Sublime

At the time, of course, no one could know the potential value of these securities. On the face of it, the associates had laid out a total of $10 to $11 million and become primary owners of a corporation capitalized at $31,486,000. As the road developed under expert management, though, it naturally increased sharply in value and earned handsome prof

What was the secret of his success? he was asked. “Secret? There is no secret about it. All you have to do is to attend to your business and go ahead. The secret of my success is this: I never tell what I am going to do till I have done it.”

With his railroad extended very nearly to the southern tip of Florida and Miami already growing into a city, it is inarguable that Flagler had reached another plateau of accomplishment in 1898. He was sixty-eight years old, and while his investments in Florida had not prospered to the degree that those in the oil business had, he was still one of t

Once again the hotel was a hit with the public, especially the moneyed public. Demand was so great that Flagler immediately commenced work on a second hotel, this set on the ocean side of the island and christened as the Breakers. Though the original Breakers structure was to be destroyed by fire a few years later, Flagler had the hotel rebuilt, an

Grace was spending $250,000 each year to entertain her friends and maintain her position as Mrs. Vanderbilt, $125,000 more each year than her and Neily’s annual income. The expenses of running 640 Fifth Avenue and of paying taxes for the privilege of having a home on a piece of the world’s most expensive urban real estate amounted to over $1,000 do

“If a boy is good for anything,” the Commodore remarked, “you can stick him down anywhere and he’ll earn his living and lay up something; if he can’t do it he ain’t worth saving, and you can’t save him.”

He had husbanded Florida’s economy through at least two natural disasters, and had established every one of the glittering, world-famous beach resorts that ran the length of its eastern shores. By the time he had reached Miami, some might have assumed Flagler was at a natural stopping point. He could retire at long last, one might have conjectured,

Before 1922, Ivar had raised most of his capital in Europe, particularly from Swedish banks. As Ivar watched the Americans enter a period of buying mania, he saw a new source of funds. Ivar had studied financial history and was aware of infamous periods of mania and later panic, such as the South Sea Bubble of 1720 and the infamous rise and collaps

By the 1880s and 1890s, it supplied its own coke and iron ore, its own pig iron, and much of its own rail and lake shipping facilities, and it maintained its own sales force. How, therefore, to compute profits on steel? First, one had to tot up the costs for the coke, the ore, the shipping, and everything else. But in the absence of normal invoices