My Story by Elizabeth J. Hauser Read Free Book Online

fascinating words and realized that the things I was doing were the things this man was attacking. Attracted to his teachings against my will I tried to find a way of escape. I didn’t want to accept them; I wanted to prove them false. But this is running ahead of my story.

II
THE MONOPOLIST MADE
    I T was the first of February, 1869, that I went to Louisville to take my job in the rolling-mill and it was at about this time that Bidermann and Alfred V. du Pont bought a street railroad in Louisville. These brothers were grandsons of Pierre Samuel du Pont, one of the physiocratic economists of France, associate of Turgot, Mirabeau, Quesnay and Condorcet to which group “and their fellows” Henry George inscribed his Protection or Free Trade , calling them “those illustrious Frenchmen of a century ago who in the night of despotism foresaw the glories of the coming day.” Pierre du Pont, after narrowly escaping the guillotine, came to this country during the Reign of Terror and established on the Brandywine the du Pont powder works known as the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Powder Company, the concern that now manufactures practically all the high explosives in the United States.
    The du Ponts were friends of our family and gave me an office job in connection with their newly-acquired street railroad. I lived with the family of my uncle Captain Thomas Coleman in Louisville and a lively family it was with its nine daughters and two sons. Though these girls were my cousins and I was but fifteen years old I fell in love with one after another of them until I had been in love with all except the few who were either too old ortoo young. The associations of this home and the influence of that splendid woman, my aunt Dullie Coleman, and her daughters saved me from the temptations that ordinarily beset the country boy in the city.
    My salary was seven dollars a week and my duties were varied. I collected and counted the money which had been deposited by the passengers in the fare-boxes, made up small packages of change for the drivers (the cars had no conductors), and in a short time took entire charge of the office as bookkeeper and cashier. I sat up until eleven o’clock every night for a month learning to “keep books.” At the end of that time a trial balance had no terrors for me.
    This was of course before the introduction of electricity in street railway operation and the cars were drawn by mules. How I hated to see horses and mules go into the street car service where they would be ground up as inevitably, if not quite as literally, as if put through a sausage machine! It was this feeling of pity for the defenseless creatures that first interested me in cables and electric propulsion.
    From the very first it was the operating end of the business that appealed to me. My liking for mechanics was stimulated by my environment and I was soon working on inventions, some of which I afterwards patented. From one of these, a fare-box, I eventually made the twenty or thirty thousand dollars which gave me my first claim to being a capitalist.
    The fare-boxes in use up to that time were made for paper money. Mine was the first box for coins, paper currency having just been withdrawn from circulation. It held the coins on little glass shelves and in plain sightuntil they had been counted. Since any passenger as well as anyone acting as a spotter could count the money there wasn’t much likelihood that either the drivers or the car riders would cheat. This box is still in use.

    TOM L. JOHNSON AT SEVENTEEN

    A. V. DU PONT

    BIDERMANN DU PONT
    In a few months I was secretary of the company, and at about the end of my first year of employment my father came in from the farm and the du Ponts made him superintendent of the road. He continued in this position until he was appointed chief of police of Louisville, several years later. Then I became superintendent, holding the job until 1876 when I embarked in business