The 20th century corporation was ‘foreshadowed when the first promoters conceived the plan of distributing stock in an enterprise to be run by a board of managers - a device practiced in England at least as early as the sixteenth
century.’ But the leap made by the corporation in the 20th century has been a quantum one, for ‘only in the twentieth century has the process been conducted to an extent which revolutionizes national life.’ Therefore the 20th century can be quarantined as the modern era of the corporation.
It was recognized early in the 20th century just how important the corporate form was. In 1911, Nicholas Murray Butler, then president of Columbia University, claimed that ‘the limited liability company outweighed even electricity as the greatest single discovery of modern times’.