Financier Who Retired from Business at
Forty Assumes Direction of Great
Railroad at Fifty-Seven.
Alexander Johnston Cassatt retired independently wealthy at the age of
forty, and seventeen years later he returned to dominate one of the
largest railroads in the country. He was born in Pittsburgh. Though poor,
his parents gave him a good education. He became a civil engineer, and the
first work he got to do was on a road being built in Georgia. He remained
in the South two years, but on the breaking out of the Civil War he
returned North, and entered the service of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Cassatt's ability won rapid promotion. In nine years he built new roads,
reorganized the company's shops, and improved the construction of cars and
locomotives. Then, when he was thirty-one years old, the position of
general manager was created for him.
One of the first things he did in this position was to introduce the
air-brake, which at that time received scant encouragement from railroad
men. Cassatt was told that it was useless. His experiments cost thousands
of dollars, but they established the practicability of the air-brake.
It was Cassatt also who developed the idea of combining individual roads
into one great system. In 1872 he executed a grand coup and purchased for
the Pennsylvania the controlling stock of the Philadelphia, Wilmington,
and Baltimore Road, a line the Baltimore and Ohio people had tried to
obtain. It took Cassatt one night to engineer the deal, and in payment for
the stock a check for $14,549,052.20 was drawn--up to that time the
largest on record.
Cassatt was first vice-president of the road when he withdrew in 1882, and
for seventeen years he remained out of railroad affairs. When he returned
it was as president of the Pennsylvania system, a position he still
holds.