He bought London Bridge and rebuilt it in Arizona

Two million four hundred and sixty thousand dollars: that is what Robert McCulloch, a chainsaw manufacturer from California, paid in 1968 for London Bridge, the granite one John Rennie raised over the Thames in 1831. He took the whole thing to the Arizona desert.

The City was selling it because it was sinking: it weighed more than its foundation could hold and was dropping about an inch every twenty years. A councilman, Ivan Luckin, talked the corporation into putting it up for sale instead of demolishing it, and flew to New York to advertise it.

The price did not come from a valuation. Luckin later explained the formula: double what dismantling it would cost — 1.2 million — plus a thousand dollars for every year McCulloch would have turned by opening day. He was going to turn sixty. Hence the exact 2,460,000.

Workers numbered 10,276 granite blocks by hand, shipped them through the Panama Canal to Long Beach and trucked the cargo up to Lake Havasu City, a town McCulloch had invented five years earlier beside the Colorado River. They assembled the bridge on dry land, on a sand peninsula; only once it was finished did they dig the channel underneath and let the water in.

It opened on 10 October 1971. Reassembly cost some seven million more, almost triple the purchase. And the legend — that McCulloch thought he was buying Tower Bridge, the one with the two towers — both he and Luckin denied to the end.