1. Charles Yerkes played a part in developing mass-transit systems in Chicago and London.
17 Facts About Charles Yerkes
1. 2.
Charles Yerkes was promised a pardon if he would deny the accusations he had made.
3.
Charles Yerkes agreed to these terms and was released after serving seven months in prison.
4.
In 1881 Charles Yerkes traveled to Fargo in the Dakota Territory to obtain a divorce from his wife.
5.
Charles Yerkes was not averse to using bribery and blackmail to obtain his objectives.
6.
Charles Yerkes had intended initially to finance only a telescope but agreed eventually to fund an entire observatory.
7.
Charles Yerkes contributed more than $500,000 to the University of Chicago to establish what would become known as Yerkes Observatory, located in Williams Bay, Wisconsin.
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Thomas Moore 8.
In 1895, Charles Yerkes purchased the Republican partisan newspaper, the Chicago Inter Ocean, using the publication to publicize his political agenda.
9.
Charles Yerkes began a campaign for longer streetcar franchises in 1895, but Illinois governor John Peter Altgeld vetoed the franchise bills.
10.
Charles Yerkes renewed the campaign in 1897, and, after a hard-fought struggle, secured from the Illinois Legislature a bill granting city councils the right to approve extended franchises.
11.
In 1899, Charles Yerkes sold the majority of his Chicago transport stocks and relocated to New York.
12.
Charles Yerkes established the Underground Electric Railways Company of London to take control of the District Railway and the partly built Baker Street and Waterloo Railway, Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, and Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway.
13.
Charles Yerkes employed complex financial arrangements similar to those that he had used in the United States to raise the funds necessary to construct the new lines and electrify the District Railway.
14.
Charles Yerkes did not live to see his London tube lines in operation.
15.
Charles Yerkes died in the hotel Waldorf Astoria in New York on December 29,1905, of kidney disease.
16.
The events of Charles Yerkes's life served as a model for Theodore Dreiser's novels The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic, in which Charles Yerkes was fictionalized as Frank Cowperwood.
17.
Charles Yerkes's wife, the daughter of Thomas Moore of Philadelphia, was painted in 1892 by the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Muller-Ury.