Life and work
1853–1907
A Wall Street broker reads the markets of three capitals.
A share could travel farther than the railway it financed. Gibson followed the trade itself, from the brokers who struck a bargain to the rules that governed its settlement. London, Paris and New York gave him three ways of organizing the same business.
Return to the editions ↓The AETERNUS edition returns to the 1889 text and provides a glossary for the vocabulary of the exchanges.
Blue Series
In his 1889 comparison, the New York broker George Rutledge Gibson follows a securities trade through three markets, each with its own brokers, rules and customs.
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The exchange appears in his book as a place where custom, law and the daily work of brokers meet. The differences between the three cities become clearest when Gibson explains how a bargain actually closes.
Gibson was born in Illinois in 1853. A New York directory records that he was educated at the University of Michigan.
By 1900 the directory listed him as a broker and financial writer at 55 Broadway, a member of Watson & Gibson and of the Consolidated Stock and Petroleum Exchange. It also recorded his fellowship of the Royal Statistical Society.
Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1889, his comparison takes readers into London’s market, the Paris Bourse and the New York exchanges. It follows the machinery of a deal through quotations, settlement and clearing, and gives the bucket shop a chapter of its own.
Gibson’s comparison preserves the practical vocabulary of a market still organized around particular rooms, clerks and brokers. That vocabulary gives the book its value as a record of financial institutions at work.