In 1862, when Washington, D.C., lived in terror of the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia (aka Merrimack), he pulled his liner Vanderbilt off her run, equipped her to fight, and gave her to the Union government. He projected and nearly built the interoceanic canal that the Nicaraguan government pursues today. He did not crawl onto land for good until the end of his seventh decade, when he sold his empire on water to fund his new one on land.Īlthough Vanderbilt’s reach occasionally exceeded his grasp, both were prodigious. En route, he sailed, dominated, and forsook New York Harbor, the Hudson, Long Island Sound, the route from New York to San Francisco via Central America, and the North Atlantic.Ī creature of the water from the start, he became an amphibian when he linked Boston and New York by water and rail. He ended as the master of a railroad empire linking the Hudson to Lake Michigan. Over 66 years, Vanderbilt (1794–1877) devoted himself to one business: transportation. These corrections, amid an extraordinary wealth of learning and insight about a great man and his times, can be found in the meticulously researched and brilliantly written The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T. He left it to his son William to damn the public, and the irresistible potato chip myth - the crusty Commodore sends back fried potatoes as insufficiently thin and salty, and the equally crusty Saratoga Springs chef says, “I’ll give him thin and salty” - is belied by the fact that the chip got to the restaurant ahead of the Commodore. Vanderbilt made the New York Central (founded by others) great, but Commodore was the press’s salute to a shipping mogul. He remarked, “The public? The public be damned!” And he inadvertently caused the potato chip to be invented. His nickname, “Commodore,” referred sardonically to his beginnings sailing a one-man Staten Island ferry. People know four things about Cornelius Vanderbilt: He founded the New York Central Railroad.

The epic life of cornelius vanderbilt