May 08, 2019 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was Fraught with Difficulties
B & O during its early years encountered
obstacles of all sorts – political, legal, financial and technical – almost
anything that you can think of it had faced.
One of the major source of hurdle came from
the fact that the whole enterprise was so large that it had to be a private
public partnership with the state involvement becoming necessary.
This meant that the board of the company
had directors that were comprised not only of private businessmen interested in
profit and dividends on their investments but public servants as well.
In fact of the 30 board of directors only
twelve were elected by the shareholders whereas rest eighteen were appointed
either by the state or the Baltimore City Council.
There exists an inherent conflict of
interest in between these two sets of people anywhere and anytime on this
planet.
Whereas the directors who were the
government appointees sought lower fares and trying to see that all or most of
the investment for this mammoth project came from corporations the directors
that were elected by the shareholders on the other hand sought higher dividends
and profit which would only come from hiking up the fare rates and lowering the
investment expenses.
Whereas the B & O faced its usual and
its unusual share of teething problems in its early years in 1820s and 1830s
something truly unseen was to come in 1860s with the start of the American
Civil War.
In 1861 when the civil war started the
Confederate General Colonel Stonewall Jackson did his best to disrupt the
functioning of B & O as the railroad was instrumental in proper functioning
of the logistics of the opposing Union Army.
After all B & O was the crucial link
between Washington DC and the northern states all of which supported the cause
of Union.
So B & O had a rough beginning and a
bumpy ride for quite some time – extending to several decades – until it
attained both stability and respectability.
John Hopkins did not stay long as a passive
investor and eventually rose in the hierarchy of the com[any to become the
director of B & O and even later chairman of its finance committee.
He even went on to become the President of
Merchant’s Bank.
He was very soon becoming a very
influential person with his own summer estate house becoming a meeting place of
Union sympathizers and federal officers.
It is an astonishing fact that by 1850s
Johns Hopkins had become so wealthy that twice when the railroad company had
gone into irrecoverable debt Hopkins bailed it out with his own money.
It makes me wonder sometimes that whether
it was B & O that had created unsurpassed wealth for Hopkins or whether it
was the other way around.
Johns Hopkins was one of those few white
Americans who were in favor of the abolition of slavery even before the dawn of
the Civil War in 1861.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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