The Wreck of a Napoleon in Finance
The Wreck of a Napoleon in Finance.—Sixteen years ago Joseph G. Robin, by name then of Rabinowitz, came to this country from Russia penniless, ignorant of the language. He began public life as a reporter. He soon got into money transactions, and his energy and ability to interest prominent men rapidly carried him forward. The other day he was taken to a sanitarium as a hopeless paranoiac. Three banks and other companies were found to be in a critical condition; and three banks with deposits of $8,000,000 were closed. His financial methods were wild and questionable in the extreme.
General Allen, Chief of the Signal Corps of the United States Army, has announced a new invention of the telephone which has been patented in the name of the American people. This invention makes it possible for several independent conversations to be carried on simultaneously on a single wire. The secret of the operation is the adoption of the wireless principle, while the direction is controlled by a wire base. This makes multiplex telephony not only possible but practicable. Three times King Alfonso of Spain has escaped assassination at the hands of bomb throwers,—once before his marriage, once on the day of his wedding, and the last occurred January 5, when a bomb was hurled before the palace in Malaga with intent to kill King Alfonso, Premier Canalejas, and the ministers of war and marine. A series of mysterious mail robberies aboard ferry-boats in the San Francisco Bay while specially guarded by postal clerks, has set the entire staff of Government post-office inspectors and Southern Pacific detectives on the trail of this seemingly well-organized band of robbers. Thousands of persons are reported killed or injured by an earthquake in Asiatic Russia. Practically 1,000 square miles are said to have been devastated. Vyerny, a fortified town of 23,000 inhabitants, is in ruins; and a great section of Kopal is also wrecked. Spiritualists announce that the sum of $100,000 has been pledged by persons interested in that cult for the erection of a temple in New York City. The edifice will be known by the incongruous title of "Temple of the Divine Inspiration." In a train wreck at Cheney, Washington, five were killed and twelve injured. The battered engine trapped its own whistle cord, and above the cries of the injured, shrieked its awful summons for help. Another train robbery occurred at Argo, a suburb of Seattle, Washington, when a masked pair looted the mail-car of the North Coast Limited, shooting the postal clerk and firing at his assistant. One day following the anniversary of the earthquake in Messina, Italy, that city was visited by fire, which has left 3,500 homeless, and damage to property estimated at $1,000,000. A fight which lasted eight hours occurred in London between anarchists and 1,200 troops. Four deaths resulted, and the burning of a building. It is reported that the Chinese in Manchuria have organized a secret society of large membership to drive the Japanese out of the country. Numerous organizations of "The Woman's Union Missionary Society" raised and distributed last year $3,328,840 for foreign missions. Senator Stephen B. Elkins of West Virginia died January 5 at Washington. The cause of his death was septic poisoning. Fourteen were instantly killed and eighteen hurt in an explosion in an ice plant at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Ben Pitman, author of the Pitman shorthand system, died at Cincinnati, Ohio, aged 88 years.