Jay Gould

Jason "Jay" Gould was an American railroad magnate and financial speculator of the Gilded Age, born on May 27, 1836, in Roxbury, New York, and died on December 2, 1892, in New York City of tuberculosis. The son of a struggling farmer, he worked as a surveyor and tannery operator in Pennsylvania before moving to Wall Street in 1860, where he learned the mechanics of railroad bonds and stock manipulation.

Gould first drew national notoriety during the Erie Railroad battle of 1868, when he, Daniel Drew, and James Fisk fought Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of the line through aggressive issuance of new shares. In September 1869 he and Fisk attempted to corner the United States gold market, triggering the Black Friday panic of September 24 when President Ulysses S. Grant ordered the Treasury to release gold reserves; the resulting crash ruined many speculators while Gould escaped largely unharmed.

Through the 1870s and 1880s he assembled a railroad empire that at its peak included the Union Pacific, Missouri Pacific, Texas and Pacific, Wabash, and other lines totaling roughly fifteen percent of United States track mileage. He also acquired the Western Union Telegraph Company and the New York World newspaper, which he sold to Joseph Pulitzer in 1883.

Contemporary cartoonists in Puck and Harper's Weekly portrayed him as a sinister manipulator, and historians have ranked him among the most controversial of the so-called robber barons, though later scholarship has credited his operational skill in consolidating fragmented railroad systems.

The name Jay began as a short form of Jason, from the Greek Iasōn, meaning "healer," the leader of the Argonauts in classical myth. He carried it as a man whose voyages were chartered in stock certificates rather than ships.