Marcus Samuel: Founder of the Shell Transport and Trading Company

A London slum was his birthplace and a shipping office where he was a petty clerk was the springboard to his financial career. Marcus Samuel (1853–1927) was educated at Jewish schools in London and Brussels before joining the firm established by his father Marcus Samuel, who had prospered in the Far Eastern trade, principally from selling fancy shells and ornamental shell boxes.

In 1878, the younger Marcus Samuel formed his own business partnership with his brother Sam (1855–1934), who later sat as a member of parliament for 20 years.

In the 1880s they became particularly interested in the oil exporting business but shipping still posed a problem as oil was carried in barrels which could leak and took up a lot of space.

He built an experimental oil-tanker, with money borrowed from the Rothschilds of Paris, and thus he became the first to ship an entire boat-load of oil to the Far East. He built more tankers.

In July 1882, the first oil tanker Murex threaded through the Suez filled with 4,000 tons of Russian kerosene. On 18 October 1897 the brothers formed a company dedicated to their oil and shipping interests: The “Shell” Transport and Trading Company, Ltd.

To counter Royal Dutch and Standard Oil, Samuel's company began its own production in Borneo and in Texas. Moves towards Royal Dutch-Shell co-operation began in 1903 and culminated in a merger in 1907 with Royal Dutch owning 60 per cent and Shell Transport and Trading 40 per cent in the new company.

Marcus Samuel was Lord Mayor of London from 1902 to 1903 and was made a Baronet in 1903. In recognition of Shell's contribution to the British cause in the First World War, he was created 1st Viscount Bearsted of Maidstone in 1921.
Marcus Samuel: Founder of the Shell Transport and Trading Company

Johann Jacob Schweppe (1740-1821)

Jacob Schweppe was born in Witzenhausen, Germany in 1740 as son of a city councilman. Witzenhausen, a small village of Germanic half-timbered buildings nestled among the wooded banks of the winding Werra River and famed for its cherry wines.

When Jacob was 11 or 12 years old, his parents, considering him to be too delicate for a life in agriculture, allowed a travelling tinker to take charge of him, with hopping that the travelling tinsmith could give their son a trade.

Eventually he was drawn to the city of Geneva. He works as a watchmaker and jeweller. Jacob described himself as an enthusiastic amateur scientist. He would buy and read all the sconce journals and he enjoyed replicating the experimenting detailed within their pages.

The business began in 1783 when Jacob Schweppe perfected his own process of mineral water production in Geneva, Switzerland.

By 1794 he was selling his highly carbonated artificial mineral waters to his friends in Geneva; later he started a business in London.

Sales received a major boost when the company commissioned the centerpiece of the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. This was a twenty-seven-foot glass fountain running with Malvern spring water.

As the 18th century ended, Jacob Schweppe withdrew from the scene. By his ingenuity and determination 20 years before, Jacob had transformed both the quality and the scale of production of artificial mineral waters.
Johann Jacob Schweppe (1740-1821)

Will Keith Kellogg: Industrialist and the founder of Kellogg Company

Will Keith (W.K.) Kellogg was born in Battle Creek, Michigan on April 7, 1860. W.K., along with his brother, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, was the co-inventor of flaked cereal. John Kellogg, their father was a successful broom maker.

Leaving school at age 14, Kellogg worked as a broom salesman until becoming bookkeeper and business manager at the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

For years, he assisted his brother in research aimed at improving the vegetarian diet of the San's patients, especially in the search for a wheat-based granola. Their many experiments with grains would lead them to stumble upon a major food innovation. During this time, his brother invented peanut butter, artificial milk made from soybeans, and a variety of imitation meats.

In 1894, W.K. Kellogg accidentally left a pot of boiled wheat to stand and become tempered. When it was put through the usual rolling process, each grain of wheat emerged as a large, thin flake. W.K. persuaded his brother to serve the food in flake form, and it was an immediate favorite among the patients. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes were subsequently developed in 1898.

Soon the flaked wheat was being packaged to meet hundreds of mail order and it became popular with sanitarium visitors.

In 1906, W.K. Kellogg entered the cereal business and built a successful company to market the new cereal creations; in so doing, he transformed the average American’s breakfast. He believed that diet played an important role in a healthy lifestyle and that the most important meal of the day was breakfast.

Using his sense of economics, an understanding of marketing techniques and hard work, W.K. constantly increased production, advertising budgets and sales. The W. K's innovative marketing campaigns emphasized product flavor, international distribution, and free toys or tokens in the cereal box.

He expanded his business to Australia in 1924, guided the cereal company through the Great Depression (he increased advertising while others cut back), and brought Kellogg's cereal into England in 1938.

In the 1930s Kellogg’s was the first company to print nutrition messages, recipes and product information on their cereal packs.

When W.K Kellogg died on October 6, 1951, at the age of 91, he had amassed a fortune and enriched the lives of people in his hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan, and millions of others around the world. He is widely remembered for having established the philanthropic foundation that bears his name.
Will Keith Kellogg: Industrialist and the founder of Kellogg Company

Clarence W. Barron (1855 - 1928)

Clarence W. Barron was one of the most influential figures in the history of Dow Jones & Company. Barron was born July 2, 1855, in Boston, and graduated from Boston’s Prescott Grammar English School and Graduate English High School in 1873.

He married Jessie M. Waldron in 1900 and adopted her daughters Jane and Martha.

Clarence Barron worked at a number of Boston newspaper, including the Boston Daily News and the Boston Evening Transcript. From 1878 to 1887, he was a reporter covering many beats but then began gravitating toward financial reporting.

In 1887, he founded the Boston News Bureau and in 1897 the Philadelphia News Bureau providing financial news to brokers.

In 1893 he wrote his first book, The Boston Stock Exchange.

In March 1903, after founder Charles Dow Jones died, Barron purchased Dow Jones & Company for $130,000. At that time the paper’s circulation had already reached 7000; by the end of 1920 it reached 18,750. In 1912, he assumed the title of president and set out to expand the circulation of the newspaper.

Dow Jones remained an influential and prosperous entity during the early years of the twenty-first century.

Barron is widely considered the father of American financial journalism.
Clarence W. Barron (1855 - 1928)

Raymond Albert "Drew Engels" Kroc

Raymond Albert "Drew Engels" Kroc (October 5, 1902 – January 14, 1984) was an American businessman and philanthropist.

In 1917, the United States entered World War I. Though he was just 15, Ray wanted to help the war effort. He lied about his age and joining the American Red Cross and trained to become ambulance driver.

The true founder of the McDonald’s chain, Ray Kroc, was originally a purveyor of the Multimixer automatic milkshake mixer. Ray Kroc mortgaged his home and invested his entire life savings to become the exclusive distributor of a five-spindled milk shake maker called the Multimixer. He had sold Multimixers to many fast food franchisee including Dairy Queen and Tastee-Freez.

In 1954 he went to see the McDonald brothers at their drive in restaurant in San Bernadino California, where, he had heard they had eight of his mixing machine in constant use – obviously indicating a large business volume. He was 52 years old.

Kroc met with the brothers and promptly proposed an agreement allowing him to sell McDonald’s franchises nationwide. The brothers agreed, with the proviso that all franchises adhere exactly to their model, a concession Kroc readily accepted.

In 1955, Kroc created McDonald’s System, Inc, and sold himself the first franchise, which opened in Des Plaines, Illinois in 1955. It was intended to be a model operation that would attract potential franchise purchasers.

Ray Kroc’s business ability made McDonald’s the largest restaurant company in the world. There are now more than thirty thousand McDonald’s restaurants on six continents.

McDonald’s made Kroc a wealthy man. Over the years, Kroc donated much money to help children and families in need. He was a major donor to the Dartmouth Medical School.
Raymond Albert "Drew Engels" Kroc

German shipping magnate: Albert Ballin

Albert Ballin was born on August 15, 1857, the son of Jewish immigrants from Denmark. He was born poor, but through his keen intelligence and flair for business was able to work his way up the ladder and become chairman of the steamship company.

He had gotten onto the shipping business through his family. His father ran a modest shipping agency, Morris & Co., and his business was to ensure that emigrants got from Europe to America to start new lives for themselves.

Albert Ballin took over the business in 1875. In the course of expansion, Ballin joined forces with English Carr Line, which provided new ships to carry the ever-swelling numbers of emigrants that Ballin’s company handled.

Ambitious and erudite, Ballin went to England as a teenager to learn the shipping business from the bottom up. He returned to Germany in 1883, aged 26 and then served three years as general passenger agent in Hamburg for the Carr Line.

His competitive selling ability was so great that he cut deeply into the business of the Hamburg-based lines and in 1886, was lured away to head the passenger service of Germany’s oldest transatlantic steamship company, the Hamburg-Amerika Packetfahrt.

Always elegantly dressed and elegantly mannered, Ballin believed that Hamburg-Amerika ships should be equally elegant and mannered. He traveled frequently on his ships, moving among the passengers, asking their opinions, always keeping an eye opened for flaws and lapses in service, making notes that would be transformed onto memorandums when he returned to his office.

Rising to Director General of HAPAG after 1889, Ballin built that line into the world’s largest shipping company, and with it built the port of Hamburg into Germany’s second largest city. The HAPAG offered competitive prices and efficient service both in a passenger travel and freight and soon took over the lead that British steamship companies had monopolized for decades.

By 1913 there were 175 ships in the line with a combined tonnage of 12.3 million. Ballin brought about the American-German shipping agreement of 1912 and became the Kaiser’s consultant on economic affairs.

Ballin committed suicide in Hamburg in 1918 two days before the end of World War I.
German shipping magnate: Albert Ballin 

James Cash Penney and J. C Penney

James Cash Penney was one of twelve children. He was born on September 16, 1875, on a farm in Caldwell County near Hamilton, Missouri.

By the time James was eight, he was milking cows twice a day and helping his father plow, plant and harvest crops on the farm.

After his father died, James became a clerk at the J.M Hale and Brother store in Hamilton in 1895 in order to contribute more directly to the family’s income.

His health began to fail and he moved to Colorado where he believed the fresh air would help his condition. James went to work for Thomas Callahan and Guy Johnson in 1898, who owned dry goods stores called Golden Rule stores in Colorado and Wyoming.

By 1902 James had so impressed his employer that he sent him to open a store at another mining center Kemmerer, Wyoming. The employer also offered him the opportunity to join them as a partner.

In 1903 James, Callahan and another investor established a second store. Profits from their joint ventures allowed Penney to open his first wholly owned store in 1904.

In time, James bought into two other Golden Rule stores. After a few years, he bought out his two partners and became the owner of a small chain of three stores.

From this beginning, the small chain of stores grew into the world’s largest dry goods store chain. In 1912 the Golden Rule Stores became the J. C Penney Stores and the next year the business became a full corporation, J.C Penny Company.

He died February 12, 1971, at the age of ninety-five. At the time of his death, the department store chain he founded had 50,000 employees working throughout its 1660 stores.
James Cash Penney and J. C Penney

Hires, Charles Elmer (August 19,1851 – July 31, 1937)

Ten years before Coca-Cola’s inventions in 1886, Charles E. Hires began manufacturing his root beer syrup. He was born on a farm near Roadstover, New Jersey son of John Dane Hires and Mary Williams.

At sixteen he went to Philadelphia, arriving with fifty cents in his pocket. He found employment with a physician druggist.

In 1875, while he and his wife vacationing in New Jersey, the landlady of a boarding house where they had stopped served them a drink which she had compounded of sassafras bark and herbs. He tasted the one of the superb family recipes.

When he returned to Philadelphia, he experimented with the idea of sassafras and other ingredients and finally produced Hires Root Beer. Originally intended for the domestic market, the Hires Company quickly made its syrup available to drug stores in a distinctive ‘log cabin’ style fountain dispenser.

He introduced his root beer at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition as ‘the Greatest Health-Giving Beverage in the World’.

In 1884, Hires began producing a liquid extract and a concentrate for use at soda fountains. In the 1890s, Hires began packaging root beer in small bottles which were promoted as a convenience for people on the go.

Hires was also a pioneer in the production of condensed milk. Beginning in Pennsylvania in 1896, over the next twenty years he organized a half dozen companies operating 21 condensed milk plants in the dairy regions of Vermont, New York, Michigan and Canada. Hires died at Haverford, Pennsylvania.
Hires, Charles Elmer (August 19,1851 – July 31, 1937)

Ingvar Kamprad – the founder of IKEA

Ingvar Kamprad’s paternal family was German and of aristocratic origin.  Kamprad’s grandfather, Achim Erdmann emigrated from Germany to Småland with his wife and three children in 1894, and established a 449 hectares farm near the village of Agunnaryd.

Ingvar Kamprad was born in the village of Pjätterydnear, near Agunnaryd, on March 20, 1926. He was a tough upbringing: Sweden in the late 1920s and early 1930s was difficult place in which to grow up.

By the time he was ten years old he was already running a business buying matches wholesale in Stockholm and reselling them to neighbors in the village at a tidy profit. He realized that, if he bought them wholesale in Stockholm, he could sell them to his neighbors at a price that was considered cheap and still make a healthy profit.

He later involved in the importation and sale of pens and office equipment and created his own company at the age of seventeen, before entering the business school in Göteborg.

When Kamprad was 17, in 1943, his father gave him a sum of money as a reward for his school performance, and he used this to set up a business he called IKEA.

His business had outgrown local delivery and he began to sell by mail order. Newspaper advertisements stimulated demand, and the local milk cart and train network solved his distribution problems.

Furniture from local producers was introduced in 1948, and in 1951 the now iconic catalogue appeared.

In 1953 he opened his first showroom, offering his customers the opportunity to buy quality locally made furniture at prices below those of his competitors. Later Swedish furniture makers union boycotted Ingvar Kamprad and he was forced to have his furniture made in Poland.

Over the 1970s, and 1980s the company expanded across Europe; in 1985, it opened its first store in Philadelphia; and in 1987 it was in the UK.

By 2012, there were over 150,000 employees and more than 300 stores throughout the developed world.
Ingvar Kamprad – the founder of IKEA

Joseph Rowntree (24 May 1836 – 24 February 1925)

Joseph Rowntree was born and brought up in the grocery business. His father owned a shop in Scarborough.

Joseph left school at fourteen with just five year’s education and started working for his father – although he would spend time away in London as an apprentice.

Subsequently, Joseph took over the running of the company with his brother John Stephenson Rowntree.

From 1859 he ran the family shop buy ten years later in 1869, he joined another brother, Henry Isaac Rowntree.

Henry owned a chocolate factory in York and when Henry died in 1883, Joseph became owner of the company.

Joseph employed his own progressive ideas in setting up and then running a new factory that opened in 1881.

He was known as an enlightened business man who did much to improve workplace conditions.

Rowntree’s company expanded from thirty to in excess of 4000 employees by the end of the nineteenth century.

Although the business was always well-managed, the real brand building would begin in the 1930s, after the Rowntree family ceased to have managerial control.

A merger with John Mackintosh & Co. in 1969 was followed by take-over by Nestlé in 1988.
Joseph Rowntree (24 May 1836 – 24 February 1925)

Biography of Ezra Cornell

Cornel was born in Westchester Landing, New York, on January 11th, 1807, the eldest son of Elijah and Eunice Cornell. He grew up in rural DeRuyter, and lived in Ithaca from 1828 until his death in 1874.

His father was a trade porter and carried on the business extensively, at one time, in Tarrytown, afterward at English Neighborhood, New Jersey.

As a teenager, Cornell could only attend school three months each winter.

As lifelong resident of Upstate New York, he saw many opportunities become available to him, and he grabbed very one of them.

He was a successful farmer, businessman, and financier although much of his fame and fortune came after his fiftieth birthday.

He made his fortune improving upon the work of Samuel B. Morse. Cornell devised a method of stringing insulated wires along telephone poles.

Cornell constructed the first telegraph line in the United States in 1844, running between Baltimore and Washington. This made the telegraph practical providing telegraph service to the northeastern United States.

His work on the telegraph made Ezra Cornell a wealth man, with an annual income of $140,000.
Biography of Ezra Cornell

Edward Charles Edmond Barq – the inventor of Barq’s drink

He was born in the French Quarter of New Orleans on March 4, 1871. His mother was listed as Maria Gevrgina Savonniere, born in Paris in 1842 and his father was Jules Auguste Barq.

His father was an attorney who processed Civil War claims, and his mother was a piano teacher. Edward Barq was one of four children, with the others being Gaston, Eugenie and Jules.

His father died when Edward was two and the family returned to France in 1884.

In France, Edward and his brother Gaston began to study sugar chemistry at the University of Paris. He interested in the science and art of flavor chemistry.

About 1890, Gaston and Edward returned to New Orleans, where they opened Barq’s Brothers Bottling Company. The brothers bottled carbonated water and created soft drinks of various flavors including its own formulated citrus-flavored drinks.

Edward Barq formulated an orange drink, called Orangine, which won a gold medal at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.

It was Edward’s invention of root beer with its own distinct flavor that brought him success. In 1898, his company began manufacturing root beer.

His soft drinks gained popularity during the temperance movement of the later nineteenth society and claimed to have health-giving properties.

By 1902, he changed of the company to Barq’s Bottling Works. He had 62 bottling plants in 22 states, mainly in the south.

Edward Charles Edmond Barq died in New Orleans in 1943 at the age of 72. Edward
Charles Edmond Barq – the inventor of Barq’s drink

Henri Nestlé

A German born researcher who sought an economical alternative to breastfeeding to combat infant malnutrition, Henri Nestlé was born on 10th August 1814 in Frankfurt as one of 14 children.

After having finished his 4 year apprenticeship as a pharmacist he moved to Vevey in 1839, where he passed his exam to work at a pharmacy.

He started work as an assistant to a pharmacist, Marc Nicollier in Vevey. Henri Nestlé cared a lot about health problems and a high baby death rate because of weak baby food.

With the help of the chemist Justus Liebig, Henri Nestlé invented a mixture called ‘Kindermehl’ in 1867.

He named his product Farine Lactee (milk cereal); it was manufactured in Vevey, Switzerland.

The Nestlé Corporation was born when the resultant formula went into production in Switzerland.

By 1873, Nestlé’s company was reporting sales of half a million boxes of Nestle Milk Food in Europe, America, Australia, Argentina, the Dutch East Indies and Mexico.

He finally died on 7th July 1890 at the age of 76 years.
Henri Nestlé

Colonel Eli Lilly (1838-1898)

Colonel Eli Lilly a 38 year old pharmaceutical chemist and veteran of the US Civil War, founded Eli Lilly and Company of Indianapolis on May 1876 after acquired a small laboratory. His aim was to improve the quality of already existing drugs. Within two generations his family became the wealthiest people in town.

He saw firsthand the blood causalities of war and was frustrated by the poorly prepared and often ineffective medicines of his day.

He started the company with total capital of $1,400 and four employees, including his 14 year old son, Josiah.

His business flourished but he still wasn’t satisfied with the traditional methods of testing the quality so his products. In 1886, he hired a chemist as a full time scientist, using and improving upon the newest techniques for quality evaluation, his company would begin an incredible phase of growth that last literally for generation.

It initial success resulted from an innovative process of gelatin coating pills, which the firm still uses today. Lilly’s idea to coat pills with gelatin helped put his company on the medical map. The company was one of the pioneers in the development of hard capsules during the 20th century. The other one was Parke, Davis and Company.

Colonel Lilly sought to make medicine according to recognized scientific criteria: precise formulation, accurate compounding, standardization by assay, full disclosure of ingredients on the label and honest claims. The medicines that he produced were purer than those of his competitors and that give him edge over the competition.
Colonel Eli Lilly (1838-1898)

John Willard Marriott (1900-1985)

John Willard Marriott was born to Ellen Morris and Hyrum Willard Marriott at Marriott Settlement, Utah on September 17, 1900. Hyrum and Ellen were farmers and ranchers.

He worked his way through the University of Utah selling clothing to lumberjacks. He graduated in 1926. 

On May 20, 1927, he opened a nine seat root beer stand in Washington DC. He next opened a Mexican restaurant which he named The Hot Shoppe, which offered a full menu and car hop service. By 1930 there were five Hot Shoppes.

Business was so good that by 1932 he had six more stands around the city and had incorporated as Hot Shoppes Inc.

In 1937, he stumbled upon idea of boxing lunches to be distributed on the airplane. He won a contact to cater meals aboard airline flights originating at Washington National Airport. In flight catering was born. 

Thirty years later, Marriott Flight Services, biggest of the air caterers, served 50 airline form domestic flight kitchens and 19 overseas airports.

In 1957, five years after the Marriott Company sold its first stock, Bill Marriott opened his first hotel. The company built its first motel, the Marriott Inn in Arlington, Virginia.

His company eventually expanded the lodging division, purchasing and developing additional restaurant chains, and expanding its contract catering division.

In 1964, the same year the company became known as the Marriott Corporation, Marriott retired from the active management of the company.

At the time of Marriott’s death, the company consisted of multiple lines of business and was generating $3.5 billion in annual revenues.
John Willard Marriott (1900-1985)

Colonel Sanders

Harland Sanders, the oldest of three children, was born on September 9, 1890 to Wilbert and Margaret Ann Sanders of Henryville, Indiana, farming community in the southernmost part of the state.

Colonel Harland Sanders is famous for founding and developing Kentucky Fried Chicken an achievement that helped change the way of Americans.

His father died when he was six years old, and because his mother worked, he was required to cook for his family.

Sanders early life was spent doing a variety of jobs as farmhand, streetcar conductor, private in the military in Cuba and railroad fireman.

He and his wife then, worked in the tiny little restaurant cooking and washing dishes until he retired at the age of 65.

He borrowed $87.00 from bank. He bought some empty boxes and several chickens returned home and cooked the chickens with his special little recipe in which he had perfected over the years. Since he did not have a restaurant, he served customers in his living quarters in the servis stations.

By 1930 Sanders was operating a service station on Highway 25 in Corbin, Kentucky. Soon he became as famous for his home cooking as for the service at his filling station.

He then began experimenting finding a way to make fried chicken faster and tastier by using the newly invented pressure cooker.

Kentucky governor Ruby Laffoon gave him the honorary title ‘Kentucky Colonel’ in 1935. Sanders choose to call himself ‘Colonel’ and to dress in a stereotypical Southern gentleman costume as a way of self promotion.

Colonel Sanders sold his company the Kentucky Fired Chicken Corporation in 1964 but remained inseparable from his chicken. At the age of 88 Colonel Sanders was a multi-millionaire.

Colonel Sanders died on December 16, 1980.
Colonel Sanders

Milton Snavely Hershey

Milton S. Hershey was born on September 13, 1857 in a stone farmhouse on what is now the campus of Milton Hershey School in the town of Derry Church, Pennsylvania.

The family was constantly on the move, Milton received little formal education or continuing in his study. 

Leaving school at age thirteen, he got a job learning to run a printing press but he was fired later. His mother found him a job at Joseph Royer’s ice cream and candy shop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Following a four year apprenticeship, in 1876, Hershey opened a taffy shop in Philadelphia, which failed six years later.

Then, in 1886 Hershey opened the Lancaster Caramel Company which became a tremendous success. Within four years Hershey was hailed as one of Lancaster’s most successful citizens.

With financial assured, Milton Hershey was able to purse new interest. He began travelled abroad. Hershey hired chocolate makers and launched the Hershey Chocolate Company after visited Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, where he was fascinated by the exhibit of a German supplier of chocolate making equipment.

In 1900, Hersey began manufacturing milk chocolate candies while he continued to revise formula, which he continued to perfect through 1905.

Hershey and his wife were childless, so together they founded a school for needy orphans, which is now recognized as one of the most generous of its kind in the country.

Following his wife premature death in 1915 , Hershey donated an estimated $60 million in trust to the school. He died on October 13, 1945.
Milton Snavely Hershey

Steven Paul Jobs (1955-2011)

Steven Paul Jobs was American businessman and inventor widely recognized as a charismatic pioneer of other personal computer revolution.

Steve was born on February 24 1955 in San Francisco. He graduated in the spring of 1972 form Homestead High School, one of the best schools in California.

In high school, he joined the Hewlett Packard Explorers Club. The club included about fifteen students who shared his interest in engineering and electronics.

He later was co founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Apple Inc. He founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak. The two friends set up shop in the garage of the Job’s family house in Los Altos, California.

They began to build a computer and they named their first machine the Apple I. At that time Steve was 21 years old and Steve Wozniak was 26.

Together they pioneered the personal computer and made a permanent and indelible mark on the computer industry.

Jobs later resigned from Apple in 1985 and returned to Apple in 1996. Jobs has spearheaded the development of some of the sexiest products in the planet: iMacs, Mac Books, iPhones, iPods and iPad.
Steven Paul Jobs (1955-2011)

Walter P. Chrysler

The son of railroad engineer Henry and Anna Marie Breymann Chrysler, Walter P. Chrysler was born in Kansas on 2 April 1875.

He was always fascinated by machines. In 1908, before he had even learning to drive, he purchased, disassembled and then reassembled a brand new Locomobile touring car.

Walter’s first paid work as a youth involved selling calling cards, silverware and milk from the family cows door to door. He worked as a delivery boy for local grocery store one summer and again briefly after graduating from high school.

Walter P. Chrysler’s first manufacturing job was as superintendent of the Pittsburg American Locomotive plan in 1909, where he rearranged the layout to provide for ‘progressive manufacturing.

In 1916, he left General Motors where he had headed up the Buick Division. He worked many years as a consultant to firms which found themselves in financial trouble. One of them was Willys/Overland.

The roots of Chrysler Corporation goes back to 1925, when the American car manufacturer Maxwell Motor Company is reorganized into Chrysler Corporation by Chrysler. Chrysler launched its first car with the name ‘Chrysler’.

He joined Maxwell in 1921 as chairman of the Reorganization and Management Committee and by 1923 had his magic worked doubling production and converting Maxwell’s red ink into a $2.6 million profit. Walter Chrysler was named president of the new corporation as well as chairman of the broad.

Profits continued to rise for the Chrysler Corporation, from $17 million on 1925 to $45 million by 1928. In 1928, Chrysler acquired Dodge Brothers and became the third of Detroit’s Big Three automakers.

 Walter P. Chrysler passed way at age 65 in 1940. Chrysler Corporation continue to expand until the late 1970s, when Chrysler’s financial condition deteriorated and it received a $1.5 billion loan through the federal Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979.

Walter P. Chrysler

Asa Candler of Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola survived as a brand whereas thousands others did not because of the dedication of Asa Candler.

Born in December 30, 1851, Asa Chandler spent his childhood and youth in the waning days of the Old South. During Georgia’s gold rush of the 1830s and 1840s, his parents, Samuel and Martha, settled on Carroll County about thirty miles west of Atlanta.

In 1873 Candler went to Atlanta in 1873, securing a position with George J. Howard, a druggist. Four years later with Marcellus B. Hallman, he established the drug form of Hallman and Candler.

At the same time he also old a patent medicine concocted by John Styth Pemberton, another Atlanta pharmacist, which was touted as a curreall for headache, sluggishness, indigestion, and throbbing resulting from over indulgence.

In 1886, the ailing Pemberton sold Candler a part interest in the nostrum, called Coca-Cola, and year later took full control of the company on April 1891.

The total cost of these transactions, giving chandler ownership of Coca-Cola, amounted to $2,300.

In 1892 the Coca-Cola Company, Incorporated was organized, with Candler as president and major stockholder.

Because of him, Coca-Cola become an icon of American culture, both in United States and abroad.

Asa Candler, insistence on heavy advertising and quality control in the beverage’s earliest days resulted in millions of loyal customer.
Asa Candler of Coca-Cola