John B. Yale

An 1875 illustration of Broadway in Manhattan, where Yale's Bankers and Merchants Telegraph Co.'s office is visible on the left next to the Western Union Telegraph Building

John Brooks Yale (1845 – 1904) was an American telegraph and railroad entrepreneur, treasurer of the Yale Lock Company. He was an early founder and secretary-treasurer of the Bankers and Merchants Telegraph Company, competing against financier Jay Gould, the robber baron of the Western Union. They operated over 400 offices, and controlled about 100,000 miles of wiring across the country, including lines of the Chicago Board of Trade and the New York Stock Exchange.

Yale's company would be bankrupted by Gould's schemes, and be acquired by industrialist John W. Mackay, one of the Bonanza Kings, and be merged with the Postcal Telegraph Co.. Yale was also the son of Yale lock inventor Linus Yale Jr., and the son-in-law of millionaire Hugh McCulloch, the last U.S. Treasury Secretary of Abraham Lincoln.