Although no one could ever patent it, one of the most important inventions of the late nineteenth century was the modern corporation, and of those who might lay claim to it, Isaac Leopold Rice was perhaps the most brilliant. At his best, a corporate entrepreneur like Rice was as much an innovator as was the inventor of a practical machine or process, for he institutionalized the useful. Rice was extraordinarily shrewd about patents, building more than fifteen corporations to sell technologies devised by other men. His astonishing versatility contrasted sharply with the single-mindedness of many captains of industry, while his cultivated personality differed just as strongly from the flamboyance of the Goulds and the Edisons. Curiously reticent for one so talented, he gave his name only to a now-forgotten gambit in chess, a particularly audacious sequence of moves. Musicologist, lawyer, professor, writer, publisher, financier, and founder of the companies that ultimately became General Dynamics, Rice moved from career to career as if they were squares on the beautiful inlaid chessboards he loved.

The Rice gambit called for a calculated sacrifice, and Rice himself often abandoned eminence in one field to pursue it in another. In February 1893, as head of the financial syndicate trying to rescue the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, Rice hastily returned to America when the company filed for bankruptcy. He had been in London raising money on the line’s coal assets as part of his scheme to reorganize the railroad and its mining ventures into the elements of a corporate holding company. This strategynovel for its day—was sabotaged when the company’s president borrowed still more money for further expansion. Disgusted, Rice resigned his chairmanship in May and over the next several months watched from the sidelines as a new syndicate headed by J. P. Morgan stole Rice’s own reorganization plan by forming the Reading Company.

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