These bills would cover an area of 228,317,433 square feet!
An expert bank teller working eight hours a day, Sundays and holidays included, and counting one bill a second without rest, would take more than 133 years to count them all. If he started to count on January 1, 1921, one of his descendants might count the last bill in the pile about the end of June, 2054!
If the Corporation’s capital were divided evenly it would give every man, woman, and child in the United States about $14!
The interest on this sum at 6 per cent. would keep some 35,000 American families in comparative comfort without touching the capital!
From the date of the Simmons dinner to that on which the plans for the new corporation were announced was a very short period. The birth of the Corporation did not take long. Once convinced that a merger of a number of large companies making various steel products was practicable and desirable for the good of the industry and of the country—as well as for the pockets of the consolidators—Morgan and his associates lost no time in bringing it about. The dinner took place on December 12, 1900; United States Steel was formally chartered on February 25th of the year following and began business as a corporate entity on April 1, 1901.
It is likely that Schwab himself did not foresee how far reaching would be the effects of his speech. Morgan did not do things by halves. When the young steel maker caught his attention and drew a picture of a company big enough to manufacture all lines of steel and to specialize on each one, powerful enough to enter and occupy foreign markets and rich enough to expand to meet the growing demand for the metal without danger of over-stretching its resources, he painted with his words something which the banker thought it would be a proud thing to father. Morgan saw before him unlimited possibilities, not of money making alone—for this was by no means the ruling passion of his being—but of creating an organization that should leave an indelible impress for good on industrial history, a business so great that its actions could not fail to force themselves upon the attention of the world and to command imitation on the part of other industries. A business, moreover, so powerful that it would not need to resort to the dubious practices of the old days to succeed.
The great steel concern that Schwab discussed corresponded very closely to the company that Gary had long been urging Morgan to assist in creating by the expansion of the Federal Steel Co. Immediately after the dinner Morgan drew Schwab aside and the latter then went more fully into the subject of a vast steel merger than he had been able to in the confines of an after-dinner oration. Finally the financier asked Schwab if he thought Carnegie would sell, and upon receiving an affirmative reply Morgan requested the terms. A few days later Schwab reported that Carnegie’s price was $303,450,000 in bonds and $188,556,160 in stock of the suggested new company. After a prolonged consultation with Gary, Robert Bacon (one of his partners), and others, Morgan accepted these terms.
As a nucleus of the proposed steel corporation, then, we have the Carnegie and the Federal companies. But Gary’s plans had provided for the manufacture of a number of products made by neither of these two concerns, and Schwab, in his talk, had pictured an industrial organization that would turn out from its mills every kind of steel product, that would be able to supply its customers with everything made of the metal from a nail to a railroad car. Morgan was not a man of half measures. There was no need to make two bites of a cherry, even though it was a mighty big cherry. Having once decided to finance the formation of the new company he thought it might as well be comprehensive in its products, and so negotiations were immediately set on foot with the controlling interests in the leading concerns making wire, tubes, tin plate, etc., with a view to bringing them all into the consolidation.
The Morgan interests had financed the organization of the National Tube Co., the principal figure in which was Edmund C. Converse, so the tube company naturally was taken in. The other concerns and interests which it was proposed to unify into the new corporation were the American Steel & Wire Co., the chief figures in which were the late John Warne Gates, Alfred Clifford, William Edenborn, and others; the four companies forming the so-called Reid-Moore group, controlled by Daniel G. Reid and William H. Moore—namely the National Steel Co., American Tin Plate Co., American Sheet Steel Co., and American Steel Hoop Co.
By the early part of February, 1901, the negotiations were concluded and the plans for the organization of the United States Steel Corporation were announced. They provided for the amalgamation of these eight companies, the smallest of which had a capitalization of $33,000,000 and the largest of more than $300,000,000. Before the plans were finally put through, however, two more units were added to the list, the Lake Superior Consolidated Iron Mines, dominated by the Rockefeller interests, and the American Bridge Co., at the head of which was Percival Roberts, Jr. The absorption of the Lake Superior Consolidated Co., with its vast ore holdings and steamship fleet, was deemed necessary to ensure the Steel Corporation an adequate ore reserve. The American Bridge Co., which secured most of its supplies of steel from the Carnegie company, seemed to fit naturally into the plans for the consolidation.