firm". With the proceeds, together they established the Bank of Nevada of San Francisco to compete with the Bank of California. Marriage In 1866, he married Marie Louise Hungerford, a native New Yorker. She had their first son in 1870, John W. Mackay, Jr. followed by Clarence H Mackay in 1874. Snubbed by New York society prior to moving to Virginia City in 1867, and no longer interested in San Francisco by 1874, Louise was moved to Paris with Mackay's blessing after a brief re-attempt at New York life. He purchased a large mansion for her in Paris where his wealth enabled her to become a noted society hostess for two decades, entertaining royalty and throwing lavish parties. The building is today occupied by the Belgium Embassy near the Arc de Triomphe. As his telegraph business expanded, in 1884 the family was moved to London for the boys' schooling and easier communications through his owned cables. 18 years after John's death, Louise returned to the United States in 1920, dying at age 85 in 1928. Communications companies In 1884, with James Gordon Bennett, Jr., Mackay formed the Commercial Cable Company, largely to fight Jay Gould and the Western Union Telegraph Company, laid two transatlantic cables, and forced the toll-rate for transatlantic messages down to twenty-five cents a word. In connection with the Commercial Cable Company, he formed in 1886 the Postal Telegraph Company as a domestic wire telegraph company so that Commercial would not need to rely on Western Union to collect and distribute telegraphic messages. Until Mackay and Bennett entered the field, all submarine cable traffic between the United States and Europe went over cables owned by the American financier Jay Gould. A rate war followed that took almost two years to conclude. Jay Gould finally quit trying to run John Mackay out of business. He was quoted as saying in reference to Mackay, "If he needs another million he will go into his silver mines and dig it out". Once Mackay had conquered the Atlantic with the Commercial Cable Company and North America with the Postal Telegraph Company he turned his sights to laying the first cable across the Pacific. He subsequently formed the Commercial Pacific Cable Company in secret partnership with the Great Northern Telegraph Company and the Eastern Telegraph Company. Although he died in 1902 before his vision was completed, his son Clarence H. Mackay, saw