rarestFinds.com is the appropriate name for a website where you will find the "rarest finds," objects which are, for different reasons, exceedingly rare or
unique. Even so most of these rarest finds were manufactured as functional objects, they are, for various reasons, extremely difficult or even impossible to find. Some items offered here were doomed to fail as they were behind or ahead of their time; some did not really work as intended; some were too expensive to find buyers; some were ephemeral; others infringed on an already patented idea; some became absolete because of newly introduced laws and regulations, etc.
Collectors have one characteristic in common; they all try to find what they can't find, they want the rarest of the rarest. With the dawn of the internet, it became easy to figure out what is rare and what is not. The process is still ongoing. Ebay became some sort of benchmark for what is rare and what is not; prices are still declining for easy to find objects, while the rare objects are still appreciating in value. The rarest of the rarest often go through the roof if they show up at a well advertised auction.
rarestFinds.comcame to be as the owner increasingly became annoyed about the high fees charged by eBay for selling on their site. At the beginning eBay charged about 4% of the price an object sold for and buyers were allowed to mail a check; now it is up to 14% and mandatory payments are collected by eBay.
Also, over the years, eBay became more and more of an impediment on sellers creativity. At the time eBay no longer allowed sellers to post their own picture-galleries (like the ones you will find here on rarestFinds.com), The owner of rarestFinds.com decided to establish his own website. The name rarestFinds.com was obvious, the owner is selling on eBay under the same name, the username, "rarestfinds."
Ebay is best described as, "out of control." Half the time half of its features are not working, everything is constantly being changed.... all in an effort to obtimize revenue to the detriment of its users. For instance, it does not make any sense to allow a seller to publish the same number of pictures (a total of 24 now) whether you sell dog poop cast inside acrylic as paper weights, or an exceedingly rare scientific instrument from the 17th century. It also does not make any sense to allow buyers to give negative feedback to sellers, while sellers are restricted to give buyers positive Feedback; and there are too many other reasons to mention here.
Who is behind rarestFinds.com?
The owner, Peter Frei, was born in 1951 in Baden Switzerland. There was nothing his father perceived as to difficult to understand (except electronics) and to fix if it was broke. Especially internal combustion engines and farm machinery; Peter Frei grew up surrounded by farms even so his father worked as foreman in a factory and was not a farmer.
After school, Frei decided to become an electrical engineer as that was the only field he could impress his father and be better than him. His thesis was about the first application of a single chip microprocessor to control a gas pump (mechanical counters would increasingly fail due to ever rising gas-prices and the time was ripe to replace these mechanical counters with electronic counters).
His first job was at the Institut fuer Kristallography and Petrography at Eidgenösische Technische Hochschule ("ETH") in Zürich Switzerland. Frei developed among other electronics, a Magnetic Field Regulator and Power Supply for an Inearth Gas Mass Spectrometer to analyze lunar sample from the National Aeronautics And Space Administration ("NASA"). Frei went-on to work for Mettler Toledo in Greifensee Switzerland, where he developed a microprocessor controlled precision scale. In the spring of 1983, Frei asked to be able to take the summer off which was denied by his superior. Frei gave his notice the next day anyway and spent time looking for antique typewriters which he collected at the time. He started buying other early artifacts of technology on his travels through Great Britain and other parts of Europe. Frei never returned to his regular job as he had too much fun tracing down rare objects of museum quality and selling them for a profit.
Eventually Frei learned about Brimfield Massachusetts, the location of the largest outside antique show in the USA that takes place three times a year. Eventually Frei bought a house near Brimfield and became a naturalized American citizen.
Before Frei became a US citizen, he strictly bought items in the US during the summer months to ship them back to Switzerland at the end of the summer and to sell them during the winter month. The introduction of eBay changed the antique business in a profound way and Frei had to adopt to the new market environment. In 2002, Frei moved his inventory to the US and gave up his residency in Switzerland. Since that time, Frei was selling on eBay and also to his broad customer base consisting of private individuals and public museums around the world.
Now semi retired, Frei is still enjoying finding the rarest of the rarest items which he is offering potential buyers on rarestFinds.com.