Microsoft founder Bill Gates writes: "Genuine pioneers don't stop after just one discovery or innovation. They are driven to build on their accomplishments and to follow them into new frontiers." He was speaking about Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com which ushered in the brave new world of internet commerce; and the mind behind Kindle, the ebook platform that blazed the road for what has become the eBook Reformation or eBook Revolution, affecting, even transforming, publishers, auth...

A biographical profile of Charles Lindbergh, the American Lone Eagle. Lindbergh was not ready for stardom, and therein lies the story, like a quintessential Greek tragedy where the hero suffers a serious misfortune which is connected to his actions, demonstrating humankind's vulnerability to suffering brought about by human and divine intervention. Lindbergh became interested in flight when airplanes were mystical; few people had seen one and even fewer had ever been on one. Although 81 pilot...

Biographical profile of Ransom E. Olds, regarded as the first of the great American automobile pioneers. He not only sold the first car manufactured in America, his company was also the first of the great automobile enterprises, a model and training ground for the Dodge brothers, Henry Ford, Henry Leland (founder of Cadillac and Lincoln), and other automotive trailblazers. His first horseless carriage, a vehicle made of whitewood and oak, resting on three steel-tired buggy wheels, steered by ...

Famed aviation pioneer Donald Douglas once said "Every airplane flying today has some Jack Northrop in it." Northrop was an aviation genius who was more interested in developing new technology than selling airplanes or making a fortune. The Northrop story is the story of American aviation history; he worked with the Loughead brothers (who changed their name to Lockheed) and Donald Douglas designing some of America's greatest airplanes from the Vega to the DC-3 and ultimately to the most ...

New Enhanced Digital EditionRay Kroc's remarkable rise to the top of the food chain--fast foods that is--began at a later age than most successful entrepreneurs at age 52. The former salesman of Multimixer milkshake machines heard about the McDonald brothers' restaurant in Southern California an eatery serving 15-cent hamburgers and 10-cent fries and making 40 milkshakes at a time. Sensing its potential Kroc began to franchise the operation ultimately bought out the McDonald brother...

In 1894, Will K. Kellogg was experimenting with a more digestible form of wheat for patients at his brother John's Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. Will mixed a wheat paste and accidentally let it stand overnight. In the morning he took the tempered remains, put them through a roller, and each grain emerged as a wide, thin flake. The flakes were a big hit with the patients -- C.W. Post, a future cereal tycoon, among them. This was the seed from which one of the largest food empires on the...

Daniel Keith Ludwig wore cheap shoes and eyeglasses, carried a plastic raincoat when it rained, flew economy class, and carried his own bags. Neighbors thought he was a mid-level manager. He was not. Ludwig was one of the wealthiest men, one of the few billionaires in the 1950s. He was reclusive and Time magazine complained that Ludwig was "so publicity-shy that almost nobody knows what he is up to." He was up to many things, with more ships than the Greek tycoons Aristotle Onassis and Stavro...

Biographical profile of EstéeLauder who combined charm, gall and a ferocious ambition to create one of the great empires in cosmetics and perfumes. Estéee was never able to shed her roots in Queens, NY, and perhaps this is what made her such a successful entrepreneur, one who mingled and rubbed elbows with heads of state, celebrities and royalty while making her way to star status and becoming a billionaire.She was as outrageous as she was brilliant, a marketing and sales genius who understoo...

Biographical profile of Alexander Hamilton, one of the most interesting, paradoxical, and brilliant members of our Founding Fathers. Professor Carl Rubine of Columbia University called him "the first Horatio Alger . . . the original underdog who made it." It is hard to imagine anyone starting life with more disadvantages than he did or achieving such extraordinary success. Self-educated and possessing a superior intellect, Hamilton had a profound understanding of commerce, law, politics and i...

In 2008 U.S. domestic airlines carried nearly 750 million passengers domestically and internationally. The growth of commercial air transportation and the number of passengers flying today can be laid at the feet of one of the great aviation pioneers, Juan Trippe, who began a crusade to create an air network that would link America to the world. The Yale graduate was absorbed by flight and airplanes. He established Pan American World Airways with a fleet of flying boats linking the U.S. to As...

Biographical profile of Charles Lewis Tiffany, jeweler, silversmith and founder of Tiffany & Co., one of the world's foremost producers of fine jewelery. Known as the "King of Diamonds," Tiffany developed the English standard for sterling silver, and created America's first retail catalog. Although his son, Louis, developed the glass art, window and lamps that are so famous today, it was Charles who set in motion and developed the company that made American silversmiths and goldsmit...

Sergey Brin once described the Internet as the repository of all our knowledge and the company he and Larry Page founded a mere decade ago Google Inc. provides access to the Internet for a majority of the Western world. Google has altered the world we live in with a profound impact on just about everything we do. In addition to the search engine Google has given us many other products including YouTube Google Earth GMail and the Android operating system for cell phones. It is now difficult to...