Gregor Mendel
Alfred Russel Wallace
Joseph Lister
Leo Tolstoy
Dmitri Mendeleev
Andrew Carnegie
J.P. Morgan
John Davison Rockefeller
Mark Twain
Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)
Gregor Mendel was a scientist, Augustinian friar and abbot in Moravia. Mendel was born in Czechoslovakia, and gained posthumous recognition as the founder of the modern science of genetics. Though farmers had known for millennia that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits, Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance.
Mendel worked with 7 characteristics of pea plants: plant height, pod shape and color, seed shape and color, and flower position and color. Taking seed color as an example, Mendel showed that when a true-breeding yellow pea and a true-breeding green pea were cross-bred their offspring always produced yellow seeds. However, in the next generation, the green peas reappeared at a ratio of 1 green to 3 yellow. To explain this phenomenon, Mendel coined the terms “recessive” and “dominant” in reference to certain traits. In the preceding example, the green trait, which seems to have vanished in the first filial generation, is recessive and the yellow is dominant. He published his work in 1866, demonstrating the actions of invisible “factors”—now called genes—in predictably determining the traits of an organism. The profound significance of Mendel's work was not recognized for more than 3 decades later.
He was the son of family who lived and worked on a farm which had been owned by the Mendel family for at least 130 years. During his childhood, Mendel worked as a gardener and studied beekeeping. From 1840 to 1843, he studied practical and theoretical philosophy and physics. He also struggled financially to pay for his studies, and his older sister gave him her dowry. Later he helped support her 3 sons, 2 of whom became doctors. He became a friar in part because it enabled him to obtain an education without having to pay for it himself. As the son of a struggling farmer, the monastic life, in his words, spared him the "perpetual anxiety about a means of livelihood."
When Mendel entered the Faculty of Philosophy, the the head of the Department of Natural History and Agriculture conducted extensive research of hereditary traits of plants and animals, especially sheep. Upon recommendation of his physics teacher Mendel entered the Abbey and began his training as a priest. Mendel worked as a substitute high school teacher. In 1850, he failed the oral part, the last of 3 parts, of his exams to become a certified high school teacher. In 1851, he was sent to the University of Vienna to study so that he could get more formal education. Mendel returned to his abbey in 1853 as a teacher, principally of physics. In 1856, he took the exam to become a certified teacher and again failed the oral part. In 1867, he became the abbot of the monastery. After he was elevated as abbot in 1868, his scientific work largely ended, as Mendel became overburdened with administrative responsibilities, especially a dispute with the civil government over its attempt to impose special taxes on religious institutions.
Mendel used the common edible pea and started his experiments in 1856 when he was 34. For the next 7 years, he cultivated and tested some 28,000 plants, the majority of which were pea plants. This study showed that, when true-breeding different varieties were crossed to each other (e.g. tall plants fertilized by short plants), in the second generation, 25% had purebred recessive traits, 50% were hybrids, which showed dominant genes, and 25% were purebred dominant. His experiments led him to make generalizations which later came to be known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.
Charles Darwin was unaware of Mendel's paper, and it is envisaged that if he had, genetics as we know it now might have taken hold much earlier. Mendel provides an example of the failure of obscure, highly original, innovators to receive the attention they deserve. 40 odd scientists who listened to Mendel's 2 path-breaking lectures failed to understand his work. "My time will come" he reportedly told a friend.
During Mendel's lifetime, most biologists held the idea that all characteristics were passed to the next generation through blending inheritance, in which the traits from each parent are averaged. Instances of this phenomenon are now explained by the action of multiple genes with quantitative effects. Charles Darwin tried unsuccessfully to explain inheritance through a theory of pangenesis. The pangenesis theory, similar to Hippocrates's views on the topic, imply that the whole of parental organisms participate in heredity (thus the prefix pan). Much of Darwin's model was speculatively based on inheritance of tiny heredity particles he called gemmules that could be transmitted from parent to offspring. Darwin emphasized that only cells could regenerate new tissues or generate new organisms. He posited that atomic sized gemmules formed by cells would diffuse and aggregate in the reproductive organs. Mendel in effect quantized the genes by introducing the concept of dominant and recessive genes.
It was not until the early twentieth century that the importance of Mendel's ideas was realized. Mendel's results were quickly replicated, and genetic linkage quickly worked out. Biologists flocked to the theory.
Mendel died at the age of 61 from chronic inflammation of the kidneys. After his death, the succeeding abbot burned all papers in Mendel's collection, to mark an end to the disputes over taxation.
Alfred Russel Wallace was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist, and biologist. He is best known for independently conceiving the theory of evolution through natural selection. His paper on the subject was jointly published with some of Charles Darwin's writings in 1858. This prompted Darwin to publish his own ideas in On the Origin of Species. Wallace did extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the faunal divide now termed the Wallace Line, which separates the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts: a western portion in which the animals are largely of Asian origin, and an eastern portion where the fauna reflect Australasia.
He was considered the 19th century's leading expert on the geographical distribution of animal species and is called the "father of bio-geography". Wallace was one of the leading evolutionary thinkers of the 19th century and made many other contributions to the development of evolutionary theory besides being co-discoverer of natural selection. These included the concept of warning coloration in animals, and the Wallace effect, a hypothesis on how natural selection could contribute to speciation by encouraging the development of barriers against hybridization. Wallace's 1904 book Man's Place in the Universe was the first serious attempt by a biologist to evaluate the likelihood of life on other planets. He was also one of the first scientists to write a serious exploration of the subject of whether there was life on Mars.
Wallace was strongly attracted to unconventional ideas such as evolution. His advocacy of spiritualism and his belief in a non-material origin for the higher mental faculties of humans strained his relationship with some members of the scientific establishment.
Aside from scientific work, he was a social activist who was critical of what he considered to be an unjust social and economic system - capitalism in 19th-century Britain. His interest in natural history resulted in his being one of the first prominent scientists to raise concerns over the environmental impact of human activity. He was also a prolific author who wrote on both scientific and social issues; his account of his adventures and observations during his explorations in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia, The Malay Archipelago, was both popular and highly regarded. Since its publication in 1869 it has never been out of print.
Wallace had financial difficulties throughout much of his life. His Amazon and Far Eastern trips were supported by the sale of specimens he collected and, after he lost most of the considerable money he made from those sales in unsuccessful investments, he had to support himself mostly from the publications he produced. Unlike some of his contemporaries in the British scientific community, such as Darwin and Charles Lyell, he had no family wealth to fall back on, and he was unsuccessful in finding a long-term salaried position, receiving no regular income until he was awarded a small government pension, through Darwin's efforts, in 1881.
Alfred Wallace was born in Wales and was the seventh of nine children. His family, like many Wallaces, claimed a connection to William Wallace, a leader of Scottish forces during the Wars of Scottish Independence in the 13th century. His father graduated in law, but never practiced law. He owned some income-generating property, but bad investments and failed business ventures resulted in a steady deterioration of the family's financial position. His mother was from a middle-class English family. When Wallace was 5 years old, his family moved and he attended Grammar School until financial difficulties forced his family to withdraw him in 1836, when he was aged 14. He went to London, to attended lectures at the London Mechanics Institute. He was exposed to the radical political ideas of the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen and of Thomas Paine. He left London in 1837 to live with William and work as his apprentice surveyor for 6 years.
After a brief period of unemployment, he was hired to teach drawing, map-making, and surveying. Wallace spent many hours at the library. One evening he met the 19 year old entomologist Bates. He befriended Wallace and started him collecting insects. After a few months, Wallace found work as a civil engineer for a nearby firm that was working on a survey for a proposed railway. Wallace's work on the survey involved spending a lot of time outdoors in the countryside, allowing him to indulge his new passion for collecting insects. During this period, he read avidly.
Inspired by the chronicles of earlier traveling naturalists like Charles Darwin, Wallace decided that he too wanted to travel abroad as a naturalist. In 1848, Wallace and Bates left for Brazil aboard the Mischief. Their intention was to collect insects and other animal specimens in the Amazon Rain-forest for their private collections, selling the duplicates to museums and collectors back in Britain in order to fund the trip. Wallace also hoped to gather evidence of the transmutation of species. Wallace and Bates spent most of their first year collecting near Belém, then explored inland separately. Wallace continued charting the Rio Negro for 4 years, collecting specimens and making notes on the peoples and languages he encountered as well as the geography, flora, and fauna.
In 1852, Wallace embarked for the UK on the brig Helen. After 26 days at sea, the ship's cargo caught fire and the crew was forced to abandon ship. All of the specimens Wallace had on the ship, mostly collected during the last 2 and most interesting years of his trip, were lost. He managed to save a few notes and pencil sketches and little else. Wallace and the crew spent 10 days in an open boat before being picked up by the brig sailing from Cuba to London.
After his return to the UK, Wallace spent 18 months in London living on the insurance payment for his lost collection and selling a few specimens that had been shipped back to Britain prior to his starting his exploration of the Rio Negro and its tributaries. He was deeply impressed by the grandeur of the virgin forest, by the variety and beauty of the butterflies and birds, and by his first encounter with Indians, an experience he never forgot. During this period, despite having lost almost all of the notes from his South American expedition, he wrote 6 academic papers which included "On the Monkeys of the Amazon" and 2 books; Palm Trees of the Amazon and Their Uses and Travels on the Amazon. He also made connections with a number of other British naturalists - most significantly, Darwin.
From 1854-1862, age 31-39, Wallace traveled through the Malay Archipelago around Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, to collect specimens for sale and to study natural history. He collected a set of 80 bird skeletons in Indonesia. His observations of the marked zoological differences across a narrow strait in the archipelago led to his proposing the zoo-geographical boundary now known as the Wallace line.
Wallace collected more than 126,000 specimens in the Malay Archipelago - more than 80,000 beetles alone. Several thousand of them represented species new to science. One of his better-known species descriptions during this trip is that of the gliding tree frog known as Wallace's flying frog. While he was exploring the archipelago, he refined his thoughts about evolution and had his famous insight on natural selection. In 1858 he sent an article outlining his theory to Darwin; it was published, along with a description of Darwin's own theory, in the same year.
Accounts of his studies and adventures there were eventually published in 1869 as The Malay Archipelago, which became one of the most popular books of scientific exploration of the 19th century, and has never been out of print. It was praised by scientists such as Darwin to whom the book was dedicated, and Charles Lyell, and by non-scientists such as the novelist Joseph Conrad, who called it his "favorite bedside companion" and used it as source of information for several of his novels, especially Lord Jim.
In 1862, Wallace returned to England, where he moved in with his sister Fanny Sims and her husband Thomas. While recovering from his travels, Wallace organized his collections and gave numerous lectures about his adventures and discoveries to scientific societies. Later that year, he visited Darwin at Down House, and became friendly with both Charles Lyell and Herbert Spencer. During the 1860s, Wallace wrote papers and gave lectures defending natural selection. He also corresponded with Darwin about a variety of topics, including sexual selection, warning coloration, and the possible effect of natural selection on hybridization and the divergence of species. In 1865, he began investigating spiritualism.
In 1866, Wallace married and the couple had 3 children. In the late 1860s and 1870s, Wallace was very concerned about the financial security of his family. While he was in the Malay Archipelago, the sale of specimens had brought in a considerable amount of money, which had been carefully invested by the agent who sold the specimens for Wallace. However, on his return to the UK, Wallace made a series of bad investments in railways and mines that squandered most of the money, and he found himself badly in need of the proceeds from the publication of The Malay Archipelago.
To remain financially solvent, Wallace worked grading government examinations, wrote 25 papers for publication between 1872 and 1876 for various modest sums, and was paid by Lyell and Darwin to help edit some of their own works.
Wallace died at home at the age of 90 years old.
Joseph Lister was a British surgeon and a pioneer of antiseptic surgery. By applying Louis Pasteur's advances in microbiology, he promoted the idea of sterile portable tents for the army. He successfully introduced carbolic acid also known as “phenol” to sterilize surgical instruments and to clean wounds. This led to a reduction in post-operative infections and made surgery safer for patients, distinguishing himself as the "father of modern surgery".
Before he studied surgery, most people believed that chemical damage from exposures to bad air was responsible for infections in wounds. Hospital wards were occasionally aired out at midday as a precaution against the spread of infection, but facilities for washing hands or a patient's wounds were not available. A surgeon was not required to wash his hands before seeing a patient because such practices were not considered necessary to avoid infection. Hospitals practiced surgery under unsanitary conditions. Surgeons of the time referred to the “good old surgical stink” and took pride in the stains on their unwashed operating gowns as a display of their experience.
Lister was born in a prosperous Quaker home in England. His father was a wine merchant and a pioneer of achromatic object lenses for the compound microscope. He attended a Quaker school. He initially studied botany and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree when he was 20 years old. He registered as a medical student and graduated with honors, subsequently entering the Royal College of Surgeons at the age of 26. He subsequently left the Quakers and joined the Scottish Episcopal Church, and eventually married his boss`s daughter, Agnes. On their honeymoon, they spent 3 months visiting leading hospitals and universities in France and Germany. By this time, Agnes had taken to medical research and was his partner in the laboratory for the rest of her life.
When Lister was 33 years old, he was appointed to the Chair of Surgery in Glasgow, and it was there that he first applied Louis Pasteur’s recent discoveries about the role of airborne bacteria in fermentation to the prevention of infection in surgery. He became aware of a paper published by the French chemist, Louis Pasteur, showing that food spoilage could occur under anaerobic conditions if micro-organisms were present. Pasteur suggested 3 methods to eliminate the micro-organisms responsible: filtration, exposure to heat, or exposure to chemical solutions. He confirmed Pasteur's conclusions with his own experiments and decided to use his findings to develop antiseptic techniques for wounds. As the first 2 methods suggested by Pasteur were dangerous and unsafe for the treatment of human tissue, he experimented with the third idea – exposure to chemical solutions. He introduced carbolic acid as an antiseptic, to kill airborne bacteria and prevent their transmission into wounds from the air of the operating theater.
When he was 7 years old, carbolic acid, (C6H5OH), a carbon ring with an OH tail derived in an impure form from coal tar was discovered. At that time, chemists were uncertain of the difference between creosote – used to treat the wood used for railway ties and ships since it protected the wood from rotting – and carbolic acid. Upon hearing that creosote had been used for treating sewage, he began to test the efficacy of carbolic acid when applied directly to wounds.
He promoted the use of carbolic acid as an antiseptic. It became the first widely used antiseptic in surgery. He first suspected it would prove an adequate disinfectant because it was used to ease the stench from fields irrigated with sewage waste. He presumed it was safe because fields treated with carbolic acid produced no apparent ill-effects on the livestock that later grazed upon them. He tested the results of spraying instruments, the surgical incisions, and dressings with a solution of carbolic acid. He found that the solution swabbed on wounds remarkably reduced the incidence of gangrene.
When he was 38 years old, he applied a piece of lint dipped in carbolic acid solution onto the wound of a 7 year-old boy who had sustained a compound fracture after a cart wheel had passed over his leg. After 4 days, he renewed the pad and discovered that no infection had developed, and after a total of 6 weeks he was amazed to discover that the boy's bones had fused back together, without there being any pus. He subsequently published his results in a series of 6 articles. He instructed surgeons under his responsibility to wear clean gloves and wash their hands before and after operations with 5% carbolic acid solutions. Instruments were also washed in the same solution and assistants sprayed the solution in the operating theater. One of his additional suggestions was to stop using porous natural materials in manufacturing the handles of medical instruments.
He left Glasgow when he was 42 years old to take over his father-in-law's position as Professor of Surgery at the University of Edinburgh and continued to develop improved methods of antisepsis. His fame had spread by then, and audiences of 400 often came to hear him lecture. As The "Germ Theory of Disease" became more understood, it was realized that infection could be better avoided by preventing bacteria from getting into wounds in the first place. This led to the rise of less primitive surgery.
He died when he was 85 years old.
33 years after Joseph Lister died, “Listerine mouthwash” was named after him for his work in antisepsis. On the anniversary of his death, in 2012, he was considered by most in the medical field as "The Father of Modern Surgery".
Count Leo Tolstoy was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time.
Born to an aristocratic Russian family in 1828, he is best known for the novels "War and Peace" (1869) and "Anna Karenina" (1877), often cited as pinnacles of realist fiction. Tolstoy's fiction includes dozens of short stories and several novellas such as "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886). He also wrote plays and numerous philosophical essays.
In the 1870s Tolstoy experienced a profound moral crisis, followed by what he regarded as an equally profound spiritual awakening. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. Tolstoy's ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894), were to have a profound impact on such pivotal 20th-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Tolstoys were a well-known family of old Russian nobility granted the title of count by Peter the Great who traced their ancestry to a mythical nobleman named Indris as arriving in 1353 in Moscow along with his 2 sons and a retinue of 3000 foreigners.
Tolstoy's parents died when he was young, so he and his siblings were brought up by relatives. In 1844, he began studying law and oriental languages at Kazan University. His teachers described him as "both unable and unwilling to learn." Tolstoy left the university in the middle of his studies, and spent much of his time in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In 1851, after running up heavy gambling debts, he went with his older brother to the Caucasus and joined the army. It was about this time that he started writing. Tolstoy served as a young artillery officer during the Crimean War and was in Sevastopol during the 11-month-long siege of Sevastopol in 1854-55.
The Crimean War was a military conflict fought from 1853-1856 in which the Russian Empire lost to an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, France, Britain and Sardinia. The immediate cause involved the rights of Christian minorities in the Holy Land, which was a part of the Ottoman Empire. The French promoted the rights of Roman Catholics, while Russia promoted those of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The longer-term causes involved the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the unwillingness of Britain and France to allow Russia to gain territory and power at Ottoman expense.
The Crimean War was one of the first conflicts to use modern technologies such as explosive naval shells, railways, and telegraphs. The war was one of the first to be documented extensively in written reports and photographs. The war quickly became an iconic symbol of logistical, medical and tactical failures and mismanagement. The reaction in the UK was a demand for professionalization, most famously achieved by Florence Nightingale, who gained worldwide attention for pioneering modern nursing while treating the wounded.
He was promoted to lieutenant for outstanding bravery and courage. His conversion from a wanton and privileged society author to the non-violent and spiritual anarchist of his latter days was brought about by his experience in the army as well as 2 trips around Europe in 1857 and 1860-61. During his 1857 visit, Tolstoy witnessed a public execution in Paris, a traumatic experience that would mark the rest of his life.
"The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens ... Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere."
Fired by enthusiasm, Tolstoy returned to and founded 13 schools for the children of Russia's peasants, who had just been emancipated from serfdom in 1861. The school was the first example of a coherent theory of democratic education.
In 1862, when he was 34 years old, Tolstoy married Sonya who was 16 years his junior and the daughter of a court physician. They had 13 children, 8 of whom survived childhood. The marriage was marked from the outset by sexual passion and emotional insensitivity when Tolstoy, on the eve of their marriage, gave her his diaries detailing his extensive sexual past and the fact that one of the serfs on his estate had borne him a son. Even so, their early married life was happy and allowed Tolstoy much freedom and the support system to compose War and Peace and Anna Karenina with Sonya acting as his secretary, editor, and financial manager. Sonya was copying and handwriting his epic works time after time. Tolstoy's relationship with his wife deteriorated as his beliefs became increasingly radical. This saw him seeking to reject his inherited and earned wealth, including the renunciation of the copyrights on his earlier works.
Tolstoy is considered one of the giants of Russian literature. His fiction consistently attempts to convey realistically the Russian society in which he lived.
"The Cossacks" (1863) describes the Cossack life and people through a story of a Russian aristocrat in love with a Cossack girl. "Anna Karenina" (1877) tells parallel stories of an adulterous woman trapped by the conventions and falsities of society and of a philosophical landowner much like Tolstoy, who works alongside the peasants in the fields and seeks to reform their lives. Tolstoy not only drew from his own life experiences but also created characters in his own image.
"War and Peace" is generally thought to be one of the greatest novels ever written, remarkable for its dramatic breadth and unity. Its vast canvas includes 580 characters, many historical with others fictional. The story moves from family life to the headquarters of Napoleon, from the court of Alexander I of Russia to the battlefields.
The novel explores Tolstoy's theory of history, and in particular the individuals such as Napoleon and Alexander. Somewhat surprisingly, Tolstoy did not consider "War and Peace" to be a novel. Tolstoy was a novelist of the realist school who considered the novel to be a framework for the examination of social and political issues in nineteenth-century life. "War and Peace" was to Tolstoy really an epic in prose. Tolstoy thought that "Anna Karenina" was his first true novel.
After "Anna Karenina", Tolstoy concentrated on Christian themes, and his later novels such as "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" (1886) and "What Is to Be Done?" develop a radical anarcho-pacifist Christian philosophy which led to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901. For all the praise showered on Anna Karenina and War and Peace, Tolstoy rejected the 2 works later in his life as something not as true of reality.
In his novel "Resurrection", Tolstoy attempts to expose the injustice of man-made laws and the hypocrisy of institutionalized church. He affirmed his belief in Jesus Christ's teachings and was particularly influenced by the Sermon on the Mount, and the injunction to turn the other cheek, which he understood as a "commandment of non-resistance to evil by force" and a doctrine of pacifism and nonviolence. In his work "The Kingdom of God Is Within You", he explains that he considered mistaken the Church's doctrine because they had made a "perversion" of Christ's teachings. Tolstoy believed being a Christian required him to be a pacifist. The consequences of being a pacifist, and the apparently inevitable waging of war by government are the reason why he was philosophical anarchist.
Tolstoy believed that a true Christian could find lasting happiness by striving for inner self-perfection through following the great commandment of loving one's neighbor and God rather than looking outward to the church or state for guidance. His belief in nonresistance when faced by conflict is another distinct attribute of his philosophy based on Christ's teachings. By directly influencing Mahatma Gandhi with this idea through his work "The Kingdom of God Is Within You", Tolstoy's profound influence on the nonviolent resistance movement reverberates to this day. He believed that the aristocracy were a burden on the poor, and that the only solution to how we live together is through anarchism.
Without naming himself an anarchist, Leo Tolstoy took the anarchist position as regards the state and property rights, deducing his conclusions from the general spirit of the teachings of Jesus and from the necessary dictates of reason. He describes the state as the domination of the wicked ones, supported by brutal force. Robbers, he says, are far less dangerous than a well-organized government. He makes a searching criticism of the prejudices which are current now concerning the benefits conferred upon men by the church, the state, and the existing distribution of property, and from the teachings of Jesus he deduces the rule of non-resistance and the absolute condemnation of all wars. His religious arguments are, however, so well combined with arguments borrowed from a dispassionate observation of the present evils, that the anarchist portions of his works appeal to the religious and the non-religious reader alike.
During the Boxer Rebellion in China, Tolstoy praised the Boxers. The Boxer Rebellion was a violent anti-foreign, anti-colonial and anti-Christian uprising that took place in China between 1899-1901, toward the end of the Qing dynasty. It was initiated by the Militia United in Righteousness, known in English as the "Boxers", for many of their members had been practitioners of Chinese martial arts. They were motivated by proto-nationalist sentiments and by opposition to Western colonialism and the Christian missionary activity that was associated with it.
Tolstoy was harshly critical of the atrocities committed by the Russians, Germans, Americans, Japanese, and other western troops. He accused them of engaging in slaughter when he heard about the looting, rapes, and murders, in what he saw as Christian brutality. Tolstoy also named the 2 monarchs most responsible for the atrocities; Nicholas II of Russia and Wilhelm II of Germany. Tolstoy also read the works of Chinese thinker and philosopher, Confucius. Tolstoy recommended that China remain an agrarian nation and warned against reform like what Japan implemented.
Tolstoy also became a major supporter of Esperanto, a constructed international language.
Towards the end of his life, Tolstoy become more and more occupied with the economic theory and social philosophy of Georgism, an economic philosophy holding that, while people should own the value they produce themselves, economic value derived from land including natural resources and natural opportunities should belong equally to all members of society. The Georgist paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.
During his last few days, he had spoken and written about dying. Renouncing his aristocratic lifestyle, he had finally gathered the nerve to separate from his wife, and left home in the middle of winter, in the dead of night. His secretive departure was an apparent attempt to escape unannounced from Sonya's jealous tirades. She was outspokenly opposed to many of his teachings, and in recent years had grown envious of the attention which it seemed to her Tolstoy lavished upon his Tolstoyan "disciples". Tolstoy died of pneumonia in a train station, after a day's rail journey south. The station master took Tolstoy to his apartment, and his personal doctors were called to the scene. He was given injections of morphine and camphor.
Tolstoy died at the age of 82.
Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian chemist and inventor. He formulated the Periodic Law, created a farsighted version of the periodic table of elements, and used it to predict the properties of some already discovered elements and also to predict the properties of 8 elements not yet discovered at that time. Mendeleev is given credit for the introduction of the metric system to the Russian Empire. Dmitri Mendeleev is often referred to as the “Father of the Periodic Table”.
Mendeleev was born in Siberia. His father was a teacher of fine arts, politics and philosophy. Unfortunately for the family's financial well-being, his father became blind and lost his teaching position. His mother was forced to work and she restarted her family's abandoned glass factory. At the age of 13, after the passing of his father and the destruction of his mother's factory by fire, Mendeleev attended the Gymnasium in Tobolsk.
In 1849, his mother took him across the entire state of Russia from Siberia to Moscow with the aim of getting him a higher education. The university in Moscow did not accept him. The mother and son continued to St. Petersburg to the father’s alma mater. The now poor Mendeleev family relocated to Saint Petersburg, where he entered the Main Pedagogical Institute in 1850. After graduation, he contracted tuberculosis, causing him to move to the Crimean Peninsula in 1855. While there he became a science master. In 1857, he returned to St. Petersburg with fully restored health.
Between 1859-1861, when he was already 25, he worked on the capillarity of liquids and the workings of the spectroscope in Heidelberg. In 1865 he became Doctor of Science for his dissertation "On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol", and started to teach inorganic chemistry. By 1871, six years later when he was 34, he had transformed St. Petersburg into an internationally recognized center for chemistry research.
Mendeleev studied petroleum origin and concluded hydrocarbons are formed from plants that were buried deep within the earth. He investigated the composition of petroleum, and helped to found the first oil refinery in Russia. He recognized the importance of petroleum as a feed-stock for petrochemicals. He is credited with a remark that burning petroleum as a fuel "would be akin to firing up a kitchen stove with bank notes."
Mendeleev invented pyrocollodion, a kind of smokeless explosive gunpowder based on nitrocellulose, the first man-made plastic developed in 1862. Nitrocellulose was created from cellulose treated with nitric acid. 6 years later, a plastic material named celluloid was developed by plasticizing the nitrocellulose with camphor. Camphor is a waxy, flammable, white or transparent solid terpenoid with a strong aroma found in the wood of the camphor laurel, a large evergreen tree found in Asia. In this way nitrocellulose could be used as a photographic film. Celluloid was used by Kodak, and other suppliers, from the late 1880s as a film base in photography, X-ray films, and motion picture films.
In 1863 there were 56 known elements with a new element being discovered at a rate of approximately one per year. In 1867 he started teaching. He wrote the definitive textbook of his time: “Principles of Chemistry” as he was preparing a textbook for his course. This is when he made his most important discovery. As he attempted to classify the elements according to their chemical properties, he noticed patterns that led him to postulate his periodic table; he claimed to have envisioned the complete arrangement of the elements in a dream.
By adding additional elements following this pattern, Dmitri developed his extended version of the periodic table. In 1869, Mendeleev made a formal presentation to the Russian Chemical Society, entitled “The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements”, which described elements according to both atomic weight and valence. Atomic weight is the average weight of a sample that contain all isotopes of the element in the amounts they are naturally found. Valence is the measure of the element's ability to combine with other atoms when it forms chemical compounds or molecules.
Mendeleev claimed that:
- The elements, if arranged according to their atomic weight, exhibited an apparent periodicity of properties.
- The elements which were similar regarding their chemical properties either had similar atomic weights or had their atomic weights increasing regularly.
- The arrangement of the elements in groups of elements in the order of their atomic weights corresponded to their so- called valences, as well as, to some extent, to their distinctive chemical properties.
- The elements which were the most widely diffused had small atomic weights.
- The magnitude of the atomic weight determined the character of the element, just as the magnitude of the molecule determined the character of a compound body.
He claimed that the arrangement would help discover many yet unknown elements and that certain characteristic properties of elements could be foretold from their atomic weights.
Mendeleev published his periodic table of all known elements and predicted several new elements to complete the table. Some people dismissed Mendeleev for predicting that there would be more elements, but he was proven to be correct when Ga (gallium) and Ge (germanium) were found in 1875 and 1886 respectively, fitting perfectly into the 2 missing spaces.
In an attempt at a chemical conception of the Aether, the assumed undetected fabric of space, he put forward a hypothesis that there existed 2 inert chemical elements of lesser atomic weight than hydrogen. Of these 2 proposed elements, he thought the lighter to be an all-penetrating, all-pervasive gas, and the slightly heavier one to be the proposed element Coronium that some thought comprised the Sun's corona.
Mendeleev died at the age of 72 from influenza.
Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish American industrialist who led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century. He is often identified as one of the richest Americans ever. Carnegie made his fortune in the steel industry, controlling the most extensive integrated iron and steel operations ever owned by an individual in the United States. During the last 18 years of his life, he gave away to charities, foundations, and universities about $350 million, almost 90% of his fortune. He challenged the rich to use their wealth to improve society, and it stimulated a wave of philanthropy.
Carnegie was born in Scotland, in a typical weaver's cottage with only one main room, consisting of half the ground floor which was shared with the neighboring weaver's family. The main room served as a living room, dining room and bedroom. He immigrated in 1848 to the United States with his very poor parents. Carnegie started work as a telegrapher and by the 1860s had investments in railroads, railroad sleeping cars, bridges and oil derricks. He accumulated further wealth as a bond salesman raising money for American enterprise in Europe. He built Pittsburgh's Carnegie Steel Company, which he sold to J.P. Morgan in 1901 for $480 million. It became the U.S. Steel Corporation. After selling Carnegie Steel, he surpassed Rockefeller as the richest American for the next couple of years, reaching a personal net worth of US$310 billion - a fortune not yet known to the modern world. Carnegie devoted the remainder of his life to large-scale philanthropy, with special emphasis on local libraries, world peace, education and scientific research.
His uncle, a Scottish political leader, deeply influenced him as a boy by introducing him to the writings of Robert Burns and historical Scottish heroes such as Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy. When Carnegie was 13 years old, his father had fallen on very hard times as a hand-loom weaver. His mother helped support the family by assisting her brother who was a cobbler and selling potted meats at her "sweetie shop". She eventually became the primary breadwinner by the 1840s. Struggling to make ends meet, the Carnegies decided to move to Pennsylvania in 1848 for the prospect of a better life. Carnegie`s father started off working in a cotton mill weaving and peddling linens. His mother earned money by binding shoes. His first job at age 13 was as a bobbin boy, changing spools of thread in a cotton mill 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.
In 1850, Carnegie became a telegraph messenger boy in the Pittsburgh Office of the Ohio Telegraph Company. He was a very hard worker and would memorize all of the locations of Pittsburgh's businesses and the faces of important men. He made many connections this way. He also paid close attention to his work, and quickly learned to distinguish the differing sounds the incoming telegraph signals produced. He developed the ability to translate signals by ear, without using the paper slip, and within a year was promoted to operator. Carnegie's education and passion for reading was given a great boost by his boss, Colonel Anderson, who opened his personal library of 400 volumes to working boys each Saturday night. Carnegie was a consistent borrower and a "self-made man" in both his economic development and his intellectual and cultural development. He was so grateful to Colonel Anderson for the use of his library that he resolved, if ever wealth came to him that other poor boys might receive opportunities similar to those for which he got. His capacity, his willingness for hard work, his perseverance, and his alertness soon brought forth opportunities.
Starting in 1853, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company employed Carnegie as a secretary/telegraph operator. Carnegie accepted this job with the railroad as he saw more prospects for career growth and experience with the railroad than with the telegraph company. At age 18, the precocious youth began a rapid advance through the company, becoming the superintendent of the Pittsburgh Division. His employment by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company would be vital to his later success. The railroads were the first big businesses in America, and the Pennsylvania was one of the largest of them all. Carnegie learned much about management and cost control during those years. Carnegie`s boss Scott helped him with his first investments, many were part of the corruption indulged in inside trading in companies that the railroad did business with, or payoffs made by contracting parties "as part of a quid pro quo" also known as “this for that”.
Before the American Civil War, Carnegie had some investments in the iron industry. Defeat of the Confederacy required vast supplies of munitions, as well as railroads and telegraph lines to deliver the goods. The war demonstrated how integral the industries were to American success. The demand for iron products, such as armor for gunboats, cannons, and shells, as well as a hundred other industrial products, made Pittsburgh a center of wartime production. Carnegie worked with others in establishing a steel rolling mill, and steel production and control of industry became the source of his fortune.
After the war, Carnegie left the railroads to devote all his energies to the iron-works trade. Carnegie worked to develop several iron works, eventually forming The Keystone Bridge Works and the Union Ironwork, in Pittsburgh. Although he had left the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, he remained closely connected to its management. He used his connection to acquire contracts for his Keystone Bridge Company and the rails produced by his iron-works. The Pennsylvania Railroad Company was his best customer. As well as having good business sense, Carnegie possessed charm and literary knowledge. He was invited to many important social functions - functions that Carnegie exploited to his own advantage. Carnegie believed in using his fortune for others and doing more than making money. He wrote:
“I propose to take an income no greater than $50,000 per annum! Beyond this I need ever earn, make no effort to increase my fortune, but spend the surplus each year for benevolent purposes! Let us cast aside business forever, except for others. Let us settle in Oxford and I shall get a thorough education, making the acquaintance of literary men. I figure that this will take 3 years active work. I shall pay especial attention to speaking in public. We can settle in London and I can purchase a controlling interest in some newspaper or live review and give the general management of it attention, taking part in public matters, especially those connected with education and improvement of the poorer classes. Man must have no idol and the amassing of wealth is one of the worst species of idolatry! No idol is more debasing than the worship of money! Whatever I engage in I must push inordinately; therefore should I be careful to choose that life which will be the most elevating in its character. To continue much longer overwhelmed by business cares and with most of my thoughts wholly upon the way to make more money in the shortest time, must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery. I will resign business at 35, but during these ensuing 2 years I wish to spend the afternoons in receiving instruction and in reading systematically!...the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced."
Carnegie did not want to marry during his mother's lifetime, instead choosing to take care of her in her illness towards the end of her life. After she died in 1886, the 51-year-old Carnegie married Louise Whitfield, who was 21 years younger. 11 years later In 1897, the couple had their only child, a daughter.
The first of his 2 great innovations was in the cheap and efficient mass production of steel by adopting and adapting the Bessemer process for steel making. Sir Henry Bessemer had invented the furnace which allowed the high carbon content of pig iron to be burnt away in a controlled and rapid way. The steel price dropped as a direct result, and Bessemer steel was rapidly adopted for rails; however, it was not suitable for buildings and bridges as there was too much carbon in the iron it making it hard and brittle.
The Bessemer process was the first inexpensive industrial process for the mass-production of steel from molten pig iron before the development of the open hearth furnace. This process has been used for hundreds of years, but not on an industrial scale. The key principle of the Bessemer process is removal of impurities from the iron by oxidation with air being blown through the molten iron. The oxidation raises the temperature of the iron mass and keeps it molten.
Pig iron was the intermediate product of smelting iron ore. It is the molten iron from the blast furnace, which is a large and cylinder-shaped furnace charged with iron ore, coke- a residue of coal used as fuel, and limestone. Charcoal and high grade coal called anthracite have also been used as fuel. Pig iron has a very high carbon content, which makes it very brittle and not useful directly as a material except for limited applications. The traditional shape of the molds used for pig iron ingots was a branching structure formed in sand, with many individual ingots at right angles to a central channel or runner, resembling a litter of piglets being suckled by a sow. When the metal had cooled and hardened, the smaller ingots (the pigs) were simply broken from the runner (the sow), hence the name pig iron. As pig iron is intended for remelting, the uneven size of the ingots and the inclusion of small amounts of sand caused only insignificant problems considering the ease of casting and handling them.
The blowing of air through the molten pig iron introduced oxygen into the melt which resulted in oxidation which removed impurities found in the pig iron, such as silicon, manganese, and carbon in the form of oxides. These oxides either escaped as gas or formed a solid slag. The refractory lining of the converter also played a role in the conversion - clay linings were used when there was little phosphorus in the raw material - this was known as the acid Bessemer process. When the phosphorus content was high, dolomite, or sometimes magnetite, linings were used in the alkaline Bessemer limestone process. In order to produce steel with desired properties, additives of alloys were added to the molten steel once the impurities had been removed.
The second of Carnegie's great innovations was in his vertical integration of all suppliers of raw materials in which the supply chain of a company is owned by that company. Usually each member of the supply chain produces a different product or service, and the products and services combine to satisfy a common need.
In the late 1880s, Carnegie Steel was the largest manufacturer of pig iron, steel rails, and coke in the world, with a capacity to produce approximately 2,000 tons of pig metal per day. In 1883, Carnegie bought the rival Homestead Steel Works, which included an extensive plant served by tributary coal and iron fields, a 685km long railway, and a line of lake steamships. Carnegie combined his assets and those of his associates in 1892 with the launching of the Carnegie Steel Company.
By 1889, the U.S. output of steel exceeded that of the UK, and Carnegie owned a large part of it. Carnegie's empire grew to include the J. Edgar Thomson Steel Works named after Carnegie's former boss and president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Pittsburgh Bessemer Steel Works, the Lucy Furnaces, the Union Iron Mills, the Union Mill, the Keystone Bridge Works, the Hartman Steel Works, the Frick Coke Company, and the Scotia ore mines. Carnegie, through Keystone, supplied the steel for and owned shares in the landmark Eads Bridge project across the Mississippi River at St. Louis, Missouri completed 1874. This project was an important proof-of-concept for steel technology, which marked the opening of a new steel market.
In 1901, Carnegie was 66 years of age and considering retirement. He reformed his enterprises into conventional joint stock corporations as preparation to this end. John Pierpont Morgan was a banker and perhaps America's most important financial deal maker. He had observed how efficiently Carnegie produced profit. He envisioned an integrated steel industry that would cut costs, lower prices to consumers, produce in greater quantities and raise wages to workers. To this end, he needed to buy out Carnegie and several other major producers and integrate them into one company, thereby eliminating duplication and waste. He concluded negotiations in 1901, and formed the United States Steel Corporation. It was the first corporation in the world with a market capitalization over $1 billion. The buyout, secretly negotiated was the largest such industrial takeover in United States history to date. The holdings were incorporated in the United States Steel Corporation, a trust organized by Morgan, and Carnegie retired from business. His steel enterprises were bought out at a figure equivalent to 12 times their annual earnings - $480 million or $13.7 billion in 2016 dollars.
Carnegie befriended the American humorist Mark Twain, as well as being in correspondence and acquaintance with most of the U.S. Presidents, statesmen, and notable writers. In 1886, Carnegie wrote a book that argued that the American republican system of government was superior to the British monarchical system. It gave a highly favorable and idealized view of American progress and criticized the British royal family.
In 1889, Carnegie published "Wealth" where he argued that the life of a wealthy industrialist should comprise 2 parts. The first part was the gathering and the accumulation of wealth. The second part was for the subsequent distribution of this wealth to benevolent causes. Carnegie believed that the rich should use their wealth to help enrich society. In that article, Carnegie also expressed sympathy for the ideas of progressive taxation and an estate tax.
Carnegie claimed that philanthropy was key to making his life worthwhile. He spent his last years as a philanthropist. From 1901 forward, public attention was turned from the shrewd business acumen which had enabled Carnegie to accumulate such a fortune, to the public-spirited way in which he devoted himself to utilizing it on philanthropic projects. To some, Carnegie represents the idea of the American dream. He was an immigrant from Scotland who came to America and became successful. He is not only known for his successes but his enormous amounts of philanthropist works, not only to charities but also to promote democracy and independence to colonized countries.
Carnegie died when he was 84 years old of bronchial pneumonia.
The "Andrew Carnegie Dictum" was to spend:
- the first third of one's life getting all the education one can.
- the next third making all the money one can.
- the last third giving it all away for worthwhile causes.
The following is taken from one of Carnegie's memos to himself:
“Man does not live by bread alone. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutrients which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach. It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else. My aspirations take a higher flight. Mine be it to have contributed to the enlightenment and the joys of the mind, to the things of the spirit, to all that tends to bring into the lives of the toilers sweetness and light. I hold this the noblest possible use of wealth.”
Carnegie built his wealth in the steel industry by maintaining an extensively integrated operating system. Carnegie also bought out some regional competitors, and merged with others, usually maintaining the majority shares in the companies. Carnegie's success was due to his convenient relationship with the railroad industries, which not only relied on steel for track, but were also making money from steel transport. The steel and railroad barons worked closely to negotiate prices instead of free market competition determinations. Besides Carnegie's market manipulation, United States trade tariffs were also working in favor of the steel industry. Carnegie spent energy and resources lobbying congress for a continuation of favorable tariffs from which he earned millions of dollars a year.
Carnegie claimed to be a champion of evolutionary thought particularly the work of Herbert Spencer, even declaring Spencer his teacher. Though Carnegie claims to be a disciple of Spencer many of his actions went against the ideas espoused by Spencer.
Spencerian evolution was for individual rights and against government interference. Spencerian evolution held that those unfit to sustain themselves must be allowed to perish. Individuals who survived to this, the latest and highest stage of evolutionary progress, would be those in whom the power of self-preservation is the greatest - the select of their generation. Spencerian 'survival of the fittest' firmly credits any provisions made to assist the weak, unskilled, poor and distressed to be an imprudent disservice to evolution. Carnegie a titan of industry seems to embody all of the qualities of Spencerian survival of the fittest. The 2 men enjoyed a mutual respect for one another and maintained correspondence until Spencer's death in 1903. There are however, some major discrepancies between Spencer's capitalist evolutionary conceptions and Carnegie's capitalist practices.
Carnegie's political and economic focus during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the defense of laissez-faire economics. He emphatically resisted government intrusion in commerce, as well as government-sponsored charities. He believed the concentration of capital was essential for societal progress and should be encouraged. Carnegie was an ardent supporter of commercial "survival of the fittest" and sought to attain immunity from business challenges by dominating all phases of the steel manufacturing procedure. Carnegie's determination to lower costs included cutting labor expenses as well. In a notably Spencerian manner, Carnegie argued that unions impeded the natural reduction of prices by pushing up costs, which blocked evolutionary progress. Carnegie felt that unions represented the narrow interest of the few while his actions benefited the entire community.
Spencer wrote that in production, the advantages of the superior individual are comparatively minor, and thus acceptable, yet the benefit that dominance provides those who control a large segment of production might be hazardous to competition. Spencer feared that an absence of "sympathetic self-restraint" of those with too much power could lead to the ruin of their competitors. Spencer argued that individuals with superior resources who deliberately used investment schemes to put competitors out of business were committing acts of "commercial murder".
On the subject of charity, Carnegie's actions diverged in the most significant and complex manner from Herbert Spencer's philosophies. Spencer declared that public schools and colleges fill the heads of students with inept, useless knowledge and exclude useful knowledge. Spencer trusted no organization of any kind, "political, religious, literary, philanthropic", and believed that as they expanded in influence so too did their regulations expand. He thought that as all institutions grow they become corrupted by the influence of power and money. The institution eventually loses its "original spirit, and sinks into a lifeless mechanism". He insisted that all forms of philanthropy that uplift the poor and downtrodden were reckless and incompetent.
Carnegie held that societal progress relied on individuals who maintained moral obligations to themselves and to society. Furthermore, he believed that charity supplied the means for those who wish to improve themselves to achieve their goals. He urged other wealthy people to contribute to society in the form of parks, works of art, libraries and other endeavors that improve the community and contribute to the "lasting good". He also held a strong opinion against inherited wealth believing that the sons of prosperous businesspersons were rarely as talented as their fathers. By leaving large sums of money to their children, wealthy business leaders were wasting resources that could be used to benefit society. He believed that the future leaders of society would rise from the ranks of the poor. He himself had risen from the bottom. He believed the poor possessed an advantage over the wealthy because they received greater attention from their parents and are taught better work ethics.
J.P.Morgan was an American financier and banker who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation. In 1892, when he was 55, Morgan arranged the merger of Edison General Electric Company and Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric. He was instrumental in the creation of the United States Steel Corporation, International Harvester and AT&T. At the height of Morgan's career during the early 1900s, he and his partners had financial investments in many large corporations and had significant influence over the nation's high finance and United States Congress members. He directed the banking coalition that stopped the Panic of 1907. He was the leading financier of the Progressive Era, and his dedication to efficiency and modernization helped transform American business. Morgan has been described as America’s greatest banker.
Morgan was born into the influential Morgan family in Connecticut, and was raised there. When he was 14, he passed the entrance exam for a school specializing in mathematics to prepare young men for careers in commerce. A year later, an illness struck which was to become more common as his life progressed. Rheumatic fever left him in so much pain that he could not walk, and he was sent to the Azores to recover. He convalesced there for almost a year, and then returned to resume his studies. After he graduated, his father sent him to a school in Switzerland where he gained fluency in French. His father then sent him to the University in Germany in order to improve his German. He attained a passable level of German within 6 months and also a degree in art history.
When he was 20, he went into banking, and 4 years later, he married. His wife died the following year. He married 3 years later and the couple had 4 children. Morgan had many partners over the years but always remained firmly in charge. His process of taking over troubled businesses to reorganize them became known as "Morganization". Morgan reorganized business structures and management in order to return them to profitability. His reputation as a banker and financier also helped bring interest from investors to the businesses that he took over.
In 1895, at the depths of the Panic of 1893 - a serious economic depression - the Federal Treasury was nearly out of gold. One of the causes for the panic of 1893 was traced back to Argentina. Investment in Argentina was encouraged; however, the failure of the 1890 wheat crop and a coup in Buenos Aires ended further investments. Because European investors were concerned that these problems might spread, they started a run on gold in the U.S. Treasury, since it was comparatively simple for them to cash in their dollar investments for exportable gold.
During the 1870s and 1880s, the United States had experienced economic growth and expansion, but much of this expansion depended on high international commodity prices. In 1893 wheat prices crashed. One of the first clear signs of trouble came in 1893 with the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which was felt to be the main cause for the economic crisis. As the price of silver rose, more and more people turned to gold.
The Sherman Silver Purchase Act was passed in response to the growing complaints of farmers' and miners' interests. Mining companies, meanwhile, had extracted vast quantities of silver from western mines. The resulting oversupply drove down the price of their product, often to below the point at which the silver could be profitably extracted. They hoped to enlist the government to increase the demand for silver. Farmers had immense debts that could not be paid off due to deflation caused by overproduction, and they urged the government to pass the Sherman Silver Purchase Act to pump silver into the economy in order to boost it and cause inflation, allowing them to pay their debts with cheaper dollars.
As concern for the state of the economy worsened, people rushed to withdraw their money from banks, and caused bank runs. The credit crunch rippled through the economy. A financial panic in the United Kingdom and a drop in trade in Europe caused foreign investors to sell back American stocks to obtain American funds backed by gold. People attempted to redeem silver notes for gold. Ultimately, the statutory limit for the minimum amount of gold in federal reserves was reached and U.S. notes could no longer be successfully redeemed for gold. Investments during the time of the panic were heavily financed through bond issues with high interest payments.
After the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed, the demand for silver and silver notes fell and the price and value of silver dropped. Many bonds lost their value and many more became worthless. A series of bank failures followed, and a series of Railway companies failed. This was followed by the bankruptcy of many other companies. In total over 15,000 companies and 500 banks, many of them in the west, failed. Almost 20% of the workforce was unemployed at the panic's peak. The huge spike in unemployment, combined with the loss of life savings kept in failed banks, meant that a once-secure middle-class could not meet their mortgage obligations. Many walked away from recently built homes as a result. Soup kitchens were opened to help feed the destitute. Facing starvation, people chopped wood, broke rocks, and sewed in exchange for food. In some cases, women resorted to prostitution to feed their families.
The protectionist McKinley Tariff was also blamed for the panic. The tariff raised the average duty on imports to almost 50%, an act designed to protect domestic industries from foreign competition. Protectionism, a tactic supported by Republicans, was fiercely debated by politicians and condemned by Democrats. Tariffs, taxes on foreign goods entering a country, served 2 purposes for the United States. One was to raise fiscal revenue for the federal government, and the other was to protect domestic manufacturers from foreign competition.
The decline of the gold reserves stored in the Treasury fell to a dangerously low level. This forced President Cleveland to borrow $65 million in gold from Wall-Street banker J.P. Morgan and the Rothschild banking family of England to support the gold standard. Morgan came up with a plan to use an old civil war statute that allowed Morgan and the Rothschilds to sell gold directly to the U.S. Treasury to restore the treasury surplus, in exchange for a 30-year bond issue. The episode saved the Treasury but hurt Cleveland's standing with the agrarian wing of the Democratic Party, and became an issue in the election of 1896 when banks came under a withering attack. Morgan and Wall Street bankers donated heavily to Republican William McKinley, who was elected in 1896 and re-elected in 1900.
After the death of his father in 1890, Morgan took control of J. S. Morgan & Co. Morgan began talks with businessman Andrew Carnegie in 1900. The goal was to buy out Carnegie's steel business and merge it with several other steel, coal, mining and shipping firms. After financing the creation of the Federal Steel Company, he finally merged it in 1901 with the Carnegie Steel Company and several other steel and iron businesses to form the United States Steel Corporation.
U.S. Steel aimed to achieve greater economies of scale, reduce transportation and resource costs, expand product lines, and improve distribution. It was also planned to allow the United States to compete globally. U.S. Steel was regarded as a monopoly by critics, as the business was attempting to dominate not only steel but also the construction of bridges, ships, railroad cars and rails, wire, nails, and a host of other products. With U.S. Steel, Morgan had captured two-thirds of the steel market.
Labor policy was a contentious issue. U.S. Steel was non-union and experienced steel producers wanted to keep it that way with the use of aggressive tactics to identify and root out pro-union "troublemakers". The lawyers and bankers who had organized the merger—notably Morgan, were more concerned with long-range profits, stability, good public relations, and avoiding trouble. The bankers' views generally prevailed, and the result was a "paternalistic" labor policy. U.S. Steel was eventually unionized in the late 1930s.
The Panic of 1907 was a financial crisis that almost crippled the American economy over a 3-week period when the New York Stock Exchange fell almost 50% from its peak the previous year. Major New York banks were on the verge of bankruptcy and there was no mechanism to rescue them, until Morgan stepped in to help resolve the crisis. Morgan then met with the nation's leading financiers in his New York mansion, where he forced them to devise a plan to meet the crisis. Morgan organized a team of bank and trust executives which redirected money between banks, secured further international lines of credit, and bought up the plummeting stocks of healthy corporations. Panic occurred, as this was during a time of economic recession - a slowdown in economic activity - and there were numerous runs on banks and trust companies.
The 1907 panic eventually spread throughout the nation when many state and local banks and businesses entered bankruptcy. Primary causes of the run included a retraction of market liquidity by a number of New York City banks and a loss of confidence among depositors, exacerbated by unregulated gambling on the prices of stocks. The panic was triggered by the failed attempt to corner the market on stock of the United Copper Company. When this bid failed and became public, banks that had lent money to the cornering scheme suffered runs that later spread to affiliated banks and trusts, leading a week later to the downfall of New York City's third-largest trust company which spread fear throughout the city's trusts as regional banks withdrew reserves from New York City banks. Panic extended across the nation as vast numbers of people withdrew deposits from their regional banks.
The panic might have deepened if not for the intervention of Morgan, who pledged large sums of his own money, and convinced other New York bankers to do the same, to shore up the banking system. At the time, the United States did not have a central bank to inject liquidity back into the market. When the financial contagion had largely ended, it was replaced by a further crisis due to the heavy borrowing of a large brokerage firm that used the stock of Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company as collateral. When TC&I's stock price collapsed, Morgan's U.S. Steel Corporation saved the day by taking it over at a great bargin. Anti-monopolist president Theodore Roosevelt was forced to approve the deal. Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, father-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., established and chaired a commission to investigate the crisis. Vowing to never let it happen again, and realizing that in a future crisis there was unlikely to be another Morgan, political leaders, led by Senator Nelson Aldrich, devised a plan that resulted in the creation of the Federal Reserve System, a conglomerate of private banks, to act as the Central Bank for America.
While conservatives hailed Morgan for his civic responsibility, his strengthening of the national economy and his devotion to the arts and religion, the left wing viewed him as one of the central figures in the system it rejected. Morgan redefined conservatism in terms of financial prowess coupled with strong commitments to religion and high culture.
Morgan did not always invest well, as several failures demonstrated. In 1900, the inventor Nikola Tesla convinced Morgan he could build a trans-Atlantic wireless communication system that would outperform the short range radio wave based wireless telegraph system then being demonstrated by Marconi. Morgan agreed to finance Tesla to build the system in return for a 51% control of the patents. Almost as soon as the contract was signed Tesla decided to scale up the facility to include his ideas of terrestrial wireless power transmission to make what he thought was a more competitive system. Morgan considered Tesla's changes and requests for the additional amounts of money to build it and refused to fund the changes. With no additional investment capital available Tesla`s project was abandoned in 1906, never to become operational.
Morgan suffered a rare business defeat in 1902 when he attempted to enter the London Underground field. Transit magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes thwarted Morgan's effort to obtain parliamentary authority to build an underground road that would have competed with "Tube" lines controlled by Yerkes.
Morgan often had a tremendous physical effect on people. One man said that a visit from Morgan left him feeling "as if a gale had blown through the house." Morgan was physically large with massive shoulders, piercing eyes, and a purple deformed nose because of a chronic skin disease. He was known to dislike publicity and hated being photographed. His social and professional self-confidence were too well established to be undermined by this affliction. It appeared as if he dared people to meet him squarely and not shrink from the sight, asserting the force of his character over the ugliness of his face.
His house became the first electrically lit private residence in New York. His interest in the new technology was a result of his financing Thomas Edison's Edison Electric Illuminating Company in 1878. An avid yachtsman, Morgan owned several large yachts. The well-known quote, "If you have to ask the price, you can't afford it" is commonly attributed to Morgan in response to a question about the cost of maintaining a yacht.
Morgan was scheduled to travel on the ill-fated maiden voyage of the Titanic, but canceled at the last minute. The White Star Line, which operated Titanic, was part of Morgan's International Mercantile Marine Company, and Morgan was to have his own private suite and promenade deck on the ship. In response to the sinking of Titanic, Morgan purportedly said, "Monetary losses amount to nothing in life. It is the loss of life that counts."
Morgan was a notable collector of books, pictures, paintings, clocks and other art objects. Most of his collections were loaned or given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art of which he was president and was a major force in its establishment. Many more of his collections were housed in his London house and in his private library in New York. By the turn of the century, Morgan had become one of America's most important collectors of gems and had assembled the most important gem collection in the U.S. as well as of over a thousand gemstones.
Morgan died in Rome, Italy, in his sleep at the age of 75, leaving his fortune and business to his son, John Pierpont Morgan, Jr. At the time of his death, he held only 20% of his net worth. His fortune was estimated at "only" US$80 million, prompting John D. Rockefeller to say: “and to think, he wasn't even a rich man”.
His son, J. P. Morgan, Jr., took over the business at his father's death, but was never as influential. As required by the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act, the "House of Morgan" became 3 entities. The Glass–Steagall Act described 4 provisions of the U.S. Banking Act of 1933. The 4 provisions separated commercial and investment banking. Starting in the early 1960s, federal banking regulators interpreted provisions of the Glass–Steagall Act to permit commercial banks to engage in investment banking. Congressional efforts to repeal the Glass–Steagall Act that restricted affiliations between commercial banks and securities firms, culminated in the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLBA), which repealed the provisions restricting affiliations between banks and securities firms. President Bill Clinton publicly declared that the Glass–Steagall law was no longer appropriate. Many commentators have stated that the GLBA's repeal of the affiliation restrictions of the Glass–Steagall Act was an important cause of the financial crisis of 2008. It pleased both banks and depositors by letting banks gamble with depositors money and guaranteeing deposits if banks failed.
Rockefeller was an American oil industry business magnate and philanthropist, who is considered to be the wealthiest American of all time by virtually every source, and - largely - the richest person in modern history.
Born in New York, he was shaped by his con man father and religious mother. His family moved several times before eventually settling in Cleveland, Ohio. Rockefeller became an assistant bookkeeper at the age of 16, and went into a business partnership when he was 20 years old. Instead of drilling for oil, he concentrated on refining. His company prospered, incorporating local refineries, until the foundation of Standard Oil which he ran until officially retiring in 1897 when he was 58.
Kerosene also known as lamp oil, was widely used as a fuel in industry and households. As the much more flammable and volatile gasoline grew in importance, Rockefeller's wealth soared and he became the richest person in the country, controlling 90% of all oil in the United States at his peak. For every liter of crude oil, he was able to process in his oil refineries about a half liter of gasoline.
Oil was used throughout the country as a light source until the introduction of electricity and as a fuel after the invention of automobile. Rockefeller had enormous influence on the railroad industry, which transported his oil around the country. Standard Oil dominated the oil industry and was the first great business trust in the United States. Rockefeller revolutionized the petroleum industry, and along with other key contemporary industrialists such as steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, defined the structure of modern philanthropy.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1911 that Standard Oil must be dismantled because it violated federal anti-trust laws; it was broken up into 34 separate entities that included companies that would become Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, and others. Some of them are still among companies with the largest revenue. The individual pieces of the company were worth more than the whole, and as shares of the individual companies doubled and tripled in value in their early years, Rockefeller became the country’s first billionaire with a fortune worth nearly 2% of the national economy.
Rockefeller's con-artist father was first a lumberman and then a traveling salesman who identified himself as a "botanic physician" and sold elixirs. The locals referred to the mysterious but fun-loving man as "Big Bill" and "Devil Bill". He was a sworn foe of conventional morality who had opted for a vagabond existence and who returned to his family infrequently. Throughout his life, Bill was notorious for shady schemes. Bill once bragged, "I cheat my boys every chance I get. I want to make 'em sharp." John did his share of the regular household chores and earned extra money raising turkeys, selling potatoes and candy, and eventually lending small sums of money to neighbors. He followed his father's advice to "trade dishes for platters" and always get the better part of any deal.
Rockefeller's mother was a homemaker and a devout Baptist, who struggled to maintain a semblance of stability at home, as the father was frequently gone for extended periods. She also put up with his philandering and his double life, which included bigamy. Thrifty by nature and necessity, she taught her son that "willful waste makes woeful want".
As a youth, Rockefeller reportedly said that his 2 great ambitions were to be a millionaire and to live 100 years. His motto was "gain all you can, save all you can, and give all you can."
At that time, the Federal government was subsidizing oil prices and it created an oil-drilling boom with thousands of speculators attempting to make their fortunes. Most failed, but those who struck oil did not even need to be efficient. They would blow holes in the ground and gather up the oil as they could, often leading to creeks and rivers flowing with wasted oil in the place of water. In this environment of wasteful boom, Rockefeller started to invest in building an oil refinery in 1863. He was only 24. The commercial oil business was then in its infancy. Whale oil had become too expensive for the masses, and a cheaper, general-purpose lighting fuel was needed.
While other refineries would keep the 60% of oil product that became kerosene, and dump the other 40% in rivers and massive sludge piles, Rockefeller remained as thrifty and efficient as ever, using the gasoline to fuel the refinery, and selling the rest as lubricating oil, petroleum jelly and paraffin wax, and other by-products. Tar was used for paving and naphtha was shipped to gas plants. Likewise, Rockefeller's refineries hired their own plumbers, cutting the cost of pipe-laying in half. He took advantage of postwar prosperity and the great expansion westward fostered by the growth of railroads and an oil-fueled economy. He borrowed heavily, reinvested profits, adapted rapidly to changing markets, and fielded observers to track the quickly expanding industry. Rockefeller continued the practice of borrowing and reinvesting profits, controlling costs, and using refineries' waste. The company owned 2 Cleveland refineries and a marketing subsidiary in New York. It was the largest oil refinery in the world. Rockefeller's company was the predecessor of the Standard Oil Company.
In 1870, when he was 31, Rockefeller formed Standard Oil of Ohio. Continuing to apply his work ethic and efficiency, Rockefeller quickly expanded the company to be the most profitable refiner in Ohio. Likewise, it became one of the largest shippers of oil and kerosene in the country. The railroads competed fiercely for traffic and, in an attempt to create a cartel to control freight rates, Rockefeller offered special deals to bulk customers like Standard Oil, outside the main oil centers. The cartel offered preferential treatment as a high-volume shipper, which included a steep discounts/rebates of up to 50% for their product. Part of this scheme was the announcement of sharply increased freight charges. This touched off a firestorm of protest from independent oil well owners, including boycotts and vandalism, which led to the discovery of Standard Oil's part in the deal. While competitors may have been unhappy, Rockefeller's efforts did bring American consumers cheaper kerosene and other oil by-products. Before 1870, oil light was only for the wealthy, provided by expensive whale oil. But during the next decade, kerosene became commonly available to the working and middle classes.
Rockefeller continued with his self-reinforcing cycle of buying the least efficient competing refiners, improving the efficiency of his operations, pressing for discounts on oil shipments, undercutting his competition, making secret deals, raising investment pools, and buying rivals out. In less than 4 months in what was later known as "The Cleveland Conquest" or "The Cleveland Massacre", Standard Oil absorbed 22 of its 26 Cleveland competitors. For many of his competitors, Rockefeller had merely to show them his books so they could see what they were up against and make them a decent offer. If they refused his offer, he told them he would run them into bankruptcy and then cheaply buy up their assets at auction. But this was not intended to eliminate competition entirely. Instead of wanting to eliminate them, Rockefeller saw himself as the industry's savior, "an angel of mercy" absorbing the weak and making the industry as a whole stronger, more efficient, and more competitive.
Standard was growing horizontally and vertically. It added its own pipelines, tank cars, and home delivery network. It kept oil prices low to stave off competitors, made its products affordable to the average household, and, to increase market penetration, sometimes sold below cost. It developed over 300 oil-based products from tar to paint to Vaseline petroleum jelly to chewing gum. By the end of the 1870s, Standard was refining over 90% of the oil in the U.S. Rockefeller had already become a millionaire with a net worth of $25 million in 2015 dollars. He instinctively realized that orderliness would only proceed from centralized control of large aggregations of plant and capital, with the one aim of an orderly flow of products from the producer to the consumer. That orderly, economic, efficient flow is what we now, many years later, call 'vertical integration'.
In 1877, Standard clashed with the Pennsylvania Railroad, Standard's chief hauler. Rockefeller envisioned pipelines as an alternative transport system for oil and began a campaign to build and acquire them. The railroad, seeing Standard's incursion into the transportation and pipeline fields, struck back and formed a subsidiary to buy and build oil refineries and pipelines. Standard countered and held back its shipments and, with the help of other railroads, started a price war that dramatically reduced freight payments and caused labor unrest. Rockefeller prevailed and the railroad sold its oil interests to Standard. But in the aftermath of that battle, in 1879 the government of Pennsylvania indicted Rockefeller on charges of monopolizing the oil trade, starting an avalanche of similar court proceedings in other states and making a national issue of Standard Oil's business practices. Rockefeller was under great strain during the 1870s and 1880s when he was carrying out his plan of consolidation and integration and being attacked by the press.
Although it always had hundreds of competitors, Standard Oil gradually gained dominance of oil refining and sales as market share in the United States through horizontal integration, by internal expansion, acquisitions and mergers ending up with about 90% of the US market. In the kerosene industry, the company replaced the old distribution system with its own vertical system. It supplied kerosene by tank cars that brought the fuel to local markets, and tank wagons then delivered to retail customers, thus bypassing the existing network of wholesale jobbers. Despite improving the quality and availability of kerosene products while greatly reducing their cost to the public by nearly 80%, Standard Oil's business practices created intense controversy.
A transportation company was legally prohibited from favoring one customer over another. Standard's most potent weapons against competitors were underselling, differential pricing, and secret transportation rebates. The deal was that if the rails transported the fuel cheaper, it was able to buy the fuel it needed to run the trains cheaper as well. This allowed Standard Oil to undercut its competitors. The firm was attacked by journalists and politicians throughout its existence, in part for these monopolistic methods, giving momentum to the antitrust movement and laws that promoted and sought to maintain market competition by regulating anti-competitive conduct.
By 1880, Standard Oil was reputed to be the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly that ever fastened upon a country. To critics Rockefeller replied, "In a business so large as ours... some things are likely to be done which we cannot approve. We correct them as soon as they come to our knowledge."
At that time, many legislatures had made it difficult to incorporate in one state and operate in another. As a result, Rockefeller and his associates owned dozens of separate corporations, each of which operated in just one state; the management of the whole enterprise was rather unwieldy.
In 1882, when he was 43, Rockefeller's lawyers created an innovative form of corporation to centralize their holdings, giving birth to the Standard Oil Trust. The "trust" was a corporation of corporations, and the entity's size and wealth drew much attention. 9 trustees, including Rockefeller, ran the 41 companies in the trust. The public and the press were immediately suspicious of this new legal entity, and other businesses seized upon the idea and emulated it, further inflaming public sentiment. Standard Oil had gained an aura of invincibility, always prevailing against competitors, critics, and political enemies. It had become the richest, biggest, most feared business in the world, seemingly immune to the boom and bust of the business cycle, consistently making profits year after year.
The company's vast American empire included 20,000 domestic wells, 6,500 km of pipeline, 5,000 tank cars, and over 100,000 employees. Its share of world oil refining topped out above 90% but slowly dropped to about 80% for the rest of the century. Despite the formation of the trust and its perceived immunity from all competition, by the 1880s Standard Oil had passed its peak of power over the world oil market. Rockefeller finally gave up his dream of controlling all of the world's oil refining. He admitted later, "We realized that public sentiment would be against us if we actually refined all the oil." Over time foreign competition and new finds abroad eroded his dominance.
In the early 1880s, Rockefeller created one of his most important innovations referred to as “future markets”. Rather than try to influence the price of crude oil directly by setting prices of oil at the time of delivery, Rockefeller issued certificates called “future contracts” for oil stored in its pipelines. These certificates were then traded by speculators who agreed to take on both the risk and reward of a volatile market. Oil was bought and sold for delivery at some agreed-upon date in the future with a price fixed at the time of the deal.
In the 1880`s, 85% of world crude production was coming from Pennsylvania wells. Russia and Asia began to reach the world market. Competitors began to establish their own refining enterprises in the abundant and cheaper Russian oil fields, including pipelines and ships called “oil tankers”. The Rothschilds jumped into the fray providing financing. Additional fields were discovered in Burma and Java. Even more critical, the invention of the light bulb gradually began to erode the dominance of kerosene for illumination. But Standard Oil adapted, developing a European presence, expanding into natural gas production in the U.S. then into gasoline for automobiles, which until then had been considered a waste product left when everything else was removed.
Rockefeller moved to New York City and became a central figure in the city's business community. He bought a residence near the mansions of other magnates such as Vanderbilt. Despite personal threats and constant pleas for charity, Rockefeller took the new elevated train to his downtown office daily.
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was central to the breakup of the Standard Oil trust. It forced a separation of Standard Oil of Ohio from the rest of the company in 1892 - the first step in the dissolution of the trust. It prohibited certain business activities that federal government regulators deem to be anti-competitive, and required the federal government to investigate and pursue trusts, centuries-old contracts whereby one party entrusted its property to a second party commonly used to hold inheritances for the benefit of children. They were used to combine several large businesses for monopolistic purposes to exert complete control over a market. The law attempted to prevent the artificial raising of prices by restriction of trade or supply. "Innocent monopolies", achieved solely by merit, were perfectly legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve that status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, were not. The purpose of the Sherman Act was not to protect competitors from harm from legitimately successful businesses, nor to prevent businesses from gaining honest profits from consumers, but rather to preserve a competitive marketplace to protect consumers from abuses. The Act was also used to oppose the combination of entities that could potentially harm competition, such as monopolies or cartels.
In the 1890s, Rockefeller expanded into iron ore and ore transportation, forcing a collision with steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, and their competition became a major subject of the newspapers and cartoonists. He went on a massive buying spree acquiring leases for crude oil production in Ohio, Indiana, and West Virginia, as the original Pennsylvania oil fields began to play out. Amid the frenetic expansion, Rockefeller began to think of retirement.
Upon his ascent to the presidency, Theodore Roosevelt initiated dozens of suits under the Sherman Antitrust Act and coaxed reforms out of Congress. In 1901, U.S. Steel, then controlled by J. Pierpont Morgan, having bought Andrew Carnegie's steel assets, offered to buy Standard Oil's iron interests as well.
One of the most effective attacks on Rockefeller and his firm was the 1904 publication of “The History of the Standard Oil Company” by Tarbell, a leading muckraker. Tarbell's father had been driven out of the oil business. She documented the company's espionage, price wars, heavy-handed marketing tactics, and courtroom evasions.
Rockefeller spent the last 40 years of his life in retirement. His fortune was mainly used to create the modern systematic approach of targeted philanthropy. He was able to do this through the creation of foundations that had a major effect on medicine, education and scientific research. His foundations pioneered the development of medical research and were instrumental in the eradication of hookworm and yellow fever. Rockefeller was also the founder of both the University of Chicago and Rockefeller University and funded the establishment of Central Philippine University in the Philippines. He was a devout and devoted Baptist, and supported many church-based institutions. Rockefeller adhered to total abstinence from alcohol and tobacco throughout his life. He was a faithful congregant of his local church where he taught Sunday school, and served as a trustee, clerk, and occasional janitor. Religion was a guiding force throughout his life, and Rockefeller believed it to be the source of his success. Rockefeller was also considered a supporter of capitalism based on a perspective of social Darwinism, and was quoted often as saying "The growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest."
He wrote and published his memoirs beginning in 1908. He was already 69 by then. Critics found his writing to be sanitized and disingenuous and thought that statements such as "the underlying, essential element of success in business is to follow the established laws of high-class dealing" seemed to be at odds with his true business methods.
Rockefeller and his son continued to consolidate their oil interests as best they could until New Jersey, in 1909, changed its incorporation laws to effectively allow a re-creation of the trust in the form of a single holding company. At last in 1911, the Supreme Court ordered it to be broken up into 34 new companies. These included, among many others, Continental Oil, which became Conoco, Standard of Indiana, which became Amoco aka BP, Standard of California, which became Chevron; Standard of New Jersey, which became Esso and later, Exxon, Standard of New York, which became Mobil.
Rockefeller, who had rarely sold shares, held over 25% of Standard's stock at the time of the breakup. He and all other stockholders received proportionate shares in each of the 34 companies. In the aftermath, Rockefeller's control over the oil industry was somewhat reduced but over the next 10 years, the breakup also proved immensely profitable for him. The companies' combined net worth rose 5-fold and Rockefeller’s personal wealth jumped to $900 million.
The strike, called in 1913, by the United Mine Workers over the issue of union representation, was against coal mine operators. Few of the miners actually belonged to the union or participated in the strike call, but the majority honored it. Strike breakers were threatened and sometimes attacked. Both sides purchased substantial arms and ammunition. Striking miners were forced to abandon their homes in company towns and lived in tent cities erected by the union. Under the protection of the National Guard, some miners returned to work and some strikebreakers imported from the eastern coalfields joined them as Guard troops protected their movements. One year later, a substantial portion of the troops were withdrawn. A general fire-fight occurred between strikers and troops. The camp burned, and 15 women and children in the camp were burned to death. The casualties suffered were labeled a massacre and mobilized public opinion against the Rockefellers and the coal industry. Initially following the massacre, Rockefeller denied any responsibility and minimized the seriousness of the event. In his 50s Rockefeller suffered from moderate depression and digestive troubles and during a stressful period in the 1890s he developed alopecia, the loss of most of his body hair.
The Rockefeller wealth, distributed as it was through a system of foundations and trusts, continued to fund family philanthropic, commercial, and, eventually, political aspirations throughout the 20th century. Rockefeller created the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913. He gave nearly $250 million to the foundation, which focused on public health, medical training, and the arts. In the 1920s, the Rockefeller Foundation funded a hookworm eradication campaign through the International Health Division. This campaign used a combination of politics and science, along with collaboration between healthcare workers and government officials to accomplish its goals. In total Rockefeller donated about $550 million.
Rockefeller died of arteriosclerosis when he was 98 years old.
Notwithstanding these varied aspects of his public life, Rockefeller may ultimately be remembered simply for the raw size of his wealth. His wealth continued to grow significantly after as the demand for gasoline soared, including significant interests in banking, shipping, mining, railroads, and other industries. This was probably the greatest amount of wealth that any private citizen had ever been able to accumulate by his own efforts.
By the time of his death in 1937, Rockefeller's remaining fortune, largely tied up in permanent family trusts, was estimated at $1.4 billion, while the total national GDP was $92 billion. After he died, his descendants continued to process oils that were pumped from the ground from deeply buried seas of crude oil called petroleum. These seas were produced from decaying jungles of plants buried and pressure cooked millions of years ago. At first, they distilled the oil to produce fuels such as kerosene and gasoline. They separated the heavier and less volatile fractions to produce lubricating oils, greases, tar, paraffin wax and asphalt.
Alkenes, the carbon chains with double bonds were removed from the petroleum soups to manufacture plastics. Plastics were the newly discovered materials that were malleable and could be easily molded into solid objects of any shape desired. Due to their relatively low cost, ease of manufacture, versatility, and water resistance , plastics were used in an enormous and expanding range of products, from paper clips to spaceships and displaced many traditional materials, such as wood, stone, bone, leather, paper, metal, glass, and ceramic. Plastics made walls, roofs, plumbing, furniture, toys and most things found in and outside of houses. Plastics were so cheap while petroleum was plentiful, that they were used in disposable packaging. The discarded plastic bags and containers littered the environment and were eaten by animals and broken down to nano size particles that ended up in the water, the soil and the air. Being so small, they were very difficult and costly to filter out and ended up polluting and making sick the humans who could not avoid breathing and eating them.
When the petroleum seas got slowly depleted, mining methods were developed that washed out any remaining traces of oil left behind. Sands containing oil called tar sands were washed polluting the nearby lakes and rivers in the process. Rocks deep underground were cracked and flooded in a process called “fracking” polluting the ground water. The fuels distilled from the oils were burned polluting the air.
Burning 1 liter of gasoline was equivalent to burning almost 25,000 kg of wood. Gasoline was in effect buried sunshine and was not a renewable source of energy. Reserves were eventually depleted.
People were so addicted to petroleum for its fuel and they burned so much of it that when the oil reserves finally became depleted along with the raw materials for plastics, people realized that burning petroleum for fuel was not such a clever thing to do. Not only did it greatly pollute the environment, but the cheap raw materials for plastics suddenly disappeared. People realized that burning gasoline for fuel was like burning your money and your house to keep warm.
"My sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw and heard."
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter often called "The Great American Novel".
Twain was raised in Missouri, which later provided the setting for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He served an apprenticeship with a printer and then worked as a typesetter, contributing articles to the newspaper of his older brother. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join his brother in Nevada. He referred humorously to his lack of success at mining, turning to journalism. His humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", was published in 1865, based on a story that he heard where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention and was even translated into French. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.
Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, but he invested in ventures that lost most of it, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter that failed because of its complexity and imprecision. He filed for bankruptcy in the wake of these financial setbacks, but he eventually overcame his financial troubles with help. He chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, even after he had no legal responsibility to do so.
Twain was born shortly after an appearance of Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it" as well; he died the day after the comet returned. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist this country has produced", and is regarded as "the father of American literature".
Twain was the sixth of 7 children. Only 3 of his siblings survived childhood. When he was 4, Twain's family moved to a port town on the Mississippi River. Slavery was legal in Missouri at the time, and it became a theme in these writings. His father was an attorney and judge, who died of pneumonia in 1847, when Twain was 11. The next year, Twain left school after the fifth grade to become a printer's apprentice. In 1851 he began working as a typesetter, contributing articles and humorous sketches to the newspaper his brother owned. When he was 18, he left to work as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, joining the newly formed International Typographical Union, the printers trade union. He educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider information than at a conventional school.
Twain describes his boyhood in Life on the Mississippi, stating that "there was but one permanent ambition" among his comrades: to be a steamboat-man.
“Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary – from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay.”
As Twain describes it, the pilot's prestige exceeded that of the captain. The pilot had to:
“…get up a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cottonwood and every obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles; and more than that, must… actually know where these things are in the dark.”
A steamboat pilot took Twain on as a cub pilot to teach him the river for $500, payable out of Twain's first wages after graduating. Twain studied the Mississippi, learning its landmarks, how to navigate its currents effectively, and how to read the river and its constantly shifting channels, reefs, submerged snags, and rocks that would "tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated". It was more than 2 years before he received his pilot's license. Piloting also gave him his pen name from "mark twain", the cry for a measured river depth of 4m which was safe water for a steamboat.
While training, Twain convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him. Henry was killed in 1858, when their steamboat exploded. Twain claimed to have foreseen this death in a dream a month earlier, which inspired his interest in parapsychology.
Twain was guilt-stricken and held himself responsible for the rest of his life. He continued to work on the river and was a river pilot until the Civil War broke out in 1861, when traffic was curtailed along the Mississippi River. At the start of hostilities, he enlisted briefly in a local Confederate unit. He later wrote the sketch "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed", describing how he and his friends had been Confederate volunteers for 2 weeks.
His older brother became secretary to Nevada Territory governor in 1861, and Twain joined him when he moved west. The brothers traveled more than 2 weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City. Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner. He failed as a miner and went to work at the Virginia City newspaper. Twain moved to San Francisco in 1864, still as a journalist, and met many writers.
His first success as a writer came when his humorous tall tale "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was published in 1865, in the New York weekly, bringing him national attention. A year later, he traveled to the Sandwich Islands Hawaii as a reporter.
In 1867, a newspaper funded his trip to the Mediterranean, including a tour of Europe and the Middle East. He wrote a collection of travel letters which were later compiled as The Innocents Abroad. It was on this trip that he saw a photograph of Olivia. Twain later claimed to have fallen in love at first sight. Twain and Olivia corresponded throughout 1868. She rejected his first marriage proposal, but they were married in 1870, where he courted her and managed to overcome her father's initial reluctance. She came from a wealthy but liberal family. Through her, he met abolitionists, socialists, principled atheists and activists for women's rights and social equality. Twain moved his family to Connecticut, where he arranged the building of a home. The couple's marriage lasted 34 years until Olivia's death in 1904.
Twain was fascinated with science and scientific inquiry. He developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla, and the 2 spent much time together in Tesla's laboratory. Twain patented 3 inventions, including an "Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments" to replace suspenders and a history trivia game. Most commercially successful was a self-pasting scrapbook; a dried adhesive on the pages needed only to be moistened before use. Over 25,000 were sold.
Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court features a time traveler from the contemporary U.S., using his knowledge of science to introduce modern technology to Arthurian England. This type of storyline became a common feature of the science fiction sub-genre alternate history.
Twain made a substantial amount of money through his writing, but he lost a great deal through investments. He invested mostly in new inventions and technology, particularly in the Paige typesetting machine. It was a beautifully engineered mechanical marvel that amazed viewers when it worked, but it was prone to breakdowns. Twain spent his fortune on it between 1880 and 1894, but before it could be perfected it was rendered obsolete by the Linotype. He lost the bulk of his book profits, as well as a substantial portion of his wife's inheritance.
Twain also lost money through his publishing house of Charles L. Webster and Company, which enjoyed initial success selling the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant but failed soon afterward, losing money on a biography of Pope Leo XIII. Fewer than 200 copies were sold. Twain and his family closed down their expensive Hartford home in response to the dwindling income and moved to Europe in 1891.
In 1893, he began a friendship with Rogers, a financier who was a principal of Standard Oil, that lasted the remainder of his life. Twain's writings and lectures with a Rogers' help enabled him to recover financially. Rogers first made him file for bankruptcy in 1894, then had him transfer the copyrights on his written works to his wife to prevent creditors from gaining possession of them. Finally, Rogers took absolute charge of Twain's money until all his creditors were paid.
Twain accepted an offer and embarked on a year-long, around the world lecture tour in 1895 to pay off his creditors in full, although he was no longer under any legal obligation to do so. It was a long, arduous journey and he was sick much of the time. The first part of the itinerary took him across northern America to British Columbia, Canada. For the second part, he sailed across the Pacific Ocean. His scheduled lecture in Honolulu, Hawaii had to be canceled due to a cholera epidemic. Twain went on to Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, India, Mauritius, and South Africa. His 3 months in India became the centerpiece of his book Following the Equator. He then sailed back to England, completing his circumnavigation of the world begun 14 months before. Twain and his family spent 4 more years in Europe, mainly in England and Austria.
He then returned to America in 1900, having earned enough to pay off his debts and then he became his country's most prominent opponent of imperialism, raising the issue in his speeches, interviews, and writings. In 1901, he began serving as vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League of New York.
Twain was in great demand as a featured speaker, performing solo humorous talks similar to modern stand-up comedy. He gave paid talks to many men's clubs. One day when it was reported that he had died, he replied that “the report is greatly exaggerated”. Twain passed through a period of deep depression which began in 1896 when his daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivia's death in 1904 deepened his gloom.
Twain formed a club in 1906 for girls whom he viewed as surrogate granddaughters called the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club. The dozen or so members ranged in age from 10 to 16. He exchanged letters with his "Angel Fish" girls and invited them to concerts and the theater and to play games. Twain wrote in 1908 that the club was his "life's chief delight". In 1907, he met Dorothy Quick (aged 11) on a transatlantic crossing, beginning "a friendship that was to last until the very day of his death".
Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse, but he became a chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies, and murderous acts of mankind. At mid-career, he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative, and social criticism in Huckleberry Finn. He was a master of rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language.
Many of his works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for its frequent use of the word "nigger", which was in common usage in the pre-Civil War period in which the novel was set.
Twain's last work was his autobiography, which he dictated and thought would be most entertaining if he went off on whims and tangents in non-chronological order. Some archivists and compilers have rearranged the biography into a more conventional form, thereby eliminating some of Twain's humor and the flow of the book.
Before 1899, Twain was an ardent imperialist. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, he spoke out strongly in favor of American interests in the Hawaiian Islands. He said the war with Spain in 1898 was "the worthiest" war ever fought. In 1899, however, he reversed course. Twain describes his transformation and political awakening, in the context of the Philippine–American War, to anti-imperialism:
“I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific... Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself?... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for 3 centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then. I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land”.
During the Boxer rebellion, Mark Twain said that "the Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success."
From 1901, soon after his return from Europe, until his death in 1910, Twain was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States and had tens of thousands of members.
During the Philippine-American War, Twain wrote a short pacifist story titled The War Prayer, which makes the point that humanism and Christianity's preaching of love are incompatible with the conduct of war. It was submitted to Harper's Bazaar for publication, but it was rejected. Because he had an exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, Twain could not publish The War Prayer elsewhere and it remained unpublished until 1923. It was republished as campaigning material by Vietnam War protesters.
“I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute”.
Twain was an adamant supporter of the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves, even going so far as to say, "Lincoln's Proclamation ... not only set the black slaves free, but set the white man free also". He argued that non-whites did not receive justice in the United States, once saying, "I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature... but I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done to him". He paid for at least one black person to attend Yale Law School and for another black person to attend a southern university to become a minister.
Twain is less supportive concerning the treatment of American Indians when he wrote in 1870:
“His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and devilish instincts. With him, gratitude is an unknown emotion; and when one does him a kindness, it is safest to keep the face toward him, lest the reward be an arrow in the back. To accept of a favor from him is to assume a debt which you can never repay to his satisfaction, though you bankrupt yourself trying. The scum of the earth!”
Twain was also a staunch supporter of women's rights and an active campaigner for women's suffrage. His "Votes for Women" speech, in which he pressed for the granting of voting rights to women, is considered one of the most famous in history. In this speech Twain spoke out for women's full enfranchisement in the electoral process and predicted that within 25 years, they would have the right to vote. This proved to be true, the Women's Suffrage Amendment to the Constitution being passed and ratified by all the states in 1920. Helen Keller benefited from Twain's support as she pursued her college education and publishing despite her deafness, blindness and and financial limitations.
Twain wrote glowingly about unions in the river boating industry and supported the labor movement. In a speech to them, he said:
“Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat”.
Twain was critical of organized religion and certain elements of Christianity through his later life. He wrote, for example, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so", and "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be - a Christian". With anti-Catholic sentiment rampant in 19th century America, Twain noted he was "educated to enmity toward everything that is Catholic". As an adult, he engaged in religious discussions and attended services, his theology developing as he wrestled with the deaths of loved ones and with his own mortality.
Twain generally avoided publishing his most controversial opinions on religion in his lifetime, and they are known from essays and stories that were published later. In essays in the 1880s, Twain stated that he believed in an almighty God, but not in any messages, revelations, holy scriptures such as the Bible, Providence, or retribution in the afterlife. "The goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His works and the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws which determine small matters such as who dies in a pestilence".
In some later writings in the 1890s, he was less optimistic about the goodness of God, observing that "if our Maker is all-powerful for good or evil, He is not in His right mind". At other times, he conjectured sardonically that perhaps “God had created the world with all its tortures for some purpose of His own, but was otherwise indifferent to humanity, which was too petty and insignificant to deserve His attention anyway”.
Twain visited Salt Lake City for 2 days and met there members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They also gave him a Book of Mormon. He later wrote in Roughing It about that book:
“The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament.”
Twain's frankest views on religion appeared in his final work Autobiography of Mark Twain, the publication of which started 100 years after his death. In it, he said:
“There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory as it is - in our country particularly and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree - it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime - the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled”.
Twain was born 2 weeks after Halley's Comet's closest approach in 1835; he said in 1909:
“I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together".”
Twain's prediction was accurate; he died of a heart attack at age 75, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth.
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