Word: railroads
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...about a trade dispute over bananas. You've seen it in the papers in headlines like BANANA SPLIT or GOING BANANAS. But Clark Davis isn't laughing. One day the quality-assurance engineer was contentedly playing in the basement of his Wexford, Pa., home with his N-gauge model railroad--three lines spread over 36 sq. ft. of diorama, styled after turn-of-the-century Europe. The next day, Davis, 66, heard from his supplier of German-made Fleischman engines that not only could the price be doubling but the supplier's hobby shop might even...
...main railroad terminal, Dora, a sour old woman (uncompromisingly played by Fernanda Montenegro), scratches out a living writing letters for the illiterate. When a customer is killed in an accident, the dead woman's son (the winsomely suspicious Vinicius de Oliveira) becomes Dora's responsibility. The two set out across the Brazilian vastness to find the boy's errant father. Theirs is an odyssey of simple problems, simple emotional discoveries, a relationship full of knots that Salles permits to unwind in an unforced, unsentimental fashion. His imagery, like his storytelling, is clear, often unaffectedly lovely, and quietly, powerfully haunting...
...first breakthrough came when he landed a job as secretary and telegrapher to Tom Scott, a powerful overlord of the Pennsylvania Railroad. At 23 Carnegie headed Pennsy's Pittsburgh division and began to rake in a small fortune from outside investments ranging from oil to iron bridges. When he was 33, the rich young man privately lectured himself that his continued pursuit of wealth "must degrade me beyond hope of permanent recovery." Yet he couldn't abandon the money chase. "Put all your eggs into one basket," Carnegie once advised, "and then watch that basket." For him that basket brimmed...
Like Rockefeller, Morgan scorned competition as wasteful and ran afoul of federal trustbusters who broke up his railroad holding company, Northern Securities, in the early 1900s. The apex of Morgan's power came in 1901 with the creation of U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation. This was followed by International Harvester, the farm-equipment trust, and the International Mercantile Marine, the North Atlantic shipping cartel. In fact, Morgan presided over so many large-scale industrial consolidations that he recast the banker's role from that of handmaiden to master of industry...
When Ford stumbled, it was because he wanted to do everything his way. By the late 1920s the company had become so vertically integrated that it was completely self-sufficient. Ford controlled rubber plantations in Brazil, a fleet of ships, a railroad, 16 coal mines, and thousands of acres of timberland and iron-ore mines in Michigan and Minnesota. All this was combined at the gigantic River Rouge plant, a sprawling city of a place where more than 100,000 men worked...