"In 1881, a young English clerk named Samuel Insull sailed from England to America and took a low-paying job as a private secretary for a determined inventor named Thomas Edison. Insull worked hard, coming in before his boss in the morning and staying until long after Edison, who wasn't exactly lazy himself, had gone home at night.
Over time, Insull's hard work & loyalty did not go unnoticed. He was promoted several times, eventually winding up in charge of Edison's business affairs.
After 12 years absorbing as much knowledge as he could, Insull finally left to pursue his own American dream. He moved to Chicago, took out a personal loan for $250,000 and built the largest power plant in the world.
At the time, electricity was like private jets are today --- grossly expensive and available only to those who don't spend much time worrying about their bank account. But Insull had a dream that electricity could be produced on a much larger scale and used by the masses. By developing revolutionary ideas, like variable pricing and inexpensive home wiring, he turned electricity from a luxury into a virtual commodity.
Before long, Insull's new company was servicing over 10 million customers in 32 states and had a market value of over $3 billion (appx $60billion today). Time magazine even celebrated his success by putting him on the cover in 1929. He was a true American success story --- a foreigner with virtually nothing to his name who had made it big through hard work and innovation.
Then the world changed. As the Roaring Twenties morphed into the Great Depression, Insull's business struggled. The debt and equity he'd financed his company's growth with had become virtually worthless, leaving over a million middle-class Americans who'd invested in his stock in financial straits. The public outrage was palpable.
In a manner of a few short years Insull had gone from hero to villain; from the poster boy fro everything about American capitalism to the poster boy for everything wrong with it.
The government, seizing on the public's fury over their lost wealth, charged him with fraud, and though he was acquitted at trial, it didn't matter -- the damage was done. Insull was the most hated man in America, the Dich Cheney of the 1930's -- and all he'd done to deserve it was to build a remarkable company that, like so many others, suffered during the Depression"
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a legend in my spare time
Originally Posted by Latham
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