How I Saved My First £l00.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXV, Issue XVIII, 3 November 1900, Page 833

How I Saved My First £l00.

THE EABDY VENTUBES OF FAMOUS MILLIONAIRES.

There is a curious fascination in the life stories of millionaires who owe their millions to their own industry and brains; and no chapter in these stories is more interesting and instructive than that which tells us how they climbed the first rung of the ladder of wealth. One of the most remarkable features in the careers of makers of millions is the fact that in nearly every case they have started on the wrong path; and it is often only by frequent change of direction that the budding Croesus finds the true road that is to lead him to riches.

John J. Blair, for example, was nearly forty years in finding that his way to wealth lay along railway tracks, and he approached it by many devious paths. “My first five dollars," he used to say, “I made in the unromantic calling- of rat catching, and for this, which was a small fortune to me at the time, 1 had to catch eighty rats. Aly first hundred dollars 1 saved when 1 became a clerk in my cousin’s store at Hope, and with that I started a store of my own at Grand Hill, when 1 was only a. boy of seventeen, it was in that store that 1 saved my first £ 100.”

But he tried almost everything, from groceries to grain and from cotton to iron, before he found his gold mine in railroads and amassed a fortune of £ 10,000,000.

More than sixty years ago Lord Strathcona landed in New York, a raw, penniless Scotch lad of sixteen, who was glad to find a passage in the steerage of a. sailing ship. At that time £lOO seemed as remote a possibility to Donald Smith as the possession of the Crown jewels. Drifting to Canada he got employment of the most menial kind in the Hudson Bay Company, and by great thrift and greater hardships saved the £lOO which started him on the way to fortune, and which was really the nucleus around which the Canadian Pacific railroad grew. Eight years' later another penniless Scottish boy, Andrew- Carnegie, landed

with his father in New York, and earned his first substantial wages as a telegraph messenger at the rate of twelve shillings a week. But he had little chance of saving, for it was all absorbed in helping to support his mother and brother. Saving only became possible when he entered the service of the Pennsylvania railroad, and it was then he saved the first £ KM) of a fortune which has now reached more millions than perhaps even Andrew Carnegie himself knows.

The late Alexander T. Stewart, who was at one time the recognised “Merchant King” of the world, began his first modest saving behind a grocer’s counter, and when he had saved his first £lOO, which was supplemented by a small legacy from his grandfather, he invested his small fortune in laees and linens, and went to America to sell them.

Within twenty years from opening his tiny shop in Chambers-street his

fortune was estimated at 20,000,000 dollars.

Anthony Brady found the key to his millions in an hotel barber's shop, of which he was cashier, and where he saved his first £lOO. With this tiny capital he opened a tea store in 1864, and with his rapidly growings fortune blossomed into a contractor and magnate of street railways and electric* lighting.

The real nucleus of the colossal fortune made by James G. Fair, the “Bonanza King,” was a few pounds saved by him as a dock labourer in New York. This provided the necessary outfit and passage to California, and gave him a start on the roaxl that led to a fortune estimated at £8,000,000.

The nucleus of the Rothschild millions was found in a. dingy pawnbroker’s shop in the Judengasse, at Frankfort, where in the middle of last century the founder of the fami’iy for-

tunes contrived to put away a comfortable nest egg in spite of the burden of a family of ten sons and daugh-

Ihe famous Rockefeller millions were cradled in a dark, dusty building in Cleveland, where the embryo

’ oil King” of the world, who was to count his millions by tens, started a warehousing business with his friend Hewitt, and where he used to sort beans as sedulously as now he counts millions. Mr Knight, the “Cotton King” of the wo nd, saved the magical £ IUO when he was clerk in a mill store and oilice, ami had the audacity to puichase the factory for £BOOO, of wiiicii ail but his own £ 100 was borrowed. Sir Arthur Palmer's £lOO came to him with painful slowness when he was herding sheep in the wilds of Queensland, and had no thought of the wealth that lay hidden in it. Mr Edison's first £ 100 was the tribute of journalism to enterprise, for he made it in the manifold character of printer, publisher, editor, and salesman of Hie “Grand Trunk Herald,” a paper which had its birth and cradle in a disused luggage van and was printed with discarded type. Sir Thomas Lipton's initial £ 100 was invested in a small provision shop in (ilasgow, and was saved during his strange nomadic life in America, when he found “much struggle and little silver” between South Carolina and New York. The law was Lord Armstrong's financial foster-mother, and enabled him

to lay the foundation of the great fortune which was to come to him through such a different channel. Mi Cecil Rhodes earned and saved his first money on a South African farm, ami wisely invested it in the purchase of a. quarter share in a Kimberley mine. Sir Richard Tangye scraped together his first £ 100 when he was clerk in the office of a Birmingham engineering firm at £5O a year, and in his next venture in sealing goods on commission. It was, however, the Great Eastern that really launched him on the voyage to fortune. Mr William Whiteley saved his first £lOO “while filling various posts in London. drapery firms,” and it was against the strong-advice of his friends that he staked his small capital in a tiny shop in Westbourne Grove, which was then considered one of the most hopeless streets in London from a shopkeeper's points of view.