Think and Grow Rich!
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| When the going was hard As a young man, Marshal Field (1835- 1906) had left the family farm in Conway, Massachusetts, to become a dry goods clerk. Moving to Chicago in 1856, he became first a junior partner, then a senior partner in the firm known as Field, Palmer & Leiter. When Palmer and Leiter retired, he became head of Marshal Field and Co, a thriving wholesale and retail dry goods business. He devoted much of his later life to philanthropy, particularly in support of the University of Chicago. 3 It maybe helpful More than $1 billion in today’s dollars. Actually, Hill speaks conservatively here, for Carnegie in his waning years gave away more than three and a halftimes that amount (again, in today’s dollars) to charitable causes. 4 Practical dreamers In the original version of Think and Grow Rich!, the Edison example is followed by this one “Whelan dreamed of a chain of cigar stores, transformed his dream into action, and now the United Cigar Stores occupy the best corners in America Unlike Napoleon Hill’s philosophy and the success principles he developed, corner cigar stores have generally not withstood the test of time. George Whelan was a US. financier who in 1912, after the American Tobacco Trust was broken up, put his United Cigar Stores under a holding company—Tobacco Products Corporation—and began acquiring small tobacco companies. In 1919 he bought the U.S. business of London’s Philip Morris Company (begun in 1847) and formed anew American corporation, Philip Morris & Company, Inc. Whelan’s wheeling and dealing led to financial collapse in 1929, but the new company survived under new management. It would go on, under its flagship product, Marlboro cigarettes, to diversify and become by the st century the world’s largest producer and marketer of packaged consumer goods, with subsidiaries such as Kraft Foods and Miller Brewing Company. 5 Marconi dreamed Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) invented the first apparatus used for wireless telegraphy and was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his efforts. His work freed long distance communications from the restraints of wires and other physical transmission media and laid the foundation for the broadcasting industry. Napoleon Hill, in discussing Marconi’s work here and in explaining certain other concepts later, uses the term ether rather than electromagnetic spectrum in both the original and several subsequent edition of Think and Grow Rich! In so doing, he was simply reflecting the popular scientific concepts and, thus, the scientific vocabulary of the day. In the latter 19th and early 20th century, many scientists believed that an invisible substance, which they called ether permeated the universe, including empty space. Through this medium, light and other radiation were thought to travel like vibrations in a bowl of jelly. The Michelson-Morley experiments and Albert Einstein’s work, which resulted in the Special Theory of Relativity, forced the scientific community to abandon the concept of ether. Over the years, the universe with its incredible array of electromagnetic, nuclear, and gravitational forces and phenomena has turned out to be even more mysterious than Hill or any turn-of-the- century scientist suspected. Hill’s effort to describe, in clear and understandable terms, energy phenomena—everything from broadcast waves to brainwaves gives the terminology in the original version of Think and Grow Rich! a more metaphysical and metaphorical “flavor” than it likely would have were he writing today. The few changes in terminology that have been made in this revised edition of Think and Grow Rich!—as, for example, the use of electromagnetic spectrum” instead of “ether”—are made simply to remove stylistic “impediments” to understanding for today’s reader. The sum and substance of Hill’s ideas remain unchanged. 6 Download 3.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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