astounding chapters in our financial history and created
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of millionaires? When Thomas A.
Edison invented the incandescent light, and when Frank J. Sprague
in 1887 constructed the first practicable urban trolley line, in
Richmond, Virginia, they liberated forces that powerfully
affected not only our social and economic life but our political
institutions. These two inventions introduced anew
phrase--"Public Utilities." Combined with the great growth and
prosperity of the cities they furnished a fruitful opportunity to
several particularly famous groups of financial adventurers. They
led to the organization of "syndicates" which devoted all their
energies, for a quarter of a century, to exploiting city lighting
and transportation systems. These syndicates made a business of
entering city after city, purchasing the scattered street railway
lines and lighting companies, equipping them with electricity,
combining them into unified systems, organizing large
corporations, and floating huge issues of securities. A single
group of six men--Yerkes, Widener, Elkins, Dolan, Whitney, and
Ryan--combined the street railways, and in many cases the
lighting companies, of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago,
Pittsburgh, and at least a hundred towns and cities in
Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Ohio,
Indiana, New Hampshire, and Maine. Either jointly or separately
they controlled the gas and electric lighting companies of
Philadelphia, Reading, Harrisburg, Atlanta, Vicksburg, St.
Augustine, Minneapolis, Omaha, Des Moines, Kansas City, Sioux
City, Syracuse, and about seventy other communities. A single
corporation developed nearly all the trolley lines and lighting
companies of New Jersey; another controlled similar utilities in
San Francisco and other cities on the Pacific Coast. In