A train of fifty-eight railroad cars would be required for transporting the precious metal, with two big engines, one at either end, to move the train! For storage room the gold would require a vault 8 feet high, 20 feet wide, and 24½ feet long, and there wouldn’t be an inch of spare room! Placed at one end of a scale the gold would need 34,666 men of average weight to balance it! If the Corporation’s capital were coined into five-dollar gold pieces they would pave a road twenty-five feet wide for more than ten miles! Stacked one on the other these coins would reach a height of more than twenty miles! If this huge sum were converted into pure silver it would weigh 87,500 tons, with a cubic content of 268,000 feet! This silver would form a needle six feet square at the base and piercing the skies to a height of 29,776 feet, or above the highest crest of the Himalayas! It would take 2,200 freight cars to load it, and about fifty-five powerful locomotives to pull these cars! This $1,404,000,000, changed into dollar bills, would measure 166,200 miles, forming a ribbon that would girdle the earth six times and leave two streamers each 8,000 miles long floating behind! A ribbon that would reach more than two thirds the distance to the moon! These bills would cover an area of 228,317,433 square feet! An expert bank teller working eight hours a day, Sundays and holidays included, and counting one bill a second without rest, would take more than 133 years to count them all. If he started to count on January 1, 1921, one of his descendants might count the last bill in the pile about the end of June, 2054! If the Corporation’s capital were divided evenly it would give every man, woman, and child in the United States about $14! The interest on this sum at 6 per cent. would keep some 35,000 American families in comparative comfort without touching the capital! From the date of the Simmons dinner to that on which the plans for the new corporation were announced was a very short period. The birth of the Corporation did not take long. Once convinced that a merger of a number of large companies making various steel products was practicable and desirable for the good of the industry and of the country--as well as for the pockets of the consolidators--Morgan and his associates lost no time in bringing it about. The dinner took place on December 12, 1900; United States Steel was formally chartered on February 25th of the year following and began business as a corporate entity on April 1, 1901.