When I was young, my girlfriend and I took a train from Marseilles to Rome. I didn't like third class so I went to 1st class and hoped the two of us wouldn't be kicked out. We weren't.
A
gentleman came into the cabin at the next stop. He must have thought we were interesting enough to share his cabin with
him. The gentleman was working on a set of drawings. As we talked he
explained how he was buying American Liberty ships and refitting them
as passenger ships in Milan.
Once the ships were remodeled, they were taken to Sweden where they were furnished. The ships were then used to transport Brits to Australia. Australia was paying shipping companies $1,400 per person for every Brit who was brought to Australia. The issue the man was working on was calculation of the size of the air conditioning needed to get the ship successfully through the 115 degree heat in the Suez Canal.
The gentleman went on to talk about his next project, growing trees for paper in the Amazon. He was certain trees would grow fast in the tropics and immediately be processed into paper creating a profitable product.
As you can tell from the title the man was Aristotle Onassis, years later to become a household name when he married the stylish and expensive widow of President Jack Kennedy. The shipping project was a great success, the Amazon was a failure. The Amazon rain forest has virtually no top soil for trees or anything to grow as crops.