Gratitude for America (2024)

02/05/2024

William L. McKnight (1887 – 1978)

William McKnight was born in White, South Dakota in 1887 in a sod home on his parents’ homestead.

At the age of 19 years old in 1907 he left 4 months into a 6 month college business program to join the company where he would work for the rest of his professional life: Minnesota, Mining and Manufacturing, better known as 3M. Founded as a mining company in 1902, the company would pivot to manufacturing sandpaper in 1905.

McKnight joined the struggling company as an Assistant Bookkeeper, earning $11.55 per week. He rapidly grasped the company’s financial peril and boldly made suggestions for cutting costs and making better products. Impressed, his boss made him Cost Accountant and two years later he was promoted to run the company’s Chicago office.

In 1914, seven years after joining the company he was made General Manager and in 1916, at the age of 29 he would become the company’s Vice President. Soon after due to the illness of the company’s president, Edgar Ober, McKnight would be running the company, and in 1929 he would officially take on the title of President, a position he would hold for the next 20 years.

McKnight would take the company from a struggling startup that made sandpaper that alienated customers unhappy the sand wouldn’t stay on the paper because the glue didn’t hold, to a company whose name would become synonymous with cutting edge innovation and one particularly attuned to customer needs and quality manufacturing.

The key to that transformation was McKnight’s focus on people and his confidence in their creativity. McKnight wanted 3M to become a bastion of new products. His most famous rule was that 30% of revenue should come from products developed within the last four years. Another rule included allowing employees to spend 15 percent of their time on personal projects without telling management. Understanding that mistakes could be made, McKnight established a program where the company would grant $50,000 for new ideas that have already been rejected if they could be successfully monetized. Some of the famous product that resulted from McKnight’s rules system included Post-it Notes, Thinsulate and advanced fiber optics.

In 1948 McKnight formalized his theory of management:

As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way.

Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs.

Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.

In 1949 McKnight was made Chairman of the Board and he would finally retire in 1972. He joined company that was on the ropes in 1907 and left it as one of the world’s greatest manufacturing firms 65 years later. In addition to shepherding 3M through most of the 20th century, McKnight would also spend a great deal of time and money on charitable projects, largely through the McKnight Foundation, the multi billion dollar foundation he established in 1953.

Today, the company he saved and turned into a juggernaut manufactures over 60,000 products around the world and which holds over 100,000 patents. A great deal of that success is directly due to William McKnight’s appreciation for the power of ingenuity, his tolerance for risk, and perhaps most of all, his belief that if you give employees the freedom and incentive to be creative, entrepreneurial even, they can and will achieve greatness. There’s a lesson there for many of us, both in business and in life.

18/04/2024

Charles Dow (1851 -1902)

The Architect of Modern Financial Journalism

Charles Dow was born in 1851 in Sterling, Connecticut, a small town in the rolling hills, close to the Rhode Island line. Not a lot is known about his early years except that he was raised by his widowed mother and at 16 would leave home to work as an apprentice. At 21 he would take up the profession that would define the rest of his life, and indeed his legacy: Journalism.

His first real job was that of a reporter at the Daily Republican, in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1872. He would work there for three years before crossing into Rhode Island to take a job writing for the Providence Star. Two years later he would join the Providence Journal, which would be the catalyst that would eventually make Dow a household name across the country.

At the Journal Dow was known for writing compelling pieces that combined history and business as he sought to give readers information not only about a company specifically, but about the environment within which the company was operating. It was at this time he wrote a history of Newport, RI, which was then becoming the summer refuge of some of America’s richest families. Dow would become familiar with many of the town’s gentry and they came to respect his engaging writing and his commitment to keeping confidences as it related to sources of information shared with him.

It was about this time Dow’s editor sent him on a journey to Colorado, accompanying a group of investors, barons, geologists and lawmakers as they investigated the state’s nascent silver mining industry. Bankers were interested in generating attention to the opportunity so they could sell shares in the mines. Listening as the men drank and smoked and played cards and told stories, Dow began to understand much about business as well as the kind of information that the people on Wall Street sought out as they invested.

Dow wrote nine "Leadville Letters" based on his experiences in Colorado where he described the Rocky Mountains, the mining companies, and the boomtown's gambling, saloons, and dance halls. He also wrote of raw capitalism and the information that drove investments, In his last letter, Dow warned, "Mining securities are not the thing for widows and orphans or country clergymen, or unworldly people of any kind to own. But for a businessman, who must take risks in order to make money; who will buy nothing without careful, thorough investigation; and who will not risk more than he is able to lose, there is no other investment in the market today as tempting as mining stock."

Bitten by the business writing bug, in 1880 Dow would move to New York and write for the Kiernan Wall Street Financial News Bureau. Two years later he would partner with Edward Jones and Charles Bergstresser to form Dow Jones and Co. The company would start publishing the Customers' Afternoon Letter, a two page newsletter focused on the day’s financial and business news. Soon it had a daily circulation over 1,000 and became a much sought after source of information from investors.

Five years later, in 1889 the company transformed the two page letter into a full fledged newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. At that point the company had over 50 employees and desks in or telegraph connections to major business centers such as Boston, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia and London.

From the beginning Dow was adamant that the Wall Street Journal would be a straight news newspaper. It would not allow its coverage to be swayed by advertisers, nor would it allow companies to dictate how they were covered in his paper. In a word, in a market where financial journalism was often seen – rightly so – as a shill for companies or investors, Dow wanted the Wall Street Journal to be known for its integrity. (And for most of it's history it has been.)

In 1896, building on the success of his 11 stock (mostly railroads) index he had created as part of the Customer’s Afternoon Letter in 1884, Dow created the Dow Jones Industrial Average, (DJIA) which included 12 of the biggest and best capitalized industrial companies in America at the time: American Cotton Oil, American Sugar, American To***co, Chicago Gas, Distilling & Cattle Feeding, General Electric, Laclede Gas, National Lead, North American, Tennessee Coal and Iron, U.S. Leather, and U.S. Rubber. Each day he would add up the closing prices of all twelve stocks and divide the total by 12. This blue-chip average – which would expand to 30 companies in 1928 – would go on to become the most watched stock market metric in the world over the next century. When historians talk about the great stock market crash that ended the Roaring Twenties, they typically refer to the DJIA, which lost almost a quarter of its value on October 28th and 29th of 1929 and over the next three years would lose almost 90% of its value.

Dow was instrumental not only in giving investors information about business and a measure by which to gauge market health, but he also gave them a theory of investing – Dow Theory – that has been the foundation for shrewd investors for more than a century. Dow’s theory basically said that the stock market follows trends, which can be analyzed to discern where stocks are headed. Today that type of model is called technical analysis and is used by investors around the world every day.

Dow would manage the company until 1902 when it was sold Boston correspondent Clarence Barron. He would write his last piece for the Journal in April of that year. On December 4th 1902 Charles Dow would suffer a heart attack and die at the age of 51. The paper he built would go on to become America’s most widely read – and most respected - newspaper well into the 21st century and the Index that bears his name one of the most watched financial metrics in the world. Not bad for a self-made man with little education who left home at 16 and started out knowing almost nothing about stocks and business and investing.

https://gratitudeforamerica.com/

10/04/2024

Levi Strauss (1829 – 1902)
A Man Whose Name Has Become Iconic Around the World

Levi Strauss was born as Loeb Strauss in Buttenheim, Germany in 1829. In 1847 after the death of his father, he, his two sisters and his mother immigrated to the United States and landed in New York City. There he joined his two brothers in their wholesale dry goods business, called “J. Strauss Brother & Co.”

After learning the ropes and sensing an opportunity in California with the Gold Rush of 1849, Loeb – by now legally Levi, headed to California in February 1853, a month after becoming an American citizen.

His destination was San Francisco, where he established Levi Strauss & Co. He was a wholesaler who brought in dry goods of all sorts from his brothers in the east and sold them to the small shops who supplied the tens of thousands of gold prospectors who were seeking their fortunes in the mines and streams across America’s then newest state. He would sell everything from clothing to umbrellas to fabric. One fabric in particular was duck cloth, or cotton denim, a heavy duty material that was popular with farmers and miners. It was that fabric that would eventually change the world of clothing, although it would not happen for another twenty years!

Strauss became a very successful wholesaler, with his customers trying to keep up with the burgeoning numbers of people moving to California, not only for gold, but for the myriad opportunities from farming to construction to railroads to the lumber industry. But 19 years after leaving for California, his life would change forever.

In 1872 one of his regular customers, Jacob Davis, a tailor from a Reno, Nevada contacted him with a proposition. He had been using metal rivets at the on the corners of the pants he had been making for his miner clients. His clients loved them because in the rough and tumble world of 19th century California they were durable. He wanted to patent the idea, but he didn’t have enough money to pay for the patent application and he wanted to know if Strauss would like to become his business partner and share the cost ($68). Always a man with an eye for an opportunity, Strauss jumped at the chance and they applied for the patent.

On May 20, 1873 US Patent No. 139,121 for "Improvements in fastening pocket openings" was issued to Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss & Co. That day is considered the “birthday” of blue jeans, however at the time they were called “waist overalls”. Davis had already been doing a brisk business, but with their patent issued and their idea protected, Strauss put the business into overdrive, making Davis the head of manufacturing. For the first decade or so jeans were sewn by seamstresses in their homes until in the early 1880’s when the pair set up their first manufacturing facility, located near Market Street in San Francisco. The facility not only produced the company’s signature 501 blue jeans - then known as "XX", but it also manufactured overalls, shirts and other clothing as well.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Strauss would play an important role in his company for most of the rest of his life, although he would bring in numerous nephews to help him as the company grew. He crafted a culture of community within his company, insisting that employees call him Levi rather than Mr. Strauss. That culture survived after Strauss died in 1902, as demonstrated by the fact that, despite suffering great damage to their facilities in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fires the company continued to pay employee salaries and extended credit to other, less fortunate merchants until they could get back on their feet.

When he died in 1902 Levi Strauss had an estate of $30 million, or approximately $900 million today. Over his lifetime Strauss donated vast sums to different charities and community organizations from Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco’s first Jewish synagogue to orphan programs, to hospitals to the University of California, Berkeley.

Levi Strauss was a businessman, a family man and a man of the community. Unlike some, he very much kept the three intertwined in his life. Perhaps that's why today the company he started still sells millions of pairs of basically the same iconic product he first manufactured over 150 years ago.

02/03/2024

Henry Flagler (1830 -1913)

A Giant of Industry… No, of Two Industries

Henry Flagler was born in Hopewell, New York on January 2nd, 1830. He went to school until the 9th grade when he quit in 1844 to work for his uncle in his store. Flagler was paid $5 a month and given room and board. He prospered there until in his early twenties when his uncle started a grain business and made a small fortune servicing the whiskey distilling business. He later put that small fortune ($950,000 in today’s money) into a salt mining business. The business collapsed after the Civil War and Flagler lost not only his investment, but an equal amount he had borrowed from his father-in-law.

Retuning to the grain business, Flagler worked to repay his family. It was there that Flagler would meet J.D. Rockefeller, who worked for a competitor. In 1867 Rockefeller would approach Flagler for investment in an oil refining company he wanted to start. Flagler’s stepbrother would invest $100,000 and Flagler would be a partner and control his brother’s interest. The market for Kerosine, which was the primary product of oil refining at the time, was booming and Rockefeller, Andrews and Flagler – which would evolved into Standard Oil – quickly became a major player. It was Flagler who was behind the innovation of rebates – where Standard Oil would get lower rates and rebates on their competitors’ shipping – that allowed the company to undercut competitors and play the railroads against one another, thereby quickly growing into the 800 lb gorilla on the block. While this tactic, which was initially done in secret, was a catalyst for Standard Oil’s growth, when discovered became a lightning rod for criticism of the company.

By the mid 1870’s Standard Oil gained control of virtually all of the refining capacity in Ohio by harnessing Cleveland’s transportation strength, being ruthlessly cost competitive and buying out its competitors. Standard Oil leveraged that Ohio stronghold to grow throughout the country and by the end of the decade it controlled 90% of America’s refining capacity. It was during this time the state of Pennsylvania sued Rockefeller and Flagler for charges of monopolizing the oil trade. This would be the first of a cavalcade of legal assaults on the company which would eventually lead to it being broken up into 34 smaller companies in 1911 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was an illegal monopoly.

Flagler stepped back from active participation in Standard Oil in 1882 when he decided to turn his attention south. Having visited Florida for the first time in 1878 when his wife fell ill, he was immediately captivated by the lightly populated state. His first project was the 540 room Ponce De Leon hotel in St. Augustine, which took two years to build and opened in 1888. The hotel was one of firsts, being both the first of its kind to be built with the then new technique of poured concrete and also one of the first hotels in America to be wired for electricity, powered by Flagler's friend, Thomas Edison.

But Flagler kept looking south and built a railroad along Florida’s east coast all the way down to Palm Beach, where he would build the Royal Poinciana hotel in 1894 and the Palm Beach Inn hotel in 1896. The latter, renamed The Breakers still stands, although this version is the third of that name, the original and a replacement both burning down, the former in 1903 and the latter in 1925.

Still not done, Flagler extended his railroad to what we know as Miami, but at the time was a lightly populated unincorporated area. Flagler’s railroad reached Biscayne Bay in 1896 and he promptly opened the Royal Palm Hotel a year later. A decade later Flagler finally decided to run his railroad to Florida’s then most populous city, Key West, 128 miles away. After seven years the Florida Overseas Railroad was completed in 1912, but Flagler would not build a hotel there. He didn't have time. He died the next year the result of a fall. The Overseas Railroad would last for only 20 years however, as sections of it would be destroyed in 1935 by the Labor Day Hurricane. A highway would be built in its place.

Few men make a household name of themselves in one industry. Henry Flagler did it in two. In oil he was unmatched: When John D. Rockefeller was asked if the Standard Oil company was the result of his thinking, he answered, “No, sir. I wish I had the brains to think of it. It was Henry M. Flagler." In 1896 when Miami was to be incorporated the citizens wanted to name the city after him but he demurred.

Henry Flagler was a giant of his industry in his time. After transforming the face of American energy, he went on to become one of the pioneers behind what he called the "American Riviera.". Over quarter century he built railroads, hotels, hospitals and donated to communities over much of Florida and today his genius can be seen in the map of Florida. From the general path of US Route 1 to Flagler County, to Flagler College to Flagler Beach to Flagler Hospital to the Flagler Museum, and countless monuments to him across the state, Henry Flagler was a giant in the development of one of America's most popular states. For a man born in the middle of winter in the virtual tundra in northern New York, one has to imagine that he’s happy that he is resting in peace in the paradise he loved so much, St. Augustine, Florida.

22/02/2024

Charles Martin Hall (1863 – 1914)

The Man Who Made Aluminum Bats Possible... For Better or Worse!

Charles Martin Hall was born in 1863 in Thompson, Ohio, about 40 miles east of Cleveland. He was something of a wonderkid in that by the age of 6 he was reading chemistry books written for adults. At 8 years old he entered school and at 16 he attended his father’s alma mater, Oberlin College.

It was at Oberlin that Hall sat in on a lecture about aluminum and the speaker said: "if anyone should invent a process by which aluminum could be made on a commercial scale, not only would he be a benefactor to the world, but would also be able to lay up for himself a great fortune". Hall took that challenge to heart and it infused much of his research over the next decade.

Aluminum is the most common metal formed in the Earth’s crust at 8.23% of its mass, and behind only Oxygen 46.1% and Silicon 28.2% in overall abundance. The problem however is that aluminum isn’t found on its own but rather as part of a compound from which it must be extracted. Extraction was difficult and aluminum was expensive, costing approximately $8 a pound in the 1880s, which made it cost prohibitive when compared to steel which was priced at close to two cents per pound. Indeed, aluminum was so expensive at that time that it was considered a precious metal.

Hall set about doing experiments trying to figure out how to extract the aluminum more efficiently. Although he experimented all though school he was never successful. Later, in 1884 he set up his own lab with a homemade furnace. Two years later he struck gold – aluminum actually – when he developed what is called the Hall–Héroult process which involved sending an electric current through a bath of alumina dissolved in cryolite. The name comes from the fact that Hall and a Frenchman named Paul Héroult discovered the process almost simultaneously, each doing so independently. Hall applied for a US patent and it was granted in 1889, Number: 600,444.

After failing to raise capital at home Hall went to Pittsburg and metallurgist Alfred E. Hunt. Together they formed a company that would eventually be called Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America) and opened the first large scale aluminum production plant. Hall’s process would revolutionize aluminum production around the world and would by the time he died in 1914 the cost of aluminum had dropped 97% from 1887’s $8 per pound to $.18 per pound. Its strength and light weight made aluminum an ideal metal for use in a wide variety of applications, from food packaging to aluminum foil to cars and much later airplanes. Indeed, aluminum became a viable alternative to many products that were previously manufactured using glass and steel and at the same time its light weight, strength and versatility created opportunities for flexible packaging and shapes that previously didn’t exist. And that includes aluminum baseball bats!

Hall would eventually move to Florida but he would spend much of his life refining and improving his process, eventually earning 22 patents. Charles Martin Hall died in 1914 having never married or having children. He left the bulk of his sizable fortune to charity. In one of the strange quirks of fate, the other man after whom the Hall–Héroult process is named, Paul Héroult, was born the same year as Hall… and died the same year Hall did!

14/02/2024

Glenn Curtiss (1878 – 1930)

The fastest man in the world for two decades!

Glenn Curtiss was at one time the fastest man in the world and he may be one of the most prolific inventors you’ve likely never heard of.

Glenn Curtiss was born in 1878 in Hammondsport, a town in western New York. Leaving school after only 8years, his first job was working for a predecessor of the Eastman Kodak company where he worked in various areas of the camera and photography company and even invented a stenciling machine the company used.

Curtiss found his passion while he was working as a Western Union bicycle messenger. He and his friends would race their bicycles during their breaks and Curtiss began tinkering with his bike in an effort to gain ever more speed. Curtiss would become the dominant rider in the “Hammondsport Boys” a local bicycle club sponsored by a local pharmacy. In 1898 he would open the Curtiss Bicycle Shop in Hammondsport and soon after another in nearby Bath, New York.

Curtiss’ constant tinkering with bikes led directly to his developing his own motorcycle once internal-combustion engines became more available. His Hercules motorcycles were so fast that he won a race from New York to Maryland in 1904, besting the bikes from Indian motorcycles, a giant of the then nascent industry. A year before that he had built the engine that would power the Tom Baldwin's California Arrow in 1904, becoming the first successful dirigible in the United States. Three years later Curtiss would take his first flight, in Baldwin’s Arrow. Eventually Curtiss would field calls from around the world for his engines and he would build factories to manufacture them.

In 1907 Curtiss set an unofficial world record of 136.36 miles per hour in Ormond Beach, Florida on a machine he designed and built himself, using a V8 engine he built for airplanes! His record would be broken by a car in 1911 but the motorcycle record would stand for 23 years! In 1908 as part of Alexander Graham Bell’s Aerial Experiment Association (AEA) Curtiss built and flew the June Bug, on the first scheduled flight in the United States to exceed one mile, winning $25,000 in the process.

In 1909 after a fallout with the AEA, Curtiss, along with several other erstwhile members of the group, formed the Herring-Curtiss Company to manufacture airplanes. The company would become a giant of the early airplane industry, and in 1916 would begin manufacturing the JN-4 "Jenny" biplane trainer for the Army and another version the Navy. The company would manufacture over 6,800 Jennys and after the war surplus planes would go on to be used by pilots across the country for everything from delivery services, flying schools and of course, Barnstorming, the traveling stunt and airshows that gave many Americans their first ever glimpse of a plane… not to mention people walking on wings of planes!

Curtiss is sometimes called the “Father of Naval Aviation” for his early activities to establish naval aviation. In 1910 a Curtiss plane was the first ever to take off from the deck of a ship and establish a flight school in San Diego that would come to be known as the “Birthplace of Naval Aviation), in 1911 he built and flew the first seaplane in the United States and in 1919 after the Navy requested a plane that could cross the Atlantic, built the Curtiss NC which became the first plane to make the trip, doing so with a course that included stops in Newfoundland and the Azores.

In 1920 Glenn Curtiss would retire from aviation and move to Florida. Ever the innovator and builder, he would develop the cities of Hialeah, Opa-locka and Miami Springs as well as found more than a dozen new companies including the Adams Trailer Corporation, named after his half brother and builder of the Adams Motor Bungalo a forerunner of the modern RV.

Curtiss was a contemporary and competitor of the Wright Brothers. Not surprisingly, given that they were operating in the same space at the same time and seeking the same success and fortune, the brothers and Curtiss were not friends. Indeed they were bitter enemies and found themselves frequently ensnared in legal disputes, going back to at least 1909. Of the nine cases between the two, the Wrights prevailed in every one. In 1916 when WWI created a great demand for planes but a legal dispute between the two kept that demand from being satisfied, the government stepped in and essentially forced the pair into a patent sharing agreement so that manufacturing could continue. Later, in 1929, long after both Wright Brothers had left the company, Curtiss would merge with Wright Aeronautical to form the Curtiss Wright Corporation, a Fortune 1000 firm that still operates to this day.

Glenn Curtiss would spend his life chasing speed and adventure and success. He would succeed on every one of those measures and would help bring America into the age of flight. He would die in 1930 at the young age of 52 from complications associated with appendicitis. Curtiss entered a world where steam engines and hot air balloons were the most exciting way a man could move and he would leave it one where men were walking on wings of planes soaring thousands of feet off the ground. That’s quite a journey.

17/01/2024

John D. Rockefeller (1839 – 1937)

The man who saved the Whales!

Well, technically he didn’t actually save the whales, but he certainly helped. In the first half of the 19th century whale oil was a main source of oil for lanterns and the United States owned 70% of the market. And the whale population was being decimated. By 1860 the market for whale oil had peaked and would never recover. One of the main reasons it never recovered was because of the emergence of kerosene as a viable inexpensive lighting source. And John D. Rockefeller played a major role in that.

Born in Richford, New York in 1839 to a family that moved often, Rockefeller was a natural businessman. At the age of 15 he took his first job, as a bookkeeper at the Cleveland, OH produce commission / shipping agent firm of Hewitt & Tuttle. It was there that he gained his first exposure to the transportation industry and quickly gained an understanding of how transportation costs impacted commodity prices.

In 1859 Rockefeller struck out with two partners to start their own competing firm. With the beginning of the Civil War their firm, Clark, Gardner & Company found great success providing food and supplies to the Union troops.

Halfway through the war Rockefeller and a different set of partners turned their attention to the refining of crude oil into kerosene and built their first refinery in 1863. At the time, the industry, while still in its infancy, was chaotic and extraordinarily inefficient. Rockefeller would bring his prescience and outstanding business skills to help rationalize and grow the market. He would build a fortune along the way and make a legion of enemies while doing so.

One of Rockefeller’s early innovations was the efficient use of the oil that was turned into kerosine. Other refiners would dump the excess after the kerosine was distilled. It could be up to 40% of the crude and Rockefeller intended to use it. He developed a wide range of products (over 100 in all) that would be manufactured from the leftover. Among them were lubricating oil, petroleum jelly, coke and much more. These alone provided Rockefeller with a revenue stream that few other refiners had.

But Rockefeller had many other tricks up his sleeve. One was plowing all of his profits back into the business and another was borrowing heavily to acquire competitors. In 1870, when he established Standard Oil, there was a glut of refiners in the market and prices tumbled. Rockefeller used the opportunity to buy up most of his competitors – including the large number of “competitors” who were not really competitors at all, but who feigned entering the refining business with the specific intent of being bought out by Rockefeller. In 1872 alone he bought up 22 of his 26 competitors in Cleveland.

Another of Rockefeller’s innovations was the vertical integration of the business, which meant that he owned everything from drillers to pipe manufacturers to pipelines for shipping, to railroads and delivery trucks bringing his product to customers. This gave him far more cost control than most of his competitors who had to pay suppliers for most of their inputs.

Easily however the single best known (and vilified) element of Rockefeller’s business was the pacts he made with railroads. Because he shipped such an enormous volume of product – at its peak during the decade of the 1870’s, Standard Oil would control 90% of the domestic oil market and for a short period of time an equal amount of the world market – Standard Oil was able to strongarm railroad companies to give it shipping kickbacks that were not available to other companies. Indeed, Standard Oil even garnered kickbacks when competitors shipped product!

Despite the fact that Rockefeller almost single handedly rationalized the drilling and refining industry and pushed down the price of kerosine by over 80%, which made it affordable to the average family, eventually the army of enemies Rockefeller had engendered caught up with him. In the 1880’s and 1890’s states from New York to Pennsylvania to Ohio were after Standard Oil for a variety of reasons. But it wasn’t until the Supreme Court ruled against the company in 1911 that Standard Oil was seriously hit. Sherman Antitrust Act was used to split the company into 42 different companies.

The long term impact was nominal however as the companies emerging from Standard Oil went on to dominate the American oil and gasoline (for automobiles) markets for most of the next century, making the Rockefeller family one of the richest in the world.

Beyond business, Rockefeller was also one of the greatest philanthropists in American history. He started at 16, giving 6% of his earnings to charity and the share only ever went in one direction, up. Although he would give away 10% of his income throughout his life, he would do much more than write random checks. He funded abolitionist organizations before the Civil War and following it he was active in programs to help educate former slaves, including funding Spellman College (an Historically Black Institution for women) in Atlanta and providing land for the nearby brother school Moorehouse College. He also founded the University of Chicago and gave millions to other institutions from Yale to Harvard to the Central Philippine University. Much of his philanthropy would make its way through various religious institutions as well. One of his primary efforts was focused on medicine and healthcare, where he funded the rapid advancement of the scientific method in the field and which would power the United States to rapidly become the most important source of medical research and medicine development in the world.

John D. Rockefeller would die in 1937 at the age of 97 and holding the title as the richest man in the world. His life would very much be characterized by having been led according to an encouragement he received from a Baptist preacher “Make as much money as you can, and then give away as much as you can.” Rockefeller was a tenacious and tough businessman at a time when America needed tenacious and tough businessmen to bring order and structure to the nascent petroleum marketplace, one which, in its infancy was utterly chaotic and inefficient, but one which would go on to fuel the industrial might and economic prosperity that would come to characterize the 20th century. Reviled, feared, loved and admired, Rockefeller would go down as one of the most important businessmen in all of human history, one whose impact was felt long after he had stepped off this mortal plain.

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