The last survivor's fortune, the singing dunes, and the firm that outlived empires

That arrangement is a tontine, and for the better part of two centuries it was a respectable way for a government to borrow or a family to save for old age. The name belongs to Lorenzo de Tonti, a Neapolitan banker who pitched the idea to the French crown around 1653 as a way to raise cash without openly swelling the king's debt.[2] The Parlement de Paris turned him down, and historians suspect he had really just repackaged investment schemes already circulating in Italy rather than inventing anything.[1] Tonti's own story ended badly. He spent roughly seven years locked in the Bastille and died in disgrace around 1684, years before France warmed to the instrument that still carries his name.[2]

Governments eventually came around, because a tontine solved a genuine problem: it let a state raise a lump sum today and let the annual cost shrink on its own as subscribers died off. The first true state tontine appeared in the Dutch city of Kampen in 1670, and Louis XIV launched a French royal version in 1689.[1] England followed in 1693, floating a tontine to help pay for the Nine Years' War against France.[3] Subscribers put in about £100 apiece and named a life on which their share depended, and the pool paid out 10 percent a year for the first seven years and 7 percent thereafter, with each dead nominee's slice flowing to those still breathing.[3] That English offering fell well short of its £1 million goal, but the shape of the thing stuck, and in 1790 Alexander Hamilton proposed a tontine of his own as one route to taming the young republic's war debt.[1]

The incentives were, to put it gently, awkward. Shrewd families bought shares in the names of healthy young children, often five-year-old girls, since girls tended to outlive boys and a longer-lived nominee meant a longer stream of payments.[1] The darker version of the same logic gave the tontine its lasting reputation, and one Australian actuary later dismissed the insurance form of it as an immoral contract that put a premium on murder.[1]

America turned the tontine into a mass-market product. In 1868 Henry Baldwin Hyde's Equitable Life Assurance Society began selling "deferred dividend" or "tontine" policies, which folded ordinary life insurance together with a long savings bet whose accumulated surplus was divided among the policyholders who kept paying and stayed alive for twenty years.[4] The idea sold ferociously. By 1905 roughly two-thirds of all life insurance in force in the United States was of this type, the product of something like nine million policies written over four decades.[4][1]

The boom ended in scandal. In 1905 New York's Armstrong Investigation, chaired by State Senator William W. Armstrong and driven by a young counsel named Charles Evans Hughes, tore into the big insurers, its outrage stoked in part by revelations that Equitable heir James Hazen Hyde had charged a lavish costume ball to company accounts.[5] The committee charged the tontine business with corruption and extravagance, and New York prohibited new sales in 1906, effectively killing the product across the country.[4] Whether the ban was deserved is contested: economists Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch have argued the policies were actuarially sound and a reasonable life-cycle investment, and that the prohibition was probably unnecessary.[4]

Fiction, meanwhile, kept the murderous reading alive. Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson built the 1889 comic novel The Wrong Box around two elderly brothers and the tontine they are the last men standing to claim.[1] An episode of M*A*S*H turned on a pact among First World War veterans, and a 1996 episode of The Simpsons gave the trope its most gleeful outing, with Grampa Simpson and Mr. Burns as the last two survivors of a wartime unit that had squirreled away looted paintings, whereupon Burns simply tries to kill Abe and take the lot.[6][1] The tontine may not be a relic. Faced with longer lifespans and shrinking pensions, actuaries and economists such as Moshe Milevsky, Jonathan Forman and Richard Fullmer have proposed modern "tontine pensions" that pool longevity risk among savers rather than an insurer, and versions with tontine features are already offered in several wealthy countries.[7]

The sound arrives when sand slides down the steep downwind face that geologists call the slip face, usually once the slope tips past about 32 to 34 degrees.[6] On a booming dune the grains do not just hiss; they lock into a deep, sustained drone with a dominant pitch of roughly 70 to 105 hertz.[1] Field recordings have measured the volume at more than 105 decibels, louder than a lawn mower or a rock concert, carrying as far as ten kilometers and lasting up to fifteen minutes after the sand stops moving.[5] The effect is felt as much as heard, because a booming avalanche carries both an acoustic and a seismic component, and the ground itself trembles underfoot.[6]

This booming is a different animal from the squeak underfoot on certain beaches. Squeaking or whistling sands sing near 500 to 2,500 hertz, several octaves higher, and only for a fraction of a second when someone scuffs a heel through them.[6] Booming is lower, vastly louder, and sustained for minutes rather than an instant.[1] At Sand Mountain in Nevada the tone has been logged around 70 hertz, roughly two octaves below a piano's middle C, closer to a bowed cello string than to any whistle.[5]

The fascination is old. Marco Polo, crossing the Gobi in the thirteenth century, blamed the desert's booming on spirits.[5] In 1835 Charles Darwin, near Copiapó in Chile, recorded local accounts of El Bramador, the roarer, a sand-covered hill that sounded only when people climbing it set the sand in motion.[9] The soldier and engineer Ralph Bagnold turned the wonder into a science with his 1941 book on the physics of blown sand, still the foundation of the field.[1]

Fewer than fifty sites are firmly documented, and they cluster where the sand is right.[1] The roster includes Sand Mountain and the Eureka and Dumont dunes of the American Southwest, the Kelso Dunes, and Colorado's Great Sand Dunes, alongside Cerro Bramador at the edge of Chile's Mar de Dunas.[1] China contributes the Badain Jaran desert, whose Bilutu Peak rises some 460 meters and hums between 70 and 105 hertz.[10] Booming dunes are also known from Morocco, Oman, Namibia, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.[1]

What every booming dune shares is a fussy recipe in the grains. The sand must be dry to the point of severe drought, rounded, polished, and unusually well sorted, with grains clustered near 0.18 to 0.32 millimeters and almost no fine dust between them.[1] The grains are typically quartz carrying a thin silica-and-water gloss that field workers call desert glaze, and the sand in the Badain Jaran holds less than about 0.3 percent moisture when it sings.[10] Miss any of these conditions and the dune stays mute.[5]

The physics splits cleanly into the settled and the argued. Everyone accepts that a shearing avalanche of the right grains produces a narrow-band note in the tens-of-hertz range.[1] The fight is over what fixes the pitch. Stéphane Douady, Bruno Andreotti and colleagues argued in 2006 that the grains synchronize their collisions like a crowd falling into step, so the frequency is set by the grain size and the rate of shear, scaling roughly with the square root of gravity over grain diameter.[3] They reproduced the note in the laboratory with sand carried from Morocco, Oman and Chile, and even coaxed a full octave out of it with a spinning blade, evidence that no dune is strictly required.[3][7] Against this, Nathalie Vriend, Melany Hunt and their Caltech group proposed in 2007 that the dune behaves as a natural waveguide: a loose dry surface layer sits atop a firmer, sometimes cemented substrate a meter or two down, and the pitch is set by the depth of that layer, not by the grains.[2] Using seismic surveys and ground-penetrating radar they measured a layered structure and found no consistent link between frequency and grain diameter, a direct challenge to the grain-size account.[2] Andreotti and coworkers published a formal 2008 rebuttal arguing the waveguide model neglected the surface waves that carry the sound, and the two camps have never fully reconciled.[4]

The one thing water settles is silence. A wet dune will not sing, because thin films of moisture bridge the grains and glue them together instead of letting them slide and collide freely, which is why many dunes fall quiet in winter or after rain.[8] As early as 1936 researchers noted that damp roaring sand loses its voice yet can be revived by heating it dry again.[1]

When Prince Shōtoku wanted a great Buddhist temple for his new capital, he sent for carpenters who knew how to build one. Three master craftsmen came from Baekje, a kingdom in what is now Korea, and one of them stayed to found the workshop that became Kongō Gumi.[2] The traditional date is 578, with the temple, Shitennō-ji, finished in 593, though historians treat that founding year as a cherished tradition rather than a notarized fact.[1] Either way the company is widely called the oldest continuously operating business on earth, a run of roughly 1,400 years.[2]

What kept it alive was a narrow, almost sacred specialty. Kongō Gumi built and repaired Buddhist temples, work that never quite ran dry in a country of millions of worshippers, and it stayed the dedicated carpenter to Shitennō-ji, which was rebuilt seven times after fires and wars.[1] Leadership passed down through some forty generations, but never by rigid rule of the eldest son.[1] The family chose the ablest heir, and when the ablest candidate was a son-in-law rather than a son, he simply took the Kongō name and carried the work forward.[2] In 1934 a woman, Yoshie Kongō, rebuilt the temple's five-story pagoda as head carpenter.[1]

The firm nearly died not of old age but of debt. During Japan's 1980s asset bubble it borrowed heavily to invest in real estate, and when the bubble burst the debt outlived the boom.[2] By 2005 revenue had slipped to about ¥7.5 billion with roughly a hundred employees, and in January 2006 Kongō Gumi gave up its independence, folding into the much larger Takamatsu Construction Group.[1] It was not the end of the craft. The name survives as a subsidiary, and its miyadaiku carpenters still raise temples with tools their predecessors would recognize.[2]

Kongō Gumi is the eldest of a very large family. The Japanese call these long-established firms shinise, and as of 2020 the country held more than 33,000 of them past the century mark, some 3,100 older than 200 years, 140 older than 500, and at least 19 that have run for more than a millennium.[4] A 2008 Bank of Korea study counted 5,586 companies worldwide that had reached the age of 200, and more than half were Japanese.[3] For comparison, the average company in the S&P 500 now lasts under two decades.[3]

The examples read like a gazetteer of patience. Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot-spring inn in the mountains of Yamanashi, has by tradition welcomed guests since 705 and holds the Guinness record, awarded in 2011, as the world's oldest hotel, run by one family across fifty-two generations.[5] A rival inn, Hōshi Ryokan in Ishikawa, traces itself by tradition to 718 and forty-six generations of the Hōshi line.[6] In a Kyoto lane beside the Imamiya Shrine, a shop known as Ichiwa has grilled skewers of aburi-mochi for pilgrims since about the year 1000, a run of more than a thousand years now in its twenty-fifth generation.[7] Its owner once turned down an offer to franchise, and a scholar of these firms, Kenji Matsuoka, likens each proprietor to a runner handed a baton.[8]

Why here, and almost nowhere else? Part of the answer is cultural. Many shinise are run by an ie, a “house” whose duty is to keep the name and the craft alive, which nudges owners toward continuity and stewardship rather than rapid growth.[3] Part is a striking succession trick. Families without a capable son adopt an adult one, usually a promising employee or a son-in-law who takes the family name, so bloodline never becomes a bottleneck; more than ninety percent of Japan's tens of thousands of annual adoptions involve grown men.[9] A habit of hoarding cash and shunning debt, a domestic focus, and a reverence for the founding trade round out the pattern.[4] Economists who studied the adoption practice found that firms led by adopted heirs tend to outperform those left to natural-born sons.[9]