Background
George was born on February 6, 1864 in New York, to Jay Gould and Helen Day Miller.
George was born on February 6, 1864 in New York, to Jay Gould and Helen Day Miller.
He was educated privately and at Columbia University.
After an apprenticeship as a clerk in the Western Union Telegraph Company, Gould was groomed to succeed his father in managing the Gould properties, which included four great railroads: the Missouri Pacific, the Texas and Pacific, the International and Great Northern, and the Wabash.
After his father's death in 1892 Gould consolidated the four roads and initiated a program of expansion in the East, in competition with the Pennsylvania Railroad, and in the West to San Francisco, finally achieving his plan of a transcontinental system. But the struggle for expansion and the opposition of Edward H. Harriman and Kuhn, Loeb and Company had weakened him, and he gradually lost control of all his railroad interests; by 1918 his railroad empire had vanished.
He married Edith M. Kingdon (1864–1921).
After the death of his first wife, Edith Kingdon Gould in November 1921, George Gould married Guinevere Jeanne Sinclair on May 1, 1922. Then with the three children in tow, they moved to England.
