In the cold winter of 1854, the small workshop in Genoa was on the verge of bankruptcy.
A mechanical engineer disguised himself as a fatherless military cadet, faced with a mountain of burlap, predatory loan sharks, and a mother with swollen eyes.
He grabbed a piece of war news from The Times and gambled his family's lives:
"I'll make the Brits' winter clothes!"
► 【The sewing machine is my Gatling gun! 】
★ Improved cotton fluffing machine? The Widow's Assembly Line boosts productivity!
Bribing Russian POWs? Confessions from Black Sea corpses become a deadly bargaining chip!
★ Gambling against the British Consul? The Ladder Agreement contains a sinister clause!
When the first pot of gold came into his pocket, he blatantly tore off his merchant coat——
► [From Bronze Ledger to Iron Throne]
❗ Newspaper predicts war: signed article ignites Turin, Cavour personally recruits!
❗ Private army surprise attack on the fortress: Nitroglycerin shatters the Bourbon dynasty, and thousands of black shirts are crowned knights on a bloody journey!
❗ Monopoly of sulfur hegemony: "One ton of sulfur for ten tons of grain", harvesting Sicily during famine!
In the turbulent times of roaring steam engines, he grasped the magic of bonds with his left hand and manipulated the struggle for supremacy among the great powers with his right hand:
Prussian-Austrian battlefield pits Austrian ships: sulfur-mixed coal explodes boiler, and Veneto is taken!
The Pope's Treasury moves gold: 50-year bonds to redeem the Holy City, and the Vatican is furious!
Suez secretly seizes shares: bottom-fishing at the window of France's defeat and strangling the throat of Europe and Asia!
When the Italian crown was crowned, he looked out over the Mediterranean:
"The so-called Caesar is nothing more than making the world believe—
The shadow that sits upon the Iron Throne is a god!"
Reborn in 1905 as a starving, impoverished cowboy in Montana, Jack Crawford thought he'd been given a hellish start. Until he discovered he received a random intelligence report every day. [Three hours later, an injured elk will collapse in the birch forest behind the house.]—Jack carried back his winter rations. [Old Hank, the neighbor, is preparing to sell his seemingly weak but actually Quarter Horse foal at a low price.]—Jack now possesses a future champion horse. [Next week, torrential rains will breach the valley, causing flash floods, and the upstream soil has extremely high mineral content.]—Jack bought the most fertile land at the lowest price after the disaster. While cowboys throughout the West were still relying on the weather and suffering heavy losses from blizzards, Jack always managed to avoid all disasters in advance. While Wall Street giants were strategizing for the economy...
[Civil War] [Business War] [Calm and Decisive] [Gilded Age] [Technological Explosion]
Alan, a business elite, died in a car accident under a heavy truck, but his soul accidentally traveled to New York in 1860 and became a 19-year-old Irish youth with nothing.
With only $75 in his pocket, he built a canning factory from scratch using modern business thinking, expanding it to become a company. During the turbulent years of the Civil War, his assets soared thanks to precise planning.
With the advent of the Gilded Age, he expanded into oil, steel, military industry, railroads, and even ventured into media, real estate, electrical technology, and the hotel industry. From a contemporary elite to a 19th-century pauper, how did he create a multi-faceted, top-tier family tycoon in America a century ago?