Fascinating stuff this, dear Ezra Cornell made his mark via the Telegraph boom of the 1840's.
"Ezra made his fortune in the telegraph business as an associate of Samuel Morse, having gained his trust by constructing and stringing the telegraph poles between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, Maryland, as the first ever telegraph line of substance in the U.S. After joining with Morse, Cornell supervised the erection of many telegraph lines, including the Erie and Michigan Telegraph Company connecting Buffalo to Milwaukee. He earned a substantial fortune as a founder of the Western Union company" **
That telecommunications boom lives on today on the bleeding edge electronic frontier of the interweb!
All the attention that I seem to be getting from Ithaca's favorite (adopted) son's philanthropic zenith is humbling to say the least, and it speaks to the great success of these communications pioneers and their legacy of wondrousness that I was able to see a storied and lovely instutition I will never visit otherwise.
I did enjoy checking out your campus, from my boring 9-5 desk. I wasn't sure where I was at first, but then spied a flag, who knew a simple google search could lead to such an exciting perch? A bird's eye view on one of the United States best respected schools. Dear Ezra, if only I knew the victory song of the mighty Cornell [insert football team name], I would be humming it right now. But alas, you sing no notes to me, just nameless logs from a web tracker. Like some indecipherable morse code, half-heard, these are merely ghosts, haunting my lil' blog.
Oh, what a kerfuffle.
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