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...

Central Park, a verdant refuge from the teeming, ever-shaded concrete corridors that crisscross Manhattan is beloved by both tourists and New Yorkers. The 700-acre park with winding paths, undulating hills, carpets of flowers in spring equally resplendent with fall colors dotted with lakes, was America's first major metropolitan park.Visitors and residents owe it all to Frederick Law Olmsted, one of America's first, and certainly best-known, landscape architects. Although Central Park was his...

Biographical profile of Andrew Carnegie, one of the wealthiest American tycoons of the Gilded Age, the late 19th century when America's moguls amassed great fortunes and lived extravagant lifestyles. Countless books and articles refer to Carnegie as a "robber baron." A few hail him as one of America's greatest industrialists and philanthropists, a man who gave away more than 300 million before his death in 1919 -- 90 percent of his fortune -- and much of the balance after his death....

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 Steve Jobs the founder of Apple Computers and the man who led an evolution in American technology and culture. He ushered in the world of personal computing with the Apple and Mac line of computers changed the way we buy and listen to music with the iPod iTunes and the iTunes Store introduced us to a new wave of animated films and technology through Pixar with such hits as "Toy Story" and "Finding Nemo" and gave us a new paradigm for mobile telep...

On Jan. 2, 1910, leading aviators from around the globe converged on Dominguez Hills near Los Angeles for the Los Angeles Air Meet. During the 10-day event, 226,000 spectators saw a dazzling display of airplanes and flight. Many world records were shattered; one pilot soared to 4,164 feet, while Glenn Curtiss hit a blistering 55 mph with a passenger on board. The planes so fascinated one onlooker, 29-year-old William Edward Boeing, that he left a lucrative business and embarked on a new caree...

Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were staunch opponents of a national bank. When President Jackson let the charter of the second bank lapse after 20 years it left the nation unprepared and powerless to respond quickly or effectively to major economic declines or emergencies. J. Pierpont Morgan became America's central bank initiating monetary policies that saved the nation from a severe depression on more than one occasion. During the Panic of 1907 Pierpont called a meeting of all the l...

Biographical profile of Benjamin Franklin, the most famous and highly regarded American in Europe during colonial times and the Revolutionary War. One of the Founding Fathers, Franklin was instrumental in virtually every phase of the birth, creation and establishment of the United States. However, Franklin was a man of many talents, a true American Leonardo da Vinci who excelled in many fields. His printing and publishing business made him independently wealthy. A man of wit and charm, he was...

Biographical profile of one of America's iconic automobile pioneers, Walter Chrysler, a man Time magazine described as a "doctor of sick automobile companies." The Chrysler Building in New York, topped by its world-famous art deco tower, an enduring symbol of America's industrial evolution, is also a standing tribute to its namesake. Walter Chrysler was a monumental pioneer in the automobile industry, helping Buick, General Motors, Willys and Maxwell survive before starting his own ...

Henry Goldman is arguably the founder of investment banking as we know it today. In 1906 he began diverting his fathers company from a bank specializing in commercial paper into a Wall Street firm that helped enterprises expand operations by raising the capital they needed through the sale of their shares to the public. He was ethical conscientious a first-rate investor and an aggressive risk-taker. Above all he was a visionary and the creative genius who revolutionized Goldman Sachs. By ye...

William Randolph Hearst was a man of mythical proportions and staggering contradictions. And he was a fascinating character so much so that he appears in various fictional works from John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" and F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Last Tycoon" to Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" as if his life was not sufficiently bizarre in its own right. At its peak Hearst's media empire included 28 leading newspapers from the San Francisco Examiner to the New York Journal ...

Jack Warner epitomized the great Hollywood studio chief. He was admired as much as he was feared, engaged in battles with some of Hollywood's greatest legends from Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney to Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis. Under his tutelage Warner Bros. gave us some of the most memorable and iconic movies, including The Jazz Singer, Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Damn Yankees and My Fair Lady. Warner was an astute businessman and a prodigious gambler; his footfa...