Bernard A. Weisberger - The Titans

In the summer of 1810, a sixteen-year-old boy who lived on Staten Island in New York harbor decided to go into the shipping business. He persuaded his mother to lend him $100 out of the precious family savings and bought a periauger - a tiny boat with two masts and a flat bottom. Then the lad offered a ferry service between Staten Island and the lower tip of Manhattan, five miles away. The fare was eighteen cents each way, and a quarter for the round trip. Every day, the little boat left on schedule, and despite tricky tides, choppy waves, and high winds, it was rarely late. The work was wet and hard. It was also the cornerstone of a career for young Cornelius Vanderbilt.

In those days, barely 100,000 people lived in New York. James Madison was president of the United States, the fourth man to hold the office he had helped write into the Constitution. Cities like Buffalo, Cincinnati, and St. Louis were rough frontier settlements; Chicago did not even exist. The West of forest and Indian began at the Alleghenies, at some points less than 100 miles inland from the Atlantic coast. Most Americans lived on farms, wore homespun clothing, read by oil lamps, and warmed themselves at wood fires. Men and goods moved by the power of wind and animal muscle, at speeds of under ten miles per hour. It took two full days to make the ninety-mile trip from New York to Philadelphia.

By the time Vanderbilt died, nearly seventy years later, the steam engine had changed the face of the land. Steam provided a new and gigantic source of power that men could add to their own as they toiled to unlock the hidden treasure of the American continent. Steam engines could power a threshing machine in an Iowa harvest field, a drill excavating a copper mine in Montana, or a loom spinning cotton yarn into cloth in a Rhode Island textile factory. Steam locomotives, hurtling over a network of railroads, could bring the products of one area to fill the needs of another. Farm produce from the prairies, bales of cotton and tobacco from the South, factory-made goods from the East, mineral ores from Minnesota and the Rockies, crisscrossed the country. Most important of all, the trains carried people. First came pioneers, prospectors, and men looking for quick money. Then came immigrants, families with children looking for a place to settle down and get to work on turning their dreams into reality. But faster than the trains, which now could carry passengers the 900 miles from New York to Chicago in a little over twenty-four hours, was the electric spark of the telegraph, which could rap out a message in San Francisco and New York simultaneously. That message was the new and equally marvelous age of electricity.

In 1877, the year of Vanderbilts death, the telegraph was already thirty years old, the telephone had just been invented, and practical electric motors and electric lights were just around the corner. In another twenty years, gasoline engines would be applied to transportation. Then men would travel at ever-increasing speeds over an ever-improving network of roads, with no need to be bothered with boilers and rails. But why bother with keeping to the roads? And so, eventually, men took to the air, powering their airplanes with highly developed gasoline engines. The era of steam was only the opening chapter in the story of a modern world.

Millions of men helped bring this new world to birth: inventors and scientists, soldiers and statesmen, pioneer settlers and industrial laborers. But a much smaller number of men organized the work of others. They brought the savings of a rapidly growing population - investment capital in the language of economics - into working patterns with the new machines and the old raw materials. In doing so, many of them created giant industrial and transportation empires. Because it all happened so quickly and on such a vast scale, these so-called captains of industry grew rich and powerful almost overnight. They were, like characters in a fairy tale, gifted with the magic powers of imagination and ability, with necessity playing the part of fairy godmother. Like all men who gain control over others, they were both respected and feared: admired by those who envied their dynamic drive, or hated by those they ruined in their determination to make money and get ahead, whatever the cost. Few of these larger-than-life-size men found time in their busy lives for reflection or gentleness. Some of them, in their impatient strength, threatened the values of equal opportunity and government by law and consent which support American democracy at its best. Yet all of them, good and bad alike, made important contributions to national growth.