SENSATIONAL RICHES.

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXX, Issue 5506, 27 November 1929, Page 1

SENSATIONAL RICHES.

TWELVE MILLIONS A MONTH. COMMON STORIES IN AMERICA. The amazing rapidity with which riches can be piled up across the Atlantic is illustrated by the statement thkt the family fortune of Mr Mellon, Secretary of the United States Treasury, has been augmented in the last five months by the colossal sum of £60,000,000, owing to the sensational rise in the shares of the Aluminium Company of America and the Gulf Oil Corporation of Pennsylvania. Every week for five months nearly £3,000,000 has been added to the wealth of one family. But in the United States such stories of quickly acquired wealth, sensational, almost incredible; as they are, are too common to attract more than a passing notice. Mr Joseph Hoadley, for example, strolled into the New York Cotton Exchange, added £200,000 to his “pile” within five minutes, and returned home the same evening £BOO,OOO richer than when he left his breakfast table —all the result of a lucky and daring gamble in cotton bales. On the same Exchange Mr Theodore Price, one day in 1905, is said to have made £lOO,OOO in five minutes, and to have added £50,000 to it within half an hour, when he felt that he had “earned his luncheon.” Mr J. L. Livermore, who a few years earlier had been an office boy employed by a Boston broker, cleared £lOO,OOO in a single day by selling cotton to alarmed speculators during a temporary break in the price. During a recent wild gamble in stock of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Railways in New York many men made fortunes ranging from £lOO,OOO to half a million pounds on a single day’s operations. During this day of frenzy the Exchange was a veritable pandemonium, in which coatless and hatless men tore from one end of the market to the other snapping up bargains. Fortunes were made in minutes. Even office boys and typists pooled their month’s salaries and pocketed several years* income before the day closed; and it is said that one astute porter employed in the Harriman offices was £lO,OOO richer when he returned home that day. Even the feats of the leviathans are taken as a matter of course —as when Mr James R. Keene cleared £BOO,OOO in National Cordage stock and £600,000 in American Tobacco stock. There were many men in Wall Street at the time who declined to be impressed by such figures, for they remembered how Jay Gould once made a round million pounds by a morning’s dealings in railway stock ; and how John D. Rockefeller realised twice this sum by a single transaction in Standard Oil stock. What writer of fiction would dare to picture a hero who adds to his riches ten times his own weight in gold every day for a whole year; or who, between breakfast and dinner, makes enough money to yield a perpetual income of £40,000 a year ? But in this amazing drama of fact there are hundreds of scenes no less amazing and true. It is crowded with stories of meh (and women, too) who have been suddenly raised from poverty to great wealth. As a boy of eleven Andrew Carnegie was thankful to earn 5s a day as a bobbin-boy in Alleghany City; and he lived to give away more than £70,000,000 and left £6,000,000 to his heirs. At fifteen years of age Russell Sage was serving behind a grocer’s counter for his board and 17s 6d a month 1 ;' and, he said, “it was probably all I was worth.” When he died he left £16,000,000 to his widow to “do what she liked with.” W. S. Stratton chased “rainbow gold” for twenty heartbreaking years before one day at Cripply Creek he struck a rich vein of gold, and was soon taking £20,000 a month out of it —the herald of the millions that later poured into his exchequer. Philip D. Armour had been content to drive' a plough for many a year before he journeyed West in search of fortune. Thirty years later he was head of a business with an annual output of £20,000,000, with a capital of £6,000,000, and with an army of 30,000 employees. So, in almost endless sequence, these stories of million-making run on—of John J. Blair, who began his working life by trapping musk-rats and rabbits and selling their skins at four for a shilling, and ended with ten millions ; James Doyle, who turned his back on a druggist’s counter at Colorado Springs to win millions in Cripple Crqek gold mines; John W. Gates, farm labourer, who made millions in steel and wire ; and Robert Knight, the “Cotton King of the World,” who as a child of eight was glad to earn a shilling a day in a Sprague mill. Then, last, but not least, there is Charles M. Schwab, who, at nineteen was driving stakes for the Carnegie Company, and twenty years later was drawing £120,000 a year as president of the great American Steel Trust and owned £8,000,000 in steel stock. For twenty years this ex-labourer had actually saved £400,000 on an average every twelve months.