Matches

The Story of the Match ~ a Great World Industry: "But if you used a penny box of wooden stick matches you helped one of the world’s greatest international trusts pay dividends, for the penny match box business of the world is practically all controlled from Stockholm.

There, in a beautiful office overlooking a courtyard in which fountains play among lovely statues, sits Ivar Kreuger, one-time youthful engineer in America, former soldier in the Boer war, and today the head of the Swedish match trust and one of the world’s greatest mystery men. Through 225 subsidiaries scattered all over the world, except in the United States, he makes* seventy-five per cent of the world’s matches, and out of the profits he buys match monopolies in many lands, and stabilizes national currencies by huge loans to governments. He goes and comes unannounced in the press, travels in private airplanes, maintains year around apartments in Paris, Berlin, London, New York and other cities, directs a world-wide organization that is rivaled in scope and size, among American companies, only by Standard Oil, and through it all remains one of the least known big business men in the world. In his middle forties, he is a bachelor, though his engagement to a Swedish countess has recently been reported."