The great American automotive pioneers were entrepreneurial inventors and visionaries who changed the American landscape and brought us a new national culture. These pioneers lifted the veil of isolation that enveloped most pre-twentieth century Americans and made it possible for the average person to travel whenever and wherever he or she pleased. Automobiles changed the concept of transportation and more so, how and where we lived, worked and played. Many lessons can be drawn from these pio...

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...

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...

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...

Kelly Johnson designed the Blackbird, a plane that flew non-stop from London to Los Angeles in less than four hours, outracing the sun and landing four hours before it had taken off, a remarkable feat--and this was more than 35 years ago. Johnson was the innovative genius behind Lockheed's "Skunk Works," and played a leading role in the development of more than forty aircraft, including some of America's most sophisticated planes. In 2003, as part of its commemoration of the 100th a...

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 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....

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...

Mary Kay Ash is the quintessential example of a Phoenix rising from the ashes. After 10 years at World Gift Co., a direct sales organization, Ash resigned when an underling she had trained was promoted ahead of her--because he was a male. Ash, a 45-year-old unemployed divorcee with three children, was at her nadir. But a few months later, she formed what is now known as Mary Kay Inc., a cosmetics company that grew into a behemoth with current annual revenues in excess of 2.4 billion. And she ...

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 ...

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 ...

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...