The company was founded in 1891 by George Merck, a member of the German Merck family who was tasked with setting up shop in the US to expand the business. The original intention was to establish a distribution office for the parent company in Germany, E Merck, a manufacturer and distributor of fine chemicals.

During first world war, the firm had its assets seized by the US government due to its German connections, but was allowed to reestablish itself as a new company in 1919.

If the government had decided otherwise, this would have been the end of Merck. Since then, however, Merck enjoyed relative success, for instance, discovering cortisone, vitamin B12, and streptomycin (an antibiotic therapy for tuberculosis).

https://theconversation.com/the-most-powerful-companies-youve-never-heard-of-merck-3187

Railroads were nationalized but not owned?

The phones were nationalized for one year?

Skip 30 years later and an electric company is nationalized?

In the 1920s, the company merged with the Chattanooga Railway and Light Company and Drexel and Company, which had a competing project on the Ocoee River, to form the Tennessee Electric Power Company (TEPCO). In 1933, Congress established the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to develop the economy by a series of flood control dams on the Tennessee River and to sell the electricity generated from the dams. After the Supreme Court in 1939 dismissed a challenge to the authority of the TVA to sell electricity in the service territory of the company,[3] TEPCO's electric system was purchased for $78,425,095 by the Tennessee Valley Authority and other participating municipal public utilities and electric cooperatives. TEPCO continued to operate as a street car company in Chattanooga and was reorganized in 1941 as Southern Coach Lines.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chattanooga_and_Tennessee_Electric_Power_Company

The Tennessee Electric Power Company (TEPCO) was the largest private-sector electrical power monopoly in Tennessee's early twentieth-century history. It was formed on May 27, 1922, when the Tennessee Power Company, Chattanooga Railway & Light, and the Chattanooga, and Tennessee River Power Company merged.

https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/tepco/

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/306/118

1971: The National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) is a government-owned corporation created in 1971 for the express purpose of relieving American railroads of their legal obligation to provide inter-city passenger rail service. The (primarily) freight railroads had petitioned to abandon passenger service repeatedly in the decades leading up to Amtrak's formation.

What was nationalized? Nothing.

1976: The Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail) was created to take over the operations of six bankrupt rail lines operating primarily in the Northeast; Conrail was privatized in 1987. Initial plans for Conrail would have made it a truly nationalized system like that during World War I, but an alternate proposal by the Association of American Railroads won out.

O yeah that clearly sets the precedent for Facebook to be nationalized..

1980s: Resolution Trust Corporation seized control of hundreds of failed Savings & Loans.
2001: In response to the September 11 attacks, the airport security industry was nationalized and put under the authority of the Transportation Security Administration.
2008: Some economists consider the government's takeover of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation and Federal National Mortgage Association to have been nationalization (or renationalization).

Lol.

You don't think much do you?

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