For the past forty-eight hours the National City Bank has had employed, night and day, a corps of forty-odd extra clerks calculating and arranging the applications and checks. At exactly twelve o'clock noon four uniformed watchmen closed the doors of the subscription department of the City Bank in the face of over three hundred intending subscribers, who were frantic at their vain efforts to get in their subscriptions before the appointed hour arrived.
Up to eleven o'clock to-night the entire bank force, regular and extra, have been at work, and at this hour the figures were announced which make the subscription of the Amalgamated Copper the greatest event in finance since the world began.
After throwing out bids that were, on examination, proved to be the efforts of speculators to take advantage of the great interest to make money with no risk, and after throwing out bids unaccompanied by checks, or checks that were not satisfactory, the first class amounting to over $170,000,000, and the last to over $62,000,000, the total cash subscription was found to have reached the gigantic sum of $412,000,000, which gave to each and every subscriber eighteen per cent. of his subscription.
It is not known how much was represented in the 300 subscribers who were too late, but it is estimated at $50,000,000—five of the 300 had single subscriptions of $1,000,000 each. It is estimated that the sum total of the subscriptions that were thrown out or that arrived by messenger or mail—for the mail is still pouring into the bank—was between $300,000,000 and $400,000,000, which, added to what insiders had intended to secure for themselves, would have carried the total to over $1,000,000,000.
It is estimated also that there are a great many who, anticipating the enormous over-subscriptions, have refrained from subscribing and will purchase in the open market.