Margen
Benjamin Franklin died in 1790 and left an experiment in his will: a thousand pounds for Boston and another thousand for Philadelphia, with instructions to lend the money to young tradesmen and let compound interest do its work. Part of the fund could be used after one hundred years; the rest, exactly after two hundred.
By 1990, Boston's fund stood at around five million dollars and Philadelphia's at over two. The money went to scholarships and technical institutions, just as Franklin had imagined.
Franklin wasn't a prophet: he was good at arithmetic. He knew that a modest sum, reinvested across generations, ends in figures that look like magic. All it took was something almost nobody has: two centuries of patience.
His lesson still stands: compound interest doesn't reward the cleverest — it rewards whoever arrives earliest and leaves last.