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Show pro day TOMORROW II FRANK PHRKIR ! TRANSPORTATION .... wheels Nothing la more interesting than to study the different ways that different peoplea and races have devised to move people and merchandise mer-chandise from one place to another. an-other. It would be interesting to know the name of the inventor who first cut a cross-section of a log, burned a hole through it, and put an axle In to make the first wheel. He didn't live very long ago. Wherever the American Indians In-dians came from, they never had seen wheels until the white men brought them four hundred and fifty years ago. I llko to wonder about the X'ople who first put nmsts and sails on bouts to make the wind do the work of moving mov-ing them nnd their foods. They must have lx-cn very brave men. Indeed, I think sailors are still very brave men. Bravest of all are the men who fly in airplanes. Tills newest means of transportation is still an infant. Children already born may live to see airplanes as big as the great ocean liners crossing the skies at a speed of a thousand thous-and miles an hour. Anything can happen. TOW KM applied All modern forms of transportation transpor-tation are merely demonstrations of mechanical power applied to different kinds of machines. The result is that people engaged in one branch of transportation are likely to be in all of them. The newest transatlantic airline is owned by a steamship company. Railroad companies are running bus lines. The moving of goods and jieoplo from wherever they are to wherever they are wanted is, nfter all, one bifr industry, the parts of which are almost interchang'eable. Every new phase of this great transportation web la either an outgrowth of, or in some way tied in with, earlier de-velo(nnents de-velo(nnents in the same field. The same names and families run through the history and development de-velopment of all forms of transportation. trans-portation. For 150 years, for example, ex-ample, the Vanderbilt family has been engaged in transportation and practically nothing else. I saw a report a few days ago that one of the youngest members of that family had been made a director of an international aviation company. com-pany. That, I reflected, would have given the founder of the family something to marvel at. VANDERBILT smart He was a pretty smart Dutch boy. young Cornelius van der Bilt, who worked the family farm on Staten Island in New York harbor. har-bor. He was handy with tools and built a large sailboat. He used to carry farm produce up the Bay to the tip of Manhattan Island for sale. He would carry passengers, at a price, if anyone wanted to make the trip. One day he saw a strange craft at the Battery wharf in New York. It was Robert Fulton's Ful-ton's new steamboat, run by machinery instead of sails. Young Vanderbilt decided to build one like It. He was not allowed to navigate his steamboat steam-boat on the Hudson River, where an exclusive franchise had b-een given, but he could steam down the Bay, around Staten Island, up the Raritari River to New Brunswick, and from there transfer assen-gers assen-gers and goods to the Delaware Dela-ware River at Trenton, where another steamboat would take them to Phlladelpliia, Cornelius Vanderbilt and his wife opened a hotel at New Bruns- to Albany, and got a franchise for a bridge across the river. That was the beginning of America's greatest railroad system. WEALTH criticized I hear radicals and discontented discontent-ed people criticizing everybody who has ever made any money in developing the resources of America. Amer-ica. Such people ask why the wealth so developed should not be distributed equally among everybody. The answer to that, as' I see it, is that when a man like old Commodore Vanderbilt gets an idea, spends his own money to see if it will work, and if it works charges people what they are willing will-ing to pay for the services they get, he is entitled to keep whatever what-ever profits he can accumulate. It is through such adven- ! tures of enterprising men with their own money that America has grown great. The tendency today is to dis courage the Vanderbilts and everyone else who is willing to risk capital in the hope of gain. The United States would never have got to first base if the Government had stopped everyone from trying to build and run steamboats, I 180 years ago. . wick, raised eleven children, and laid the foundation of the greatest great-est fortune in all America for the next 100 years. And the Vanderbilts Vander-bilts have hung on to most of it ever since. RAILROADS competitors While Cornelius Vanderbilt was building steamships and running them all over the world, the railroad rail-road was invented and he took one trip on the first line connecting the Delaware and Hudson Rivers, the Camden and Amboy, the original ori-ginal line of the B. & O. The train was wrecked and he swore he would never ride on the steamcars again. Rut his son, William H., who had stayed home on Staten Sta-ten Island, had a different idea. The railroad wanted to bridge its tracks from Perth Amboy across the Island to the upier harbor of New York. William H. Vanderbilt surprised his old father by becoming the president of a profitable railroad running through the old family farm. The old man stuck to steamboats, steam-boats, and ran his lines up the Hudson from New York to Albany. Al-bany. Then some smart promoters ran a railroa'd up the river. That hurt the steamboat business. Cornelius Cor-nelius Vanderbilt got mad enough to go into the railroad business with his son. They built another road up the Harlem Valley to Chatham, with a branch line over |