A rare, personal record of one of the most consequential flights in modern history came up for bidding Thursday night, when Boston-based RR Auction closed its "Remarkable Rarities" sale, headlined by the mission logbook of Robert A. Lewis, co-pilot of the B-29 bomber Enola Gay.
Lewis kept the notebook aboard the aircraft on August 6, 1945, recording the mission from takeoff on Tinian Island through the release of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, switching from ink to pencil partway through the flight when he ran out. On the back cover, he sketched the mushroom cloud rising over the city, estimating its altitude at roughly 50,000 feet. Elsewhere in the log, he wrote a line historians have quoted ever since: "My God what have we done." The logbook carried a pre-sale estimate of roughly $500,000.
It was not the only piece of history on the block. The same sale included a 1788 first edition of The Federalist, a handwritten 1894 blueprint by Pierre de Coubertin outlining his plan to revive the modern Olympic Games, a working Enigma cipher machine from the Second World War, and a factory-sealed original iPhone still in its shrink wrap.
RR Auction specializes in space memorabilia, historical documents and autographs, and has built a niche selling artifacts that sit at the intersection of collecting and archive-keeping. Past Remarkable Rarities sales have topped $4 million, with individual lots — an Apollo 17 astronaut's checklist, theater tickets from the night of Lincoln's assassination — fetching six figures apiece.
For collectors, the appeal of a lot like the Lewis logbook lies less in rarity of ownership than in proximity to a single, world-altering moment: a diary entry written in real time by someone who had no way of knowing how history would judge what he had just taken part in.