Buick, David Dunbar (17 September 1854–06 March 1929), inventor and businessman, was born in Arbroath, Scotland, the son of Alexander Buick and Jane Roger. The family emigrated from Scotland to Detroit, Michigan, two years after Buick was born; his father died three years later. Buick attended elementary school, but the poverty of his single-parent family forced him to find full-time employment when he was just eleven years old. By the time he was fifteen, he had delivered newspapers, worked on a farm, and served as a machinist’s apprentice at the James Flower & Brothers Machine Shop (the same firm where ...
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Richard P. Scharchburg
Champion, Albert (02 April 1878–27 October 1927), inventor and businessman, was born in Paris, France, the son of Alexander Champion. Available sources reveal no other information about his family or his early life. No doubt he received an early education in Paris. When he was about twelve years old, he obtained employment as an errand boy for a bicycle manufacturer....
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George W. May
Duryea, Charles Edgar (15 December 1861–28 September 1938), inventor and manufacturer of bicycles and automobiles, was born near Canton, Fulton County, Illinois, the son of George Washington Duryea and Louisa Melvina Turner, farmers. From Canton the family moved successively to farms in Woodford and Stark counties, Illinois, where Duryea grew up with a bent toward mechanics. At the age of eighteen his first inventive effort was a bicycle....
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Duryea, Frank (08 October 1869–15 February 1967), inventor and manufacturer of automobiles, was born James Frank Duryea near Washburn, Illinois, the son of George Washington Duryea and Louisa Melvina Turner, farmers. From Washburn the family moved to a farm near Wyoming, Illinois, where Frank grew up and graduated from Wyoming High School. Frank Duryea’s career was linked closely with that of his brother ...
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William E. Worthington
Haynes, Elwood (14 October 1857–13 April 1925), inventor, metallurgist, and automobile manufacturer, was born in Portland, Indiana, the son of Jacob March Haynes, a judge and banker, and Hilinda Sophia Haines. Haynes graduated from the Worcester County Free Institute of Industrial Science (now Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1881 with a B.S. in chemistry. He returned to Portland and taught in the local public schools. To further his knowledge of chemistry, he began in 1884 a year of study at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. His efforts to secure a fellowship that would enable him to complete a graduate degree were unsuccessful, forcing him to resume teaching in the Portland schools in 1885. In 1887 he married Bertha Lanterman; they had two children....
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Charles Franklin Kettering. Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; this acquisition was made possible by a generous contribution from the James Smithson Society.
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Kettering, Charles Franklin (29 August 1876–25 November 1958), inventor and automotive engineer, was born in Loudonville, Ohio, the son of Jacob Kettering and Martha Hunter, farmers. He attended public schools and graduated at the top of his high school class. He spent two years teaching and then enrolled in the engineering program at the Ohio State University. Forced by chronic eye inflammation to withdraw at the beginning of his sophomore year, he took a job with a local telephone company line crew. Two years later he returned to Ohio State and graduated in 1904....
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Lockheed, Malcolm (1887–13 August 1958), aircraft engineer and inventor, was born Malcolm Loughead in Niles, California, the son of John Loughead, a hardware store owner, and Flora Haines, a fruit grower and writer. (He later started using a phonetic spelling of his Scottish name, which people had persisted in pronouncing “log-head” or “loaf-head.”) His mother, long separated from her husband, was a college graduate and a former schoolteacher who supported her family by growing and marketing fruit and writing feature articles for the ...
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Stanley, Francis Edgar (01 June 1849–31 July 1918), and Freelan Oscar Stanley (01 June 1849–02 October 1940), inventors and manufacturers, were born in Kingfield, Maine, the sons of Solomon Stanley and Apphia French, farmers. The brothers left home to attend the Farmington (Maine) State Normal and Training School, a teachers college. Graduating in 1871, Francis taught school at several towns in Maine. Freelan attended Bowdoin College before also starting a teaching career....
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Yanek Mieczkowski
Wills, Childe Harold (01 June 1878–30 December 1940), metallurgist and automobile designer and manufacturer, was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the son of John Carnegie Wills, a railroad mechanic, and Angelina Swindell. Wills’s mother named the boy after the hero of Lord Byron’s epic poem ...
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Patrick G. Williams
Wilson, Charles Erwin (18 July 1890–26 September 1961), businessman and U.S. secretary of defense, was born in Minerva, Ohio, the son of Thomas Erwin Wilson, the principal of a local high school, and Rosalind Unkefer, formerly a teacher. In 1894 the Wilsons moved to Mineral City, Ohio, and ten years later to Pittsburgh. Charles Wilson graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1909, having earned an electrical engineering degree in three years. After briefly working as a patternmaker and signing on with the local union, Wilson secured a spot as an apprentice engineer with Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company in Pittsburgh. In 1912 he married Jessie Ann Curtis; the couple had six children....
