On February 23 there appeared in the New York newspaper Packet a notice that read: “BANK. It appearing to be the disposition of the Gentlemen in this City, to establish a Bank on liberal principles, the stock to consist of specie only: they are…hereby invited to meet…at the Merchant’s Coffee-House; where a plan will be submitted to their consideration.”
The meeting was held the next day and a committee appointed to sell a thousand shares at five hundred dollars each. The bank was to be organized when half the shares were taken; this was quickly managed, and so came into being the Bank of New York.
Alexander Hamilton bought a single share of the stock. He had retired from Congress the previous year to devote himself to the practice of law. He was, with his lone share, elected one of the directors of the new enterprise and remained so until he resigned in 1788.
It was Hamilton who drew up the bank’s constitution, adopted by his colleagues on March 15, 1784. He wanted the bank to be incorporated and, indeed, it was probably at his instigation that the bank had applied for a state charter even before the constitution was approved. But it was seven years before the legislature overcame the objections of Governor Clinton to allow it. Difficult as it now is to imagine, there was then a general fear that large financial corporations might abuse their “privelege” and trample on the fruits of our newly won liberty.
During the same month that the gentlemen met to organize their bank, another event took place that was also to have great implications for the commercial future of America. The Empress of China sailed from New York for Macao. Maj. Samuel Shaw of Boston was aboard, carrying a letter from President Washington. This was the first American ship to visit China, and Shaw was the first American businessman to deal directly with Chinese merchants. When he returned, his account of the trip was read aloud in Congress.
The Chinese wanted ginseng (a root they valued for medicinal purposes), sandalwood, and, above all, the fur of the sea otter. American ships brought home teas, silks, ivory, and objects of art. It has been estimated that a ten-cent investment in some trifle could be traded to the Indians of Oregon for two dollars’ worth of otter skins, which in turn fetched a five-dollar box of tea from China. With a 5,000 percent return, it is no wonder that the China trade flourished.
1884 One Hundred Years Ago
The first writing was probably a matter of smearing blood—or the juice of some plant—with a finger. When someone figured out that a hollow reed could be used to supply a steady flow of liquid to a flat surface, we had the first pen. This seems to have happened about twenty-seven hundred years before the birth of Christ.
Onward and upward it went, through various implements: the quill pen (introduced in the sixth century B.C.) reigned for over a thousand years, and steel points appeared in 1780. The latter were elegant enough but involved the inconvenience of continual dipping into the ink supply. Handmade fountain pens came into being in the early nineteenth century, but these had to be filled with an eyedropper and never became popular. Then came Lewis Edson Waterman (1837–1901).
Waterman’s early career was unremarkable. He was a laborer, school-teacher, bookseller. He taught the Pitman system of shorthand for a while and sold life insurance in Boston. Poor health led to his retirement, and in 1883 he turned with new seriousness to a study that had interested him for some time—the perfection of the fountain pen. His experiments were successful, and he received the first of several patents on February 12, 1884.
This was for the most important of his improvements, the ink-feeding device. A piece of hard rubber was inserted into the barrel that held the pen nib, which was gold, in position. In the rubber was a square groove with narrow fissures that ran from the ink supply in the barrel to the nib of the pen and automatically controlled the flow of ink.
Waterman decided to establish a business in New York City. From a simple workshop in the back of a cigar store on Fulton Street, the Ideal Pen Company sold five hundred handmade pens in its first year. Waterman incorporated the business in 1887 as the L. E. Waterman Company and continued to improve his product until his death in 1901. On June 28, 1919, Lloyd George signed the Treaty of Versailles with a solid gold pen bearing the Waterman hallmark.
MARCH 28: Ten thousand people rioted in Cincinnati to protest the sentence received by the murderer William Berner: twenty years in the penitentiary. The local militia seemed sympathetic to the crowd, who set fire to the jailhouse. Berner, in a disguise designed to protect him, took advantage of the confusion to escape. The rioting continued for a second day. The courthouse was also set on fire, and the militia was now shooting to kill. At least two hundred people were killed or wounded. The riots had been sparked by a local meeting at which a speaker complained of the prevalence of violent crime throughout the country and of the leniency of the courts in dispensing justice.
1964 Twenty Years Ago
FEBRUARY 7: There were three thousand teen-agers and over one hundred policemen at JFK Airport in New York when the Beatles arrived for their first American visit. They had already sold six million records, and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had become the top record in the United States. George Harrison was twenty, Paul McCartney twenty-one, John Lennon and Ringo Starr twenty-three.
Lennon was asked how he accounted for the group’s success. “We have a press agent,” he answered. “We have a message,” McCartney added, and the crowd grew still. “Our message is: ‘Buy more Beatle records!’”
Another mob of kids hung about the Plaza Hotel, where the Fab Four were staying; some of these were asked by a reporter just why the Beatles generated all this hysteria. Social anthropologists of the future may find this material valuable:
“They’re just so sexy, also foreign.”
“Their hair is so adorable.”
“I scream because I hope they’ll look at me.”
“It’s Ringo. It may sound silly to you, but I propose to him every single night.”
“The American rock ’n’ roll is getting to be a drag.”
“I just don’t know why I scream. It’s just because they’re Beatles.”
They performed three times on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and the first performance won the highest rating in television history. At a party at the British Embassy in Washington, someone sneaked up behind Ringo and clipped a lock of his hair. “Thank heaven,” said a writer for Life magazine, “the outrage technically was on British soil.”
FEBRUARY 25: Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston for his first world heavyweight title in Miami. Liston refused to come out for the seventh round. The judges had it scored as a draw to that point.
