[...]... have that same field open before them.” Vanderbilt’s strategy against Collins was to charge only $.15 for half-ounce letters and to cut the standard first-class fare $20, to $110 Later he slashed it to $80 Vanderbilt also introduced a new service: a cheaper third-class fare in steerage The steerage must have been uncomfortable—people were practically stacked on top of each other—but for seventy-five dollars,... ship with a beam engine, which was more powerful than Collins’s traditional side-lever engines In a head-to-head race, the Vanderbilt beat Collins’s ship to England and won the Blue Ribbon, an award given to the one ship owning the fastest time from New York City to Liverpool By 1856, Collins had two ships—half of his accident-prone fleet—sink (killing almost five hundred passengers) In desperation, he... enormous ships (not five smaller ships as he had promised), each with elegant saloons, ladies’ drawing rooms, and wedding berths He covered the ships with plush carpet and brought aboard rose-, satin-, and olive-wood furniture, marble tables, exotic mirrors, flexible barber chairs, and French chefs The staterooms had painted glass windows and electric bells to call the stewards Collins stressed luxury,... history, is that the best direction to follow for lifting Americans out of poverty and into prosperity and freedom? When President Jimmy Carter did the same thing in the 1970s, he helped to create the energy crisis Market entrepreneurs have clashed head-to-head with political entrepreneurs since the ink dried on the U.S Constitution in 1787 Looking at the facts of that struggle will give Americans a clear... local trader and avoid the ninety-mile walk through swirling snow to see if the government agent in Detroit would give him replacements on credit.15 Astor built on this advantage by trading the best supplies he could find at reasonable rates of exchange Indians wanted guns and blankets, and Astor supplied them at low cost The best blankets he could find were British-made blue-striped blankets, and Astor... steamship companies experimented with iron hulls and screw propellers in the 1840s, but Cunard thwarted this whenever he could According to twentieth-century economist Royal Meeker, The mail payments made it possible for the Cunard company to cling to an out-of-date and uneconomical type of steamer Both the Admiralty and the Post Office departments refused to permit mail steamers to use the screw propeller... entrepreneurs—Robert Fulton, Edward Collins, and Samuel Cunard—cannot be lumped with Thomas Gibbons, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and William Inman, the market entrepreneurs, because of their differing attitudes toward innovation, technology, price-cutting, monopolies, and federal aid In the steamship industry, political entrepreneurship often led to price-fixing, technological stagnation, and the bribing... partnerships with existing companies In the Michigan Territory, the Hudson’s Bay Company was Astor’s ever-present rival The American Fur Company, however, remained the largest firm in the field after the factories were closed Astor, better than any American before him, had mastered the complex accounting and organization needed to conduct a worldwide business.45 Astor always knew he had to please the... factory clothes, and the government restrictions on where he could trade, what he could trade, and where Indians would live all told him it was time to leave Also, Astor was seventy-one years old and ready for less strenuous work The same skills that made him America’s largest fur trader also made him profits in New York real estate For many years, he had been buying lots in northern Manhattan, developing... boat, and when he did succeed, his steamboat was named the North River, the nickname that local New Yorkers used for the Hudson River.1 The idea of a self-propelled boat going upriver had long fascinated inventors With the wretched state of roads in all countries of the world, water travel was far easier and often more economical But how could a boat go upstream? From Leonardo da Vinci to Benjamin Franklin, . Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, (West) Virginia, for example, the road detoured through Uniontown and Washington, Pennsylvania. Why? Because Jefferson’s Treasury secretary, Albert Gallatin, lived. trader in the country, a man popular with Indians, because he gave them what they wanted, where they wanted it, and when they wanted it. McKenney, by contrast, was failing because he expected Indians. lines were strung all over the settled portions of the country. Unlike the National Road, which often went where people weren’t, the telegraph went where people were. Ezra Cornell helped found Western