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A tulip bulb sits in your hand . It looks like a small onion . In 1637 , one of these bulbs cost as much as a house in Amsterdam . The Dutch were very rich in this period . Their ships sailed all over the world . People had money and wanted to spend it . They were new and beautiful . Some tulips had rare patterns on their petals . These were the most wanted . One variety was called Semper Augustus . It had red and white stripes . Nobody could grow it easily . So the price went up and up . People started to buy bulbs and then sell them again quickly . They wanted to make money , not grow flowers . The bulb never needed to leave the ground . By early 1637 , the prices were enormous . Then , in February 1637 , buyers stopped coming . People who had paid fortunes lost everything . Historians call this tulip mania . It was one of the first recorded speculative bubbles in history . A bubble happens when a price loses all connection to real value . Today , we still see the same thing happen . The tulip shows us how fast a crowd can be wrong .
