Baron Maurice de Hirsch

person

German-born financier, 1831–1896, who on 17 April 1869 took the Ottoman concession to build and operate some 2,500 km of railway connecting Constantinople with Vienna, and in 1870 formed the company known as the Chemins de fer Orientaux. He is the answer to the question the Orient Express story usually skips — somebody had to finance and build the track through Ottoman Europe before a luxury sleeper could be attached to anything. The concession terms, a guaranteed payment per completed kilometre, made the enterprise financially attractive and politically contentious, and the programme was cut back in renegotiation from 1871. Hirsch later became one of the largest philanthropists of the nineteenth century, largely on this fortune.

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