The Age of Big Business

The Age of Big Business, subtitled A Chronicle of the Captains of Industry, is by Burton Jesse Hendrick. The contents list includes chapters on, among others, the epic of steel, the telephone and the democratization of the automobile.

The text says a comprehensive survey of the United States taken when the Civil War ended "would reveal a state of society which bears little resemblance to that of today." In 1865 most large cities had horse-car systems, and "New York had thirty separate companies engaged in the business of local transportation." The only corporation of the Civil War period that "could be described as a 'trust' in the modern sense" was "the Western Union Telegraph Company." Bell is said to have been "engaged in a task that seemed hopeless to most men" for years, and he declared, "If I can make a deaf-mute talk, I can make iron talk." If several thousand of the watches could be made, each one exactly alike, "they would cost only thirty-seven cents apiece," and Ford says to himself, "everybody could have one."