The Project Gutenberg ebook of History of the United States, Volume 4, by
Download 7.23 Mb.
|
1887] THE MARCH OF INDUSTRY 355
Under Side of a Modern Switchboard, showing 2,000 Telegraph Wires. In 1893, the aggregate length of telegraph lines in the United States open to the public exceeded 210,000 miles. There were, besides, government and private lines to a length vast but not ascertainable. In addition to all this, the Bell Telephone Company, which conducted the main telephone business of the country, owned, the same year, 307,748 miles of wire, which the lines of other companies increased to 440,750 miles. 356 THE CEMENTED UNION [1862 From this account of our country's material advance after the war we purposely omit mention of the great economic progress at the South, as that has been already reviewed in Chapter IV. We must, instead, notice several events which decidedly checked the prosperity of these years. So soon as gold had ceased to circulate in 1862, speculation in it began, which was one of the most pernicious results of the depreciation of paper. The ups and downs in the gold price of the greenback from week to week and from day to day during the war were largely due to this cause. In 1869 a clique of speculators in New York thought to realize an immense fortune by cornering gold, a large proportion of the stock east of the Rocky Mountains being known to be in New York City. 1869] THE MARCH OF INDUSTRY 357 By Wednesday, September 22d, they had pushed up the price of gold in greenbacks from 131 to 141, causing a disastrous tumble in stocks and almost a panic. The money market grew tight, and interest enormous. Loans were to be had only on the very best securities. On Thursday gold still advanced, showing that the corner remained solid. 
Professor Bell Sending the First Message by Long-distance Directory: pub -> gutenberg pub -> Acm word Template for sig site pub -> The german unification, 1815-1870 pub -> Baltic Olympiads in Informatics: Challenges for Training Together pub -> Preparation of Papers for ieee transactions on medical imaging pub -> Forthcoming meetings and conferences pub -> Asilomar Conference on Circuits, Systems & Computers, Pacific Grove, ca, November 1978, pp. 55 58 pub -> Forthcoming meetings and conferences pub -> Harmonised compatibility and sharing conditions for video pmse in the 7 9 ghz frequency band, taking into account radar use gutenberg -> The Project Gutenberg ebook of History of the World War, by Download 7.23 Mb. Share with your friends:
|