His father owned a machine shop, but young George Westinghouse had no interest in doing what he was told. Obsessed with his own inventions and ideas, George earned his first patent at the age of nineteen. When he died forty-eight years later, he held over four hundred...
Along with five younger siblings, Adolph Ochs was raised in poverty in Knoxville, Tennessee, by his scholarly but financially unsuccessful father and inspirational mother. In 1869, at the age of eleven, he developed an interest in the newspaper business, delivering...
One of the myths about great entrepreneurs is that they love risk and are big gamblers. In fact, they usually do everything they can to reduce risk and are rarely true gamblers. But there is always an exception to the rule. This is the story of one of those...
The grandson of slaves, Arthur George Gaston was born in 1892 in Demopolis, Alabama, to Rosie Gaston. There is no record of his father’s name, who died shortly afterward. A. G. Gaston started with nothing but the encouragement of his mother and grandparents. Over the...
Before there was Amazon, there was Sears, Roebuck, using the mail-order catalog where the Internet is used today. Before Walmart was the world’s largest retailer (and company of any type), there was Sears, Roebuck, in its glory days by far the largest retailer on...