If you want to understand a state's history, start by looking at its name.
The map below shows the breakdown of all the states' etymologies. The most names, eight in both cases, stem from Algonquin and Latin. 
 
<div class="KonaFilter image-container"><div class="image">Wikimedia Commons</div></div>
But the etymologies of some names have become muddled over the years. Even alternate theories exist for some, and an author even appears to made one up entirely.
Scroll through the list to find your home state's meaning and how the name originated:
<a href="http://www.archives.state.al.us/statenam.html">Alabama</a>: From the Choctaw word albah amo meaning "thicket-clearers" or "plant-cutters."
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Alaska&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Alaska</a>: From the Aleut word alaxsxaq, from Russian ??????, meaning "the object toward which the action of the sea is directed."
<a href="http://www.azcentral.com/news/columns/articles/0225clay0225.html">Arizona</a>: From the O'odham (a Uto-Aztecan language) word ali sona-g via Spanish Arizonac meaning "good oaks."
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Arkansas&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Arkansas</a>: From a French pronunciation of an Algonquin name for the Quapaw people: akansa. This word, meaning either "downriver people" or "people of the south wind," comes from the Algonquin prefix -a plus the Siouan word kká:ze for a group of tribes including the Quapaw.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;search=California&amp;searchmode=none">California</a>: In his popular novel "Las sergas de Esplandián" published in 1510, writer Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo named an imaginary realm California. Spanish explorers of the New World could have mistaken Baja California as the mythical place. Where Montalvo learned the name and its meaning remain a mystery. 
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Colorado&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Colorado</a>: Named for the Rio Colorado (Colorado River), which in Spanish means "ruddy" or "reddish." 
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Connecticut&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Connecticut</a>: Named for the Connecticut River, which stems from Eastern Algonquian, possibly Mohican, quinnitukqut, meaning "at the long tidal river." 
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Delaware&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Delaware</a>: Named for the Delaware Bay, named after Baron De la Warr (Thomas West, 1577 - 1618), the first English governor of Virginia. His surname ultimately comes from de la werre, meaning "of the war" in Old French.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Florida&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Florida</a>: From Spanish Pascua florida meaning "flowering Easter." Spanish explorers discovered the area on Palm Sunday in 1513. The state name also relates to the English word florid, an adjective meaning "strikingly beautiful," from Latin floridus.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Georgia&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Georgia</a>: Named for King George II of Great Britain. <a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&amp;search=George&amp;searchmode=none">His name</a> originates with Latin Georgius, from Greek Georgos, meaning farmer, from ge (earth) + ergon (work). 
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Hawaii&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Hawaii</a>: From Hawaiian Hawai'i, from Proto-Polynesian hawaiki, thought to mean "place of the Gods." Originally named the Sandwich Islands by James Cook in the late 1700s.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Idaho&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Idaho</a>: Originally applied to the territory now part of eastern Colorado, from the Kiowa-Apache (Athabaskan) word idaahe, meaning "enemy," a name given by the Comanches. 
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Illinois&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Illinois</a>: From the French spelling ilinwe of the Algonquian's name for themselves Inoca, also written Ilinouek, from Old Ottawa for "ordinary speaker." 
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Indiana&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Indiana</a>: From the English word Indian + -ana, a Latin suffix, roughly meaning "land of the Indians." Thinking they had reached the South Indes, explorers mistakenly called native inhabitants of the Americas Indians. And <a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Indian&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">India</a> comes from the same Latin word, from the same Greek word, meaning "region of the Indus River." 
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Iowa&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Iowa</a>: Named for the natives of the Chiwere branch of the Aiouan family, from Dakota ayuxba, meaning "sleepy ones."
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Kansas&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Kansas</a>: Named for the Kansa tribe, natively called kká:ze, meaning "people of the south wind." Despite having the same etymological root as Arkansas, Kansas has a different pronunciation.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Kentucky&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Kentucky</a>: Named for the Kentucky River, from Shawnee or Wyandot language, meaning "on the meadow" (also "at the field" in Seneca). 
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Louisiana&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Louisiana</a>: Named after Louis XIV of France. When René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle claimed the territory for France in 1982, he named it La Louisiane, meaning "Land of Louis." <a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Louis&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Louis</a> stems from Old French Loois, from Medieval Latin Ludovicus, a changed version of Old High Germany Hluodwig, meaning "famous in war."
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Maine&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Maine</a>: Uncertain origins, potentially named for the French province of Maine, named for the river of Gaulish, an extinct Celtic language, origin.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Maryland&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Maryland</a>: Named for Henrietta Maria, wife of English King Charles I. Mary originally comes from Hebrew Miryam, the sister of Moses.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Massachusetts&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Massachusetts</a>: From Algonquian Massachusett, a name for the native people who lived around the bay, meaning "at the large hill," in reference to Great Blue Hill, southwest of Boston.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Michigan&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Michigan</a>: Named for Lake Michigan, which stems from a French spelling of Old Ojibwa (Algonquian) meshi-gami, meaning "big lake."
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Minnesota&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Minnesota</a>: Named for the river, from Dakota (Siouan) mnisota, meaning "cloudy water, milky water,"
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Mississippi&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Mississippi</a>: Named for the river, from French variation of Algonquian Ojibwa meshi-ziibi, meaning "big river."
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Missouri&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Missouri</a>: Named for a group of native peoples among Chiwere (Siouan) tribes, from an Algonquian word, likely <a href="http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&amp;type=summary&amp;url=/journals/american_speech/v079/79.1mccafferty.html">wimihsoorita</a>, meaning "people of the big (or wood) canoes."
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Montana&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Montana</a>: From the Spanish word montaña, meaning "mountain, which stems from Latin mons, montis. U.S. Rep. James H. Ashley of Ohio proposed the name in 1864. 
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Nebraska&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Nebraska</a>: From a native Siouan name for the Platte River, either Omaha ni braska or Oto ni brathge, both meaning "water flat."
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Nevada&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Nevada</a>: Named for the western boundary of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, meaning "snowy mountains" in Spanish.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Hampshire&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">New Hampshire</a>: Named for the county of Hampshire in England, which was named for city of Southampton. Southampton was known in Old English as Hamtun, meaning "village-town." The surrounding area (or scir) became known as Hamtunscir.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=New+Jersey&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">New Jersey</a>: Named by one of the state's proprietors, Sir George Carteret, for his home, the Channel island of <a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Jersey&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Jersey</a>, a bastardization of the Latin Caesarea, the Roman name for the island.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Mexico&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">New Mexico</a>: From Spanish Nuevo Mexico, from Nahuatl (Aztecan) mexihco, the name of the ancient Aztec capital.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=New+York&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">New York</a>: Named in honor of the Duke of York and Albany, the future James II. <a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=York&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">York</a> comes from Old English Eoforwic, earlier Eborakon, an ancient Celtic name probably meaning "Yew-Tree Estate."
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Carolina&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">North Carolina</a>: Both Carolinas were named for King Charles II. The proper form of Charles in Latin is Carolus, and the division into north and south originated in 1710. In latin, Carolus is a strong form of the pronoun "he" and translates in many related languages as a "free or strong" man.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Dakota&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">North Dakota</a>: Both Dakotas stem from the name of a group of native peoples from the Plains states, from Dakota dakhota, meaning "friendly" (often translated as "allies").
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Ohio&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Ohio</a>: Named for the Ohio River, from Seneca (Iroquoian) ohi:yo', meaning "good river." 
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Oklahoma&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Oklahoma</a>: From a Choctaw word, meaning "red people," which breaks down as okla "nation, people" + homma "red." Choctaw scholar Allen Wright, later principal chief of the Choctaw Nation, coined the word. 
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Oregon&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Oregon</a>: Uncertain origins, potentially from Algonquin.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Pennsylvania&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Pennsylvania</a>: Named, not for William Penn, the state's proprietor, but for his late father, Admiral William Penn (1621-1670) after suggestion from Charles II. The name literally means "Penn's Woods," a hybrid formed from the surname Penn and Latin sylvania.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Rhode+Island&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Rhode Island</a>: It is thought that Dutch explorer Adrian Block named modern Block Island (a part of Rhode Island) Roodt Eylandt, meaning "red island" for the cliffs. English settlers later extended the name to the mainland, and the island became Block Island for differentiation. An alternate theory is that <a href="http://sos.ri.gov/library/history/name/">Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano</a> gave it the name in 1524 based on an apparent similarity to the island of Rhodes.
South Carolina: See North Carolina.
South Dakota: See North Dakota.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Tennessee&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Tennessee</a>: From Cherokee (Iroquoian) village name ta'nasi' of unknown origin.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Texas&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Texas</a>: From Spanish Tejas, earlier pronounced "ta-shas;" originally an ethnic name, from Caddo (the language of an eastern Texas Indian tribe) taysha meaning "friends, allies."
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Utah&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Utah</a>: From Spanish yuta, name of the indigenous Uto-Aztecan people of the Great Basin; perhaps from Western Apache (Athabaskan) yudah, meaning "high" (in reference to living in the mountains).
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Vermont&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Vermont</a>: Based on French words for "Green Mountain," mont vert.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Virginia&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Virginia</a>: A Latinized name for Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Washington&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Washington</a>: Named for President George Washington (1732-1799). The surname Washington means "estate of a man named Wassa" in Old English.
West Virginia: See Virginia.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Wisconsin&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Wisconsin</a>: Uncertain origins but likely from a Miami word Meskonsing, meaning "it lies red"; misspelled Mescousing by the French, and later corrupted to Ouisconsin. Quarries in Wisconsin often contain red flint.
<a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Wyoming&amp;allowed_in_frame=0">Wyoming</a>: From Munsee Delaware (Algonquian) chwewamink, meaning "at the big river flat."

Here's What All 50 State Names Really Mean

On August 3rd, 1900, Charles Yerkes, an American financier and ex-convict, gazed across London from the top of Hampstead Heath.
His journey through the capital in a horse-drawn carriage had already begun to persuade him that it was a fine place to invest.
The streets heaved with people; Yerkes had never travelled through such a densely populated city. But the view from one of its highest points clinched his interest.
To the south lay spires, crowded terraced houses and congested streets. To the north were pastures, stretches of farmland and a few sleepy villages.
Within two decades that landscape was transformed--thanks to Yerkes. By 1907 elegant redbrick Underground stations had been built to the north at Archway, near Highgate village, and to the north-west at Golders Green, on a site previously dominated by a pig farm and a crematorium. Land values surged. A photograph of Golders Green from 1920 shows an elegant high street lined with four-storey buildings and bustling with cars and buses.
The story of how London expanded so swiftly at the turn of the 20th century is one of financial ingenuity, bold risk-taking and low skulduggery. It is also the tale of one dauntless American who, though notorious in his time, is today unknown in the city he helped shape.
<h3>There are second acts in American lives</h3>
America was full of men on the make in the second half of the 19th century. As John Franch observes in "Robber Baron", a biography of Yerkes, he numbered among the "gilded generation" that also included Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. Born in 1837, Yerkes grew up in an age of big business, when railways were stretching across the country like arteries and large enterprises springing up along them. By 1851, as Mr Franch enumerates, even the fairly rundown part of Philadelphia where the young Yerkes lived boasted three textile factories, a malt house, a machine shop and a sawmill.
A child who did not care much for books--but had a head for numbers--Yerkes thrived in this atmosphere. He was born into a reasonably well-to-do Quaker family; his father was president of a bank. An indifferent student, he finished his education at 17 to work for a brokerage, and by the age of 28 had set up his own bank and was acquiring a reputation as a canny businessman. Then, in 1871, a fire in Chicago and the ensuing stockmarket collapse undid him: Yerkes was found to have embezzled funds that he was holding for the city of Philadelphia. He was sent to prison for two years and four months, serving seven months.
"By the time I was 35 I had accumulated a fortune of some $1m," he later told an English journalist. "Then, by a stroke of ill luck, I lost it all...This, of course, is nothing extraordinary for Americans." He rebuilt his fortune by investing in the burgeoning tram (or "streetcar") business in Chicago in the late 1880s. His business methods were purposefully obscure: Yerkes would borrow cash, acquire leases and create networks of construction companies, operating companies and holding companies before issuing diluted stock. Bribery of officials was rife, as was the badmouthing of competitors. In one particularly Machiavellian move, described by Sidney Roberts, a historian, Yerkes constructed a tram line in the dead of night--and in four hours--so that fractious Chicago property-owners wouldn't be able to stop him.
Eventually he controlled hundreds of miles of tramway and railway. But his luck ran out again. Infuriated by Yerkes's badly lit trams and occasionally shoddy service, the citizens of Chicago revolted when he tried to renew his franchises. Club-wielding men protested. Local newspapers ran angry editorials: Yerkes was portrayed as a monopolising robber baron who had little regard for his passengers' comfort. Spurned, in 1899 he decided to leave the Midwest. He sold his shares for an inflated $20m and moved to New York, packing up his growing art collection (which included the first Rodin sculpture bought by an American, a sword that once belonged to Oliver Cromwell, and a few flashy portraits of Yerkes himself); he installed it, along with his second wife, in a mansion overlooking Central Park. To the delight of New York gossip columnists, he also set up his 19-year-old mistress, Emilie Grigsby, in a flat two blocks away.
Yerkes could have led an easy life in New York. He was 62 when he arrived, and admitted that he needed a rest. Photographs from the period show a sturdy, rather short man, with white whiskers and fashionably slicked hair, glaring at the camera. He looks fearsome, but also rather tired. His house in the city was magnificent: it had a two-storey conservatory full of rare birds, a penthouse theatre and a marble-clad hallway ornamented with a bust of Nero. It was far more fun to spend money in New York than in Chicago, he once quipped. But Yerkes could never settle anywhere for long. He soon decided to invest in London's transport network; he would spend the next five years travelling back and forth between America and Britain.
The move would help ruin him financially. It would also be the finest idea of his life.
<h3>Baron versus baron</h3>
In 1900 London was the world's largest city, with 6.5m inhabitants and streets thronged with omnibuses, hackney cabs and horse-drawn carriages. By the time Yerkes visited Hampstead Heath, three Underground lines were already dug and running: the Metropolitan, the District, and the City and South London line, which shuttled businessmen from Stockwell to King William Street in uncomfortable carriages known as "padded cells". But a series of plans for further lines--stretching up from Charing Cross in central London to Hampstead in the north, or from Elephant and Castle in the south-east to Regent's Park in the north-west--had stalled for lack of cash.
Yerkes's decision to invest was not driven by anglophilia. The government's tendency to meddle and the interminable parliamentary processes annoyed him. An "obsolete past" hung over the city like smog, he thought. Compared with Americans, Britons seemed sluggish. They took far too long to board a train, as if they "had a hundred years to do it in", Yerkes huffed. To a man known to work 18-hour days--getting up at five o'clock to cycle 12 miles in his knickerbockers--the locals could seem lazy. In 1903 he told a reporter at the New York Times: "The trouble with the British workman is that he does not work enough. If you pass through London or adjacent places on a Saturday afternoon you will be perfectly amazed by the number of men playing ball." He was willing to concede that "this is an enjoyable way to live. But it is a bit startling to a busy, hustling American." That sort of indolence helped give this particular hustling American his opportunity.
In New York Yerkes had met Thomas Reeves and H.H. Montague Smith, English businessmen who were looking for funding for the Charing Cross to Hampstead railway. Now part of the Underground's Northern line, this had been given parliamentary approval in 1893; a construction contract had been signed in 1897, but finance proved elusive. After his visit to Hampstead in August 1900 Yerkes paid £100,000 to the railway company and became its chairman. A new contract was signed, and two new bills put before Parliament to extend the line farther north to Golders Green and Archway.
As politicians pondered these proposals, and those submitted by rivals, Yerkes took over three other lines, actual and planned, among them the Great Northern, Brompton and Piccadilly railway, a proposed route from west London to Finsbury Park in the north-east (see map).
Altogether these projects would cost £16m. To raise the cash Yerkes created a new company, the Underground Electric Railways Company (UERL), enlisting a bank to help through the issuing of "profit-sharing secured notes".
Most investors were American, but Yerkes persuaded some wary Britons to chip in too. Before he built anything, however, Yerkes would have to see off an even grander American financier: John Pierpoint Morgan.
Morgan's son, J. Pierpoint Morgan junior, had wired his father details of a proposed underground line to run from Piccadilly to north-east London, tracing a similar route to Yerkes's Brompton and Piccadilly railway. Meanwhile London United Tramways (LUT), a separate outfit that operated trams, put a bid into Parliament to create a line serving two tram termini in west London. Morgan and the LUT joined forces to build a line that would stretch under the city from Hammersmith in the west to Tottenham in the north-east.
In 1902 Yerkes won parliamentary approval for his extension up to Golders Green and Archway, as well as for his Brompton and Piccadilly line. Oddly (since the two schemes were so similar) Morgan's plans were also approved; perhaps the MPs thought one of them was bound to collapse--an outcome that, inadvertently, they helped bring about. The politicians were concerned that only the lucrative, central part of Morgan's line would be built, so insisted that the whole thing, from Hammersmith to Tottenham, must be constructed. Still, when Parliament went into recess, it seemed that both the Yerkes and Morgan projects were viable.
But when Parliament returned Yerkes had acquired a majority interest in the LUT. This meant he could prevent it building its part of the Morgan line. The whole proposal promptly fell through. J.P. Morgan described Yerkes's manoeuvres as "the greatest rascality and conspiracy I have ever heard of." Scandalised politicians huffed about this "very dirty transaction".
<h3>Paradise by way of Golders Green</h3>
In the event Tottenham did not join the Underground network until the 1960s. All the same, Yerkes's cunning and determination were a boon to his adopted city. They meant work on his Underground lines began even as Parliament prevaricated and NIMBYs in Hampstead fretted that the Tube (as the system was soon known) would drain the Heath of moisture. If plans had been left to fester for ten more years, the rise of the motorbus would have made tunnelling under crowded streets seem even less worthwhile. As Christian Wolmar, a railway expert, points out, another deep-level Tube line did not open in London until 1968.
And the monopolistic instinct that got Yerkes booted out of Chicago served a better purpose in London. By the time of the first world war his firm, the UERL, then known as the Underground Group and run by Alfred Stanley (later Lord Ashfield), controlled all but one of the city's Tube lines, all three tram companies and the main bus operator. Its elegant roundel logo is still in use today. London's transport network became a comprehensive system, not a fractured, chaotic one. Rather than leaving stations to switch lines, passengers could zip down escalators to do so instead. This changed the way people got around the city. It also changed the way the city itself developed.
In 1900 Yerkes told a sceptical American journalist that "a generation hence London will be completely transformed...people will think nothing of living 20 miles or more from town, owing to electrified trains." This had started to happen in parts of the city where railway lines had already been built. Large Victorian houses clustered in places such as Clapham Junction, a south London neighbourhood home to a railway terminus since 1863. But Tube lines would encourage more people to move farther out. At a board meeting in 1903 (reported in The Economist), Yerkes asserted: "Cheap fares to the suburban districts is the only thing that will solve the problem [of overcrowding], and other Londons must be built up on the outskirts of London."
Other Londons were indeed built. Land values in Golders Green more than doubled between 1903 and 1904 alone. By 1908 the Underground Group put up posters showing a couple in their garden in Golders Green: a man in a waistcoat, his sleeves rolled up, waters sunflowers; his wife reclines in a deckchair as their child plays nearby. Below are lines from William Cowper's 1784 poem, "The Task", describing how pleasant it is to be at a "safe distance" from "the great Babel". The image is a precursor of the famous adverts that, after the first world war, touted "Metro-Land" as the bucolic domain of aspiring middle-class families.
<h3>Mind the gap</h3>
The three new lines that Yerkes championed all opened between March 1906 and June 1907. He did not live long enough to see any of them in operation. When he became ill with kidney disease in 1905 he defied his doctor's orders and kept a telephone by his bed. He also chaired meetings of his company, and gave newspaper interviews in which he yet again berated Londoners for being slow moving. But in November of that year he returned to America to die in the Waldorf Astoria hotel, with Miss Grigsby, his mistress, by his side.
British newspapers were generous towards the man "who revolutionised our old-fashioned methods of going to and fro". Americans were more scathing about his rakish behaviour: a serial philanderer, Yerkes cheated repeatedly on both his wives and on Miss Grigsby. His behaviour so outraged his contemporaries that when the journalist Theodore Dreiser based a trilogy of novels on Yerkes's life, he depicted him as a swarthy businessman who seduces female stenographers in his oak-panelled office, and has to break down his wife's door when she tries to strangle one of his mistresses.
Americans were also unimpressed by his apparent lack of philanthropy, which seems mostly to have consisted of splashing out $23,000 on an electric fountain in Chicago in 1890 and, two years later, giving just over $300,000 to fund what was then the world's largest telescope. (As a result, a crater on the moon is named after him.) Yerkes was startlingly blunt about his motives: "Whatever I do, I do not from any sense of duty, but to satisfy myself."
Yet, in a paradox characteristic of many voracious tycoons, he also wanted to leave a legacy. Initially, that seemed unlikely. Many of his other business schemes were ditched. Angry creditors contested his will. Proposals for his mansion in New York to become a museum fell through, and it was sold off along with his art collection. In the 1930s the mansion was bulldozed and replaced with a modern apartment block. Plans to establish a hospital in his name were also scuppered. Yerkes once told his shareholders that the Underground would be "the crowning success" of his life. But, when his lines eventually opened, passenger numbers disappointed, and even that hope looked forlorn.
After his death, though, the concern was saved from bankruptcy by Lord Ashfield, who ploughed money into advertisements, boosting the Tube's popularity. Yerkes's attention to details, such as the decor of his tile-clad stations, survived him, as did his vision of a city surrounded by densely packed suburbs. And, these days, his method for realising that vision is back in fashion.
One of Yerkes's lines is currently being extended; meanwhile Crossrail, a completely new project that scythes through London, is scheduled to open in 2016. Both of these schemes are funded partly by private capital: austerity has made it near-impossible to fund big infrastructure projects with public money alone. The city is coming full circle, suggests Isabel Dedring, London's deputy mayor for transport: back to a model of development based more on Yerkes-style independent finance.
Unlike J.P. Morgan, Yerkes's feted arch rival, today few know of this strange, extravagant individual. His only real monument does not bear his name. At Golders Green station--which still looks much the same as when Yerkes's team built it in 1907--a small brown plaque near the electronic ticket gates notes the date the building opened, and that some original features remain, such as ornate timber handrails in the stairwells. But it does not mention the man who ensured that the station, along with the suburb that blossomed around it, got built.
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