Cornelius Vanderbilt — the Ferry Boy Who Built an Empire of Steam

Cornelius Vanderbilt was born on May 27, 1794, into a family of modest Dutch farmers and boatmen on Staten Island, then a rural fringe of New York. He had almost no schooling, leaving the classroom around age eleven to work the water with his father, and by sixteen he was running his own small ferry across New York Harbor. He could barely read and write all his life, signed documents in a cramped scrawl, and was famously profane and abrasive. He was also one of the most relentless and gifted businessmen the country ever produced.

From a single sailboat ferrying passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan, Vanderbilt built first a steamboat empire and then, late in life, a railroad empire, earning the lifelong nickname ‘the Commodore.’ By his death in 1877 he had amassed a fortune estimated at over $100 million — a sum often described as larger than the amount then held in the United States Treasury, and the greatest American fortune of its time. He founded the dynasty whose later spectacular decline is a story told elsewhere; this entry is about the rise.

Vanderbilt’s method was competition pushed to its limit. He learned the steamboat business inside the legal fight that broke the monopolies controlling American waters, then turned the resulting open competition into a weapon, slashing fares until rivals either failed or paid him handsomely to take his boats elsewhere. He built faster, ran cheaper, and squeezed harder than anyone, and he was willing to be bought off — collecting what amounted to legalized extortion from competitors who could not survive a price war with him.

His is one of the era’s purest rises from working-class origins, owing nothing to inheritance, education, or social connection. It is also a fortune built through ruthless tactics, sharp dealing, and at times open contempt for the law and for the partners he outflanked. Vanderbilt left almost the entire fortune to a single son, a concentration of wealth that powered the dynasty’s brief glittering peak — and, by being neither widely shared nor given away, set the stage for its eventual dissipation.

Levi Strauss — the Immigrant Peddler Who Invented the Blue Jean

Levi Strauss was born Löb Strauß on February 26, 1829, in Buttenheim, a small village in the Kingdom of Bavaria, the son of a Jewish dry-goods peddler named Hirsch Strauss. His father died of tuberculosis around 1846, and in 1847 the eighteen-year-old Löb sailed with his mother and two sisters to the United States to join his older brothers Jonas and Louis, who ran a wholesale dry-goods business in New York called J. Strauss Brother & Co. He anglicized his name to Levi and learned the trade from the inside.

In early 1853 Strauss became a U.S. citizen, and the following year — drawn by the California Gold Rush — he reached San Francisco to open a West Coast branch of the family business. He did not come to dig but to sell, importing clothing, fabric, thread, and household goods and supplying the dry-goods stores of the booming mining country. Over two decades he built a prosperous, respectable wholesaling house, Levi Strauss & Co., long before the product that would carry his name into history existed.

In 1872 a Reno, Nevada tailor and customer named Jacob W. Davis wrote to Strauss describing a method he had devised for reinforcing the stress points of men’s work pants with copper rivets. Davis lacked the money to file a patent and proposed that Strauss, his fabric supplier, become his partner. Strauss agreed and financed the application; on May 20, 1873, U.S. Patent No. 139,121 for “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings” was granted to Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss & Co., with half assigned to the firm. The riveted “waist overall” — the garment we now call blue jeans — was born.

Strauss never married and had no children, and he ran his firm until his death on September 26, 1902. Estimates of his estate vary, from a frequently cited figure of roughly $6 million to as much as $30 million, divided among his nephews and a long list of charities. He did not, strictly speaking, invent the blue jean alone — Jacob Davis did the inventing, and Strauss supplied the denim, the capital, the patent, and the company that turned a workman’s trouser into one of the most successful and imitated garments in the history of clothing.