Word: telegraphers
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Theodore Roosevelt was moving out of the White House, a Brazilian army engineer named Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon, running a telegraph line through the untracked fastnesses of central Brazil, glimpsed the headwaters of an unmapped river that flowed he knew not whither. He called it Rio da Dúvida-"River of Doubt...
...Irish immigrant clerk one of the richest men in the greatest get-rich-quick era in U. S. history. Like many another bonanza king, John William Mackay beat a quick & gaudy path to the capitals of Europe but he did leave an enduring monument to his amazing energy-Postal Telegraph...
...testy irishman entered the telegraph & cable field solely to annoy Jay Gould, who had characteristically crossed him in a business deal. Allied with the equally testy Publisher James Gordon Bennett, who shared his animosity for the sly manipulator of Erie-R. R., John Mackay strenuously laid cables and strung wires to compete with Western Union, then a Gould favorite. The ensuing rate wars were scandalous, but at the founder's death in 1902 the Mackay companies were still a worthy heritage...
Dapper, debonair, lavishly educated abroad, Clarence Hungerford Mackay continued to spin the web his father had begun until it was a $120,000,000 world-wide system. Then, after presiding over Western Union's only competitor for a quarter century, he sold out in 1928 to International Telephone & Telegraph which, under the direction of the Brothers Behn, was gobbling up communication companies in all the world's corners. As I. T. & T. has since learned, the Postal System was no bargain...
...this effort increased Postal's share of the total available telegraph business from 17%, to 22%. But the company did not thrive. Deficits were reported for the last four years, and interest charges on $50,000,000 of bonds and debenture stock were met only by liquidating assets and borrowing from I. T. & T. Last week, facing another interest payment July 1, Postal's President George S. Gibbs petitioned the courts for permission to reorganize under Section 77 B of the Bankruptcy Act. So long had Wall Street awaited some formal recognition of Postal's plight that...