When Yerkes quit Chicago in 1899, he sold out all his transport interests .... which promptly went bust not long after. In a way his death was perfectly timed - he'd got the organisation in place in London, and had all the construction work under way, but was not there to milk it when it became productive. Not related to our main subject (the underground), but it's worth mentioning also that he financed the Yerkes Astronomical Observatory in Wisconsin. Characteristically, he included a clause in the contract which required the land and improvements to revert to him and/or his heirs should they cease being used for astronomical work. This has apparently just happened, the terrestrial-based technologies in use there now being pretty much outdated. The resulting legal wrangles are still going on.
The Yerkes Observatory is located in Williams Bay, WI, which is near the tourist mecca of Lake Geneva, WI. People from Chicago land visit the area and I was actually in the observatory some years ago. It has been made superfluous not only by changes in technology, but sadly by light pollution. Milwaukee and Chicago being not so far away from what was once farmland at the time of the observatories construction. Yerkes was a bit of a rouge and his legend lives on in this part of the world.
Ethically questionable maybe (in Christian Wolmar's book on the tube, the chapter on Yerkes' railways is entitled "The Dodgy American") but without him half of London Underground might not exist including most of the north-south lines. Just imagine the chaos! Only the Central London tube and the Metropolitan subsurface lines ever really made money. As the video points out, the Northern/Piccadilly/Bakerloo were financial losers, and the District was struggling till he electrified it. Underground lines generally just don't make money because the capital cost is so huge, as governments and councils have found out since. Hence only 3 new underground lines in central London in the 100+ years since Yerkes; Victoria, Jubilee, Crossrail. (Thameslink was in existing BR tunnels).
Just the medicine to entertain all of us depressed by lockdown. This was UndergrounD history at its best ~ and the cartoons and other illustrations often looked just like Yerkes (maybe he posed for them).
George Gibbs was also instrumental in building the first Subway in NYC This is a rendering of the Gibbs hi v subway cars which were in Service from 1904 until 1959
Another fascinating video, and the term “the combine” is still used to this day, especially by older hands (many things are still undertaken by individual lines, but sometimes things are planned across the combine)
What an almost unbelievable story - things we never knew! Thank you for setting it out so clearly, as well as for opening our eyes to the ethically questionable founding of the London Underground.
As a Chicagoan...well, someone from the Chicago area, fine, let's split hairs...anyways, as someone from the area who is deeply interested in history, it's great to learn about Mr. Yerkes.
the Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire is (loosely) based on Yerke's life - its a pretty good read, tho challenging for the younger generations what with the 1860s stylised language and everything. The third book (The Stoic) focuses on his London endeavours.
Inspite of his at times dubious business methods he was the unifying force for London underground and achieved much. This was in the face of petulance by the Metropolitan railway and the even worse business practices of JP Morgan. The latter had a plan for other badly conceived alternative routes. yerkes stopped them by acquiring London Electric Tramways and with vertical integration , Lots Rd power, AEC bus builders and acquisitions forged a formidable organisation of a public transport infrastructure. See Christian Walker's book. The metropolitan and JP Morgan would have made an unholy mess.
Yerkes got it all together and going places, but the real architect of London Transport was Albert Stanley: a British-born US immigrant who came home and made the Underground the centerpiece of the world's best city public transit. Lord Ashfield, as Stanley became, together with his ceo and design maestro Frank Pick and architect Charles Holden, oversaw the transition from private to public enterprise. A thing of modern beauty as well as efficiency. As Wren's memorial in St Paul's Cathedral says: If you want to see their monument, look around you. It's all there and it all still keeps London circulating.
I really, really, really liked this (and every) video. This quickie on CTY whet my appetite and I have ready two wonderful books on the " good old boy"! You have been kind to him! (And clearly American politics have been corrupt and the shills of millionaires for 170 years - if not longer).
Yeah, yeah, a year and a half late. I don't care. Chicago in the 1880's/90's had the largest cable car system based on volume. San Francisco's system was larger in mileage, but Chicago had the traffic. The companies had to build tunnels under the Chicago River, cable powered street railway did not lend themselves to draw bridges. Yerkes did finance the Yerkes Observatory which used the largest refactor telescope ever built at 40 inches (102 cm for the educated). I think he wanted to improve his image.
With your videos of stations in London. I'm surprised you seem to steer clear of the one for Threadneedle St. and City; now closed, I read? My Grandfather during his summer hols would take us kids to all different locales around London for different reasons. We usually got out at Temple on northern line. Then to embankment and then to where ever..? That would be 1956 or so...Always was curious why that stop. Remember him getting off while Grandma and me went on too .. Oxford Circus and Selfridge lunch rooms? Different places. Sometimes the lunch rooms in a park. After Grandad would sketch and paint. Then off after an hour
Yerkes hated the fact that people in London seemed to walk so slowly and got on trains as if they “had a hundred years to do it in”. The Underground certainly doesn't permit the latter.
he was a master BSer who got caught but was no different than any other businessman who could see that initial interest wasn’t enough to keep passengers coming. his difference was that he got caught! and people trash him, but he’s directly responsible for the most iconic looks of the Underground stations and if you think his successors weren’t in on the financial difficulties you’re fooling yourself. there’s no way in hell that they didn’t know about the financial issues and didn’t pilfer things until they couldn’t do so any longer. it’s easier to blame the old guy, but those men were pilfering alongside him
You might think about doing one on Samuel Insull, an Englishman who went to Chicago and built an even bigger transit & electric house of cards than Yerkes did.
@@JagoHazzard Insull is a good story. He was probably in part the inspiration for Citizen Kane and Hyman Roth. (also possibly any other movie after 1935 that's got a ruthless capitalist with an posh English or Mid-Atlantic accent ;-)
Perhaps someone can tell me, was Yerkes the American who created "stand on the right"? I know it was an American. As we drive on the left in this country, it has always struck me that it's a bit odd that we "overtake" on the left on Tube escalators until I found that the rule was devised by an American.
Thank you JH - found it. I have always liked your use of the cartoon characters images - which we don't see in your more resent video, is this to do with copywright?
... er, as a Chicagoan and as one with an interest in Yerkes' history, I've been waiting for him to show up in your stories. I think you were too kind to him; yes he left London with a wonderful transportation infrastructure. So his greed had a silver lining. But his greed was greed.
Since this episode features the Money bags character from Monopoly so much. How about a video explaining why the stations on the monopoly board were chosen? To modern eyes these do not seem to be the most important London stations. Should the other stations be offended by their omission?
It's slightly strange that they _are_ stations; in the original game, those spaces represented ownership of entire railroads. I guess London railways' names were so long they wouldn't fit on the cards. :)
The stations comprise the four termini owned by the LNER. (Fenchurch St was LNER because it was formerly owned by the Great Eastern, not the London, Tilbury & Southernd, which became part of the LMS.) WHY they were all LNER I don't know - maybe money changed hands.
"Yerkes was born in 1837 in Philadelphia; by 1865, he'd become a major player in the financial life of the city" - Bad things happen in Philadelphia (to coin a phrase)
He would also acquire a number of horse tram lines in Philadelphia, which he would sell(or lease?) to Peter A.B. Widener(whose son and grandson, George and Harry, in order, would go down with the Titanic in 1912) and William Elkins. Widener and Elkins would pick up more routes via lease(which would cause problems years later, as the resulting operator, Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company, would go bankrupt in 1934...it would take 5 plus years to resolve the case(the financial and legal maneuvers would need a book, or a long article, to describe), by merging all of the underliers with PRT, to become the Philadelphia Transportation Company on January 1, 1940
You should also mention that he financed an observatory with what was then the world’s largest telescope NW of Chicago. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes_Observatory
I spent decades occasionally wondering whether the Yerkes of Yerkes Observatory was the same as the Yerkes of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. I just learned that the answer is, in fact, "no"--the primate research Yerkes was Robert M. Yerkes (and it's not called that any more, because Robert Yerkes' eugenicist tendencies are less respected today). They don't seem to have been closely related.
@@MattMcIrvin It’s always nice to solve a long-standing mystery like that, no matter how inconsequential it might be. One of the useful things about the development of the Internet is the ability to expand on poorly-remembered facts or incidents from decades ago.
Is it definitely "Yerkees", rather than Yerks? I'm not arguing; just that for all I've read about the guy, I've never heard his name spoken and had guessed it was Yerks. Another excellent chapter, if maybe a bit short.😁
@@GrubHuncher Aha. Thank you Mr Yerkes for the confirmation. I hope Mr. H. sees this. I'm sure he's not the only one who mis-pronounces your name but it doesn't come up 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 often outside this channel.😁
History is full of less than squeaky clean fellows... but we wouldn't have much of anything, without many of them. "No amount of [physical] work one cares to add can make a mud pie into an apple tart. It remains a mud pie; Value: Zero."
Isn't it funny that someone who was obviously master of shady business moves and smash-and-grab principles came out to become a unifier of London underground!!?
After watching most of your videos I'm surprised to find something on which we disagree. I'm afraid I cannot find anything redeeming about Charles Yerkes. 'He brought American knowhow to a city with little experience of mass transit, so set the stage for London's rapid growth in the 20th Century. So I guess we have to thank him for that.' Thanks, but no thanks, to scoundrels like Yerkes or any of the other wheelers and dealers involved in these schemes. No one has as yet come up with a credible argument against the Labour Theory Of Value, and until that happens I'll stick with that. Behind every celebrity 'pioneer' has been an army of nameless, skilled people, such as technicians, draughtsmen, etc, etc. without whose labour no transport systems would even have come into being, ( Even the Stephensons didn't do it all by their own hands). I'll be happy to thank them for their contribution to improving public transport. As far as rapid growth goes, it's debatable whether that has benefitted the lives of the masses all that much since Yerkes.
I doubt Trump ever had anything like Yerkes' level of organizational skill. He'd have been able to buy up an existing line, make the stations gaudier and let the actual transit system break down.
The cartoon "Monopoly" character actually LOOKS like Yerkes... with that distinctive moustache.
Coincidence?
It’s not impossible - Yerkes was pretty notorious in his day.
Apparently Uncle Pennybags was modelled on J P Morgan but honestly he DOES look more like Yerkes.
When Yerkes quit Chicago in 1899, he sold out all his transport interests .... which promptly went bust not long after.
In a way his death was perfectly timed - he'd got the organisation in place in London, and had all the construction work under way, but was not there to milk it when it became productive.
Not related to our main subject (the underground), but it's worth mentioning also that he financed the Yerkes Astronomical Observatory in Wisconsin. Characteristically, he included a clause in the contract which required the land and improvements to revert to him and/or his heirs should they cease being used for astronomical work. This has apparently just happened, the terrestrial-based technologies in use there now being pretty much outdated. The resulting legal wrangles are still going on.
The Yerkes Observatory is located in Williams Bay, WI, which is near the tourist mecca of Lake Geneva, WI. People from Chicago land visit the area and I was actually in the observatory some years ago. It has been made superfluous not only by changes in technology, but sadly by light pollution. Milwaukee and Chicago being not so far away from what was once farmland at the time of the observatories construction. Yerkes was a bit of a rouge and his legend lives on in this part of the world.
@@caturdaynite7217 Sorry, is a "rouge" a slang for a shady individual who was caught "red-handed", or a misspelling of "rogue"?
@@vaclav_fejt I was there a couple of years ago. Beautiful buildings and grounds.
This list just keeps getting better...... Thank you for putting this all into words.
Ethically questionable maybe (in Christian Wolmar's book on the tube, the chapter on Yerkes' railways is entitled "The Dodgy American") but without him half of London Underground might not exist including most of the north-south lines. Just imagine the chaos! Only the Central London tube and the Metropolitan subsurface lines ever really made money. As the video points out, the Northern/Piccadilly/Bakerloo were financial losers, and the District was struggling till he electrified it. Underground lines generally just don't make money because the capital cost is so huge, as governments and councils have found out since. Hence only 3 new underground lines in central London in the 100+ years since Yerkes; Victoria, Jubilee, Crossrail. (Thameslink was in existing BR tunnels).
Just the medicine to entertain all of us depressed by lockdown. This was UndergrounD history at its best ~ and the cartoons and other illustrations often looked just like Yerkes (maybe he posed for them).
George Gibbs was also instrumental in building the first Subway in NYC This is a rendering of the Gibbs hi v subway cars which were in Service from 1904 until 1959
Another fascinating video, and the term “the combine” is still used to this day, especially by older hands (many things are still undertaken by individual lines, but sometimes things are planned across the combine)
What an almost unbelievable story - things we never knew! Thank you for setting it out so clearly, as well as for opening our eyes to the ethically questionable founding of the London Underground.
Ah, so let us boycot, definance and sanction London Underground, power of foot walking to the people!!! Long live the shoe!!
Why do I suspect he was known as Jerky-Yerkes in some circles.
As a Chicagoan...well, someone from the Chicago area, fine, let's split hairs...anyways, as someone from the area who is deeply interested in history, it's great to learn about Mr. Yerkes.
i really really really really LOVE your videos!
Fantastic story. Thank you.
the Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire is (loosely) based on Yerke's life - its a pretty good read, tho challenging for the younger generations what with the 1860s stylised language and everything. The third book (The Stoic) focuses on his London endeavours.
I knew about Yerkes being a blackmailer and a swindler, but the idea of him being an “all-around bounder” came as quite a shock to me.
Thank you for the information about Charles.R.Yerkes 😊
Inspite of his at times dubious business methods he was the unifying force for London underground and achieved much.
This was in the face of petulance by the Metropolitan railway and the even worse business practices of JP Morgan. The latter had a plan for other badly conceived
alternative routes. yerkes stopped them by acquiring London Electric Tramways and with vertical integration , Lots Rd power, AEC bus builders and acquisitions forged a formidable organisation of a public transport infrastructure. See Christian Walker's book.
The metropolitan and JP Morgan would have made an unholy mess.
Yerkes got it all together and going places, but the real architect of London Transport was Albert Stanley: a British-born US immigrant who came home and made the Underground the centerpiece of the world's best city public transit. Lord Ashfield, as Stanley became, together with his ceo and design maestro Frank Pick and architect Charles Holden, oversaw the transition from private to public enterprise. A thing of modern beauty as well as efficiency.
As Wren's memorial in St Paul's Cathedral says: If you want to see their monument, look around you. It's all there and it all still keeps London circulating.
Apperantly his mother was called "Elizabeth Link Yerkes" wich is a briliant.
I did not know that!
People who get difficult things done are often unpleasant. Nice people come second!
I really, really, really liked this (and every) video. This quickie on CTY whet my appetite and I have ready two wonderful books on the " good old boy"! You have been kind to him! (And clearly American politics have been corrupt and the shills of millionaires for 170 years - if not longer).
The Combine sounds like the Wurzels tour support band
I really liked it. It was, it was wicked.
Yeah, yeah, a year and a half late. I don't care. Chicago in the 1880's/90's had the largest cable car system based on volume. San Francisco's system was larger in mileage, but Chicago had the traffic. The companies had to build tunnels under the Chicago River, cable powered street railway did not lend themselves to draw bridges.
Yerkes did finance the Yerkes Observatory which used the largest refactor telescope ever built at 40 inches (102 cm for the educated).
I think he wanted to improve his image.
Great edition, like the two story start at the beginning.
With your videos of stations in London. I'm surprised you seem to steer clear of the one for Threadneedle St. and City; now closed, I read? My Grandfather during his summer hols would take us kids to all different locales around London for different reasons. We usually got out at Temple on northern line. Then to embankment and then to where ever..? That would be 1956 or so...Always was curious why that stop. Remember him getting off while Grandma and me went on too .. Oxford Circus and Selfridge lunch rooms? Different places. Sometimes the lunch rooms in a park. After Grandad would sketch and paint. Then off after an hour
I love a good origin story!
Yerkes hated the fact that people in London seemed to walk so slowly and got on trains as if they “had a hundred years to do it in”. The Underground certainly doesn't permit the latter.
A man from Chicago built the London Underground, and a man from London built the Chicago Elevated
I am going to thank _you_ for 6:40. ;)
Underrated is that 95 stock...
Great stuff - obviously he was one of the main ‘stars’ of episode 2 that you have just published. Sounds like a right’un!
he was a master BSer who got caught but was no different than any other businessman who could see that initial interest wasn’t enough to keep passengers coming. his difference was that he got caught!
and people trash him, but he’s directly responsible for the most iconic looks of the Underground stations
and if you think his successors weren’t in on the financial difficulties you’re fooling yourself. there’s no way in hell that they didn’t know about the financial issues and didn’t pilfer things until they couldn’t do so any longer. it’s easier to blame the old guy, but those men were pilfering alongside him
You might think about doing one on Samuel Insull, an Englishman who went to Chicago and built an even bigger transit & electric house of cards than Yerkes did.
Interesting! Thanks for the tip, could make for a great companion piece!
@@JagoHazzard Insull is a good story. He was probably in part the inspiration for Citizen Kane and Hyman Roth.
(also possibly any other movie after 1935 that's got a ruthless capitalist with an posh English or Mid-Atlantic accent ;-)
Perhaps someone can tell me, was Yerkes the American who created "stand on the right"? I know it was an American. As we drive on the left in this country, it has always struck me that it's a bit odd that we "overtake" on the left on Tube escalators until I found that the rule was devised by an American.
Nah, that's the bloke Chase thingamebob who runs Formula 1
As a Yerkes myself, our name is actually pronounced “Yerks”. Everyone always says “Yerkeez” though lol
I think my boss is his descendent.
Thank you JH - found it.
I have always liked your use of the cartoon characters images - which we don't see in your more resent video, is this to do with copywright?
Watching you in
... er, as a Chicagoan and as one with an interest in Yerkes' history, I've been waiting for him to show up in your stories. I think you were too kind to him; yes he left London with a wonderful transportation infrastructure. So his greed had a silver lining. But his greed was greed.
Since this episode features the Money bags character from Monopoly so much. How about a video explaining why the stations on the monopoly board were chosen? To modern eyes these do not seem to be the most important London stations. Should the other stations be offended by their omission?
It's slightly strange that they _are_ stations; in the original game, those spaces represented ownership of entire railroads. I guess London railways' names were so long they wouldn't fit on the cards. :)
The stations comprise the four termini owned by the LNER. (Fenchurch St was LNER because it was formerly owned by the Great Eastern, not the London, Tilbury & Southernd, which became part of the LMS.) WHY they were all LNER I don't know - maybe money changed hands.
"Yerkes was born in 1837 in Philadelphia; by 1865, he'd become a major player in the financial life of the city" - Bad things happen in Philadelphia (to coin a phrase)
He would also acquire a number of horse tram lines in Philadelphia, which he would sell(or lease?) to Peter A.B. Widener(whose son and grandson, George and Harry, in order, would go down with the Titanic in 1912) and William Elkins. Widener and Elkins would pick up more routes via lease(which would cause problems years later, as the resulting operator, Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company, would go bankrupt in 1934...it would take 5 plus years to resolve the case(the financial and legal maneuvers would need a book, or a long article, to describe), by merging all of the underliers with PRT, to become the Philadelphia Transportation Company on January 1, 1940
You should also mention that he financed an observatory with what was then the world’s largest telescope NW of Chicago.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes_Observatory
I spent decades occasionally wondering whether the Yerkes of Yerkes Observatory was the same as the Yerkes of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. I just learned that the answer is, in fact, "no"--the primate research Yerkes was Robert M. Yerkes (and it's not called that any more, because Robert Yerkes' eugenicist tendencies are less respected today). They don't seem to have been closely related.
@@MattMcIrvin It’s always nice to solve a long-standing mystery like that, no matter how inconsequential it might be. One of the useful things about the development of the Internet is the ability to expand on poorly-remembered facts or incidents from decades ago.
If you like our criminals so much will you please take our politicians? They are even more underhanded than Yerkes.
Is it definitely "Yerkees", rather than Yerks? I'm not arguing; just that for all I've read about the guy, I've never heard his name spoken and had guessed it was Yerks.
Another excellent chapter, if maybe a bit short.😁
Its Yerks. I have the same last name
@@GrubHuncher Aha. Thank you Mr Yerkes for the confirmation. I hope Mr. H. sees this. I'm sure he's not the only one who mis-pronounces your name but it doesn't come up 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 often outside this channel.😁
History is full of less than squeaky clean fellows... but we wouldn't have much of anything, without many of them.
"No amount of [physical] work one cares to add can make a mud pie into an apple tart. It remains a mud pie; Value: Zero."
Isn't it funny that someone who was obviously master of shady business moves and smash-and-grab principles came out to become a unifier of London underground!!?
So this is the video when you stoped numbering the tales from the tube
Yep. I make the videos in advance, so having a specific order was a bit limiting - I couldn’t respond to changing circumstances.
dodgy dealing? he would have had a great career in British politics, or the city in modern day London lol
U E R pronounced: ooh err by no coincidence obviously. 👍
Am I the only one who always thought that his last name would be actually pronounced as "Yerks" instead of "Yerkees"?
i find it hilarious how america mad all this public transit, brought it across the ocean, then deleted everything we had over here.
Christian Wolma's book as below
Fascinating history. Sounds like Trump took some lessons from Yerkes for his business dealings and beyond.
🖖
After watching most of your videos I'm surprised to find something on which we disagree. I'm afraid I cannot find anything redeeming about Charles Yerkes.
'He brought American knowhow to a city with little experience of mass transit, so set the stage for London's rapid growth in the 20th Century. So I guess we have to thank him for that.'
Thanks, but no thanks, to scoundrels like Yerkes or any of the other wheelers and dealers involved in these schemes.
No one has as yet come up with a credible argument against the Labour Theory Of Value, and until that happens I'll stick with that. Behind every celebrity 'pioneer' has been an army of nameless, skilled people, such as technicians, draughtsmen, etc, etc. without whose labour no transport systems would even have come into being, ( Even the Stephensons didn't do it all by their own hands). I'll be happy to thank them for their contribution to improving public transport.
As far as rapid growth goes, it's debatable whether that has benefitted the lives of the masses all that much since Yerkes.
Oh, Really? Really, Really, Really?
A shady, lowdown American entrepreneur. What a novel concept?
I wonder why the words 'Donald' and 'Trump' came to mind.
I doubt Trump ever had anything like Yerkes' level of organizational skill. He'd have been able to buy up an existing line, make the stations gaudier and let the actual transit system break down.
Was this Trump in a previous life?
Trump just destroys and disrupts things
no.
This recycling of content is tiresome.