840s confusion between real Sevres pieces and counterfeits was well established.”
As curator for Decorative Arts at the New Orleans Museum of Art and as the porcelain cataloger for the New Orleans Auction Galleries, John Keefe faces the yes, no and maybe of Sevres production every day. He explains the problem with these “later-decorated” blanks: “Although they were plain white, they were marked – and the buyers had their top decorators paint them. Some of the painted designs are fabulous – you’re really hard-pressed sometimes to distinguish them from the originals. But when someone is doing that kind of copying, inevitably the taste of the era doing the copying gets in.” For example, real 18th-century Sevres birds differ slightly from those painted by the fakers in the 19th century, and it takes considerable experience to tell them apart.
Supply struggled to keep up with the growing demand for this imitation French porcelain. Keefe says, “These pieces getting out on the English market and the American market and the antiquarian market started what I call the ‘robber baron’ taste for Sevres. Everybody who had any pretension to high fashion wanted Sevres porcelain, particularly in this country.
“Then you have the Bohemian factories – clever boys that they were – making those things that I catalog as ‘Sevres style.’ Those great big covered vases with the gilt brass or bronze mounts decorated with portraits of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI and Madame Pompadour and Napoleon I. There was that enormous late-19th-century craze for it, and everybody who had an entrepreneurial instinct started to produce that stuff.”
Keefe was fortunate enough to catalog a group of fine Sevres lots for the January and March sales in New Orleans that had an impeccable provenance. They bore small handwritten labels that the curator traced back to the owner of the Antique Porcelain Co. in London, founded in 1946. These objects from an anonymous consignor also bore labels indicating that they had once belonged to well-known collectors Leo and Doris Hodroff, who had probably acquired them from the London dealer.
One of the pieces, a Sevres covered bowl, or ecuelle, with its underplate sold for $2,280 in January at the New Orleans Auction Galleries. Bearing the date letter for 1767, the porcelain set was decorated with panels of putti against an aqua and dark blue ground. Keefe says, “A lot of good stuff is still flowing through this part of the world.”
ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE
On display in the ‘Sevres Then and Now’ exhibition, this covered cup and saucer from a tea service displays a combination of green and pink grounds fashionable when it was made in 1759-1760. Courtesy Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. On display in the ‘Sevres Then and Now’ exhibition, this covered cup and saucer from a tea service displays a combination of green and pink grounds fashionable when it was made in 1759-1760. Courtesy Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. The exhibition ‘Sevres Then and Now: Tradition and Innovation in Porcelain, 1750-2000’ runs through May 30 at the Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens in Washington, D.C. The catalog by Liana Paredes, senior curator, is an important reference for collectors. Courtesy Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens. This Sevres covered bowl and underplate decorated with putti bears the date letter for 1767. The porcelain set, which once belonged to ceramics collectors Leo and Doris Hodroff, sold for $2,280 at the New Orleans Auction Galleries in January. Courtesy New Orleans Auction Galleries. Sevres began making their famous pink ground in the mid-18th century. These squared bowls with flowers and birds date to around 1790. Ex-Hodroff Collection, the pair sold for $1,140 in January. Courtesy New Orleans Auction Galleries. Small covered cups, referred to as pots a jus or pots a crème, were part of large Sevres dinner services. This 1768 pair with blue celeste ground and painted cherubs, also ex- Hodroff Collection, brought $1,020 at the New Orleans Auction Galleries sale in January. Courtesy New Orleans Auction Galleries. This elegant footed cup and saucer made at Sevres has a blue celeste ground and reserves painted with flowers and birds. The lot sold in New Orleans on March 27 for $420. Courtesy New Orleans Auction Galleries. International demand continues for ornate objects decorated with Sevres-style porcelain, and they command high prices. This gilt bronze clock with a portrait of Louis XVI, second half of the 19th century, sold at a Leslie Hindman auction in January for $31,720. Courtesy Leslie Hindman Auctions, Chicago. A circular table, or gueridon, ornamented with gilt metal attachments and inset Sevres-style portrait medallions, was sold by Leslie Hindman in January for $20,740. Courtesy Leslie Hindman Auctions, Chicago.
A reconstruction of the iberomesornis (of the extinct Enanthiornithes family) housed in the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, 2007 photo by José-Manuel Benito Álvarez.
FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) – Amateur paleontologist Kris Howe, 34, was just doing what he learned as a 5-year-old from his father, a fossil collector. But his recent discovery is being hailed as one of the most significant in years.
On a fossil hunt near the dam spillway at Lake Grapevine, Howe happened upon four bones that two Dallas scientists say are the oldest bird fossils found in North America.
“My first thought was, ‘Wow, that’s pretty cool looking. I wish I knew what it was,”’ Howe said of spotting the arrangement of fossils poking out from the ground, each “within centimeters” of the others.
“It was an excitement that started with (Howe) and cascaded from there,” said scientist Tony Fiorillo, curator of earth sciences for the Dallas Museum of Nature and Science.
The fossilized bones are about 96 million years old and from a previously undiscovered species of flightless, carnivorous bird that probably resembled a modern roadrunner, museum paleontologist Ron Tykoski said at a news conference earlier this month to announce the discovery.
The largest fossil, a shoulder blade, measured about 2.5 inches. Fused metacarpals, or hand bones, suggested the bird had claws, and therefore teeth, to feed on other creatures in this region, a coastal area in that time.
A section of lower leg bone was also found. Another bone could not be positively identified because of its poor condition, but the scientists speculate it could be a part of the bird’s upper wing.
Together, the fossils are “reminiscent of what you might find in the bottom of a KFC bucket,” Fiorillo said. But they help close a gap in the evolutionary timeline of prehistoric birds, Tykoski said.
Howe’s discovery “extends the North American record of Enantiornithes back by approximately 10 million years,” the scientists said in an academic article published in the current issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Enantiornithes are a group of primitive birds that also roamed Asia, Europe and South America, where more complete skeletons from 120 million to 130 million years ago have been found. Paleontologists had believed the birds arrived in North America about 65 million to 85 million years ago.
Fiorillo said the discovery is a “best-case scenario.” Because of his experience collecting fossils, Howe, of Carrollton, was able to spot the bones and enlist Fiorillo and Tykoski’s help in identifying them before erosion washed them away. To the untrained eye, Howe said, each fossil would have looked “like just a lump of rock.”
Fiorillo and Tykoski named the new bird species Flexomornis howei in honor of Howe.
The fossils are the latest in a series of finds near the lake.
In 2006, fossils from a Columbian mammoth, including a jawbone and parts of a tusk, were found along the receding shores of the lake.
In 2005, fossilized dinosaur tracks in sandstone bedrock, first found in 1989, were rediscovered when lake levels dropped. But shortly after word of the discovery became public, someone stole two of the footprints, estimated to be 96 million years old, and damaged another print. In response, the Army Corps of Engineers filled the prints with clay, dirt and rocks so they wouldn’t be visible.
Other fossils have also been discovered around the lake, including tracks from a meat-eating dinosaur and a smaller, birdlike dinosaur found in 1982.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
BEIJING (AP) – Disruptions suffered by Google Inc.’s Chinese search service show how vulnerable it remains to the country’s Internet police _ a threat industry executives said is likely to drive users and advertisers in the mainland away.
Though service resumed Wednesday, many users inside China were unable to search anything for the latter part of Tuesday. Google initially said it was an in-house technical problem but later shifted its explanation, blaming the “Great Firewall” _ the nickname for the network of filters that keep mainland Web surfers from accessing material the government deems sensitive.
Whatever the reason, the outage reaffirmed suspicions that China’s government would settle scores after a public dispute over censorship prompted Google to shut its mainland-based search engine and move the service to the freer Chinese territory of Hong Kong last week.
“People are going ‘Uh-oh, it’s begun,”’ said T.R. Harrington, chief executive of Shanghai-based Darwin Marketing, which specializes in advertising for China’s search engine market. “People just have an expectation that there’s going to be some problems based on how Google decided to make its exit and how the government reacted to that.”
Chinese departments that monitor the Internet and maintain the network of filters rarely explain disruptions to individual sites and services. The press office at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology declined immediate comment Wednesday on the outage and the possible reasons for it.
Google said it made no fixes or changes on its end to restore service, raising the likelihood that Chinese blocking _ not technical glitches within the company _ caused the trouble. “We will continue to monitor what is going on, but for the time being this issue seems to be resolved,” the Mountain View, California-based company said in a statement.
The sudden disruption and lack of explanation fit with how the government has brought companies to heel previously in the heavily monitored Chinese Internet industry, analysts said.
“I don’t think anyone should be surprised,” said Bill Bishop, a Beijing Internet entrepreneur and author of the technology blog Digicha. Tuesday’s problems were payback by the government, he said, because “Google humiliated China.”
“Is it really realistic to expect that the Chinese government is just going to say ‘OK, we’re all friends now and go ahead about your business’ after what just happened?” he said. “I think most people who’ve spent time in China and spent time in this industry dealing with the government would probably tell you that’s a low-probability outcome.”
Google’s other China ventures began unraveling almost immediately after it announced its partial retreat, switching google.cn queries to google.com.hk in Hong Kong. Partners in mobile phone and other ventures said they were reviewing or scrapping service agreements with Google. Among them was China’s second-largest mobile phone operator, China Unicom, which shelved plans to use Google search on two new cell phones running Google’s Android software.
Industry analysts have said that in the past the government used its control of telecommunications companies to slow the speed of queries and responses to some sites, driving customers away. Those slow speeds are thought to have played a part in undoing eBay Inc.’s business in China.
Service disruptions – or fears of them – drive users and advertisers away, and Google has already begun to be affected by those fears, said Edward Yu, president of Analysys International, a Beijing research firm.
Yu said his firm’s research shows that Chinese advertisers are shifting their spending to homegrown companies like China’s search leader Baidu, the auction site Alibaba and other kinds of market services “because they are afraid of the instability of Google services.”
“The peak of the panic started from the moment Google said it was considering pulling out of China, but later events confirmed the worry,” said Yu.
Google, meanwhile, warned of a separate threat to Internet freedom in neighboring Vietnam, saying cyberattacks were attempting to silence opponents of a government-led mining project involving a Chinese company.
“The attacks did not involve Google, but it said it was drawing attention to them because they underscored the need for the international community “to take cybersecurity seriously to help keep free opinion flowing.”
Copyright 2010 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Wes Cowan is founder and owner of Cowan’s Auctions Inc. in Cincinnati. An internationally recognized expert in historic Americana, Wes stars in the PBS television series History Detectives and is a featured appraiser on Antiques Roadshow. He can be reached via email at info@cowans.com. Research by Joe Moran.
