AI-generated image depicting a scene between two men in an office.
Transcribed from the Los Angeles Evening Express (Los Angeles, California), January 28, 1901 –
“Do you see that young man over there?” said a man on a cable car, indicating a young man reading a paper in the seat opposite. “He’s one of the greatest financial geniuses in the country, if little things are any indication of a man’s ability and character. He’ll be a millionaire before long, or I’m no judge of people.”
The young man’s appearance did not seem to indicate that there was anything out of the common about him, and his admirer’s companion said so.
“Well, I’ll tell you how I came to discover his genius,” said the man who had spoken first. “When I tell you what he did I think you’ll agree with me. He secured a typewriter [i.e., typist] without paying a cent for it, and without doing a stroke of work for it, and he did it in a perfectly honest and legitimate way, too. In fact, he actually made money on the transaction. I only discovered how he did it by accident, and I’ve been wondering at the genius and simplicity of the scheme ever since. He was formerly employed in the same office with me, and we both had to do a good deal of writing. One day he came up to me and proposed that we should hire a typewriter together.
“‘We can hire a typewriter for $4 a month,’ he said, ‘and if we split it between us it will only cost us 50 cents a week each. We can do that all right, because we wouldn’t be using it at the same time, anyway. If you give me $2 now I’ll go up to the office of one of the typewriter companies and have them send down a typewriter. I’ll arrange the whole thing so as to save you any trouble.’
“I agreed to this, and the young man went off with the $2. Every month I paid him $2, and we both used the typewriter with perfect satisfaction. About a week after the first payment I learned that my friend was not paying anything for the typewriter, but was actually making a little on it. He was hiring it out to a man who only used it occasionally, and whom he persuaded to pay him 50 cents a week for the use of it. I thought that this was rather clever, but I didn’t realize the full measure of my friend’s ability until a year had expired. Then I learned from a man who had called to collect a payment on it that he had agreed to buy the typewriter on the installment plan, paying $4 a month for it. The man was calling for the last monthly payment on it at the time, and the typewriter is now the property of my friend. It took him a year to pay it off at $2 a month, and he was receiving 50 cents a week for it all the time. I never took the trouble to figure it out, but I can see that he must have been making a little on it while he was paying for it.” — New York Times
The original –
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