Over the course of his career, Vanderbilt lived out the history of this abstraction, the invention of this imagined world. More than that, he took it to a new level by pioneering the giant corporation. By consolidating his New York lines into the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad, he constructed something larger than himself, not to mention virtually every other enterprise that had ever existed.
American geography enabled this to happen, in part. Vanderbuilt established original routes wih Steamships and railroads where there was unmet demand.
