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Howard Hughes
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Howard Hughes is most famous for the last years of his life, when his mind faded and he lived the life of a wealthy, paranoid recluse. But earlier he had been a dashing and innovative businessman. Inheriting the Hughes Tool Company at age 19, Hughes became by turns a Hollywood movie producer, aircraft inventor, mining mogul, casino owner and ladies' man. (He dated Ava Gardner and Katharine Hepburn among many other starlets.) An avid and daring pilot, Hughes set a handful of aviation world records, including one for a 1938 flight around the world in just over 91 hours. In the 1960s his business dealings paid off handsomely and his wealth reached one billion dollars, a staggering amount for the era. In the 1950s certain personality quirks began to dominate and Hughes grew increasingly unbalanced. He dropped from public view and became famous for his wealth and his mysterious hidden ways, surfacing via telephone in 1972 to say that a biography written by Clifford Irving was a hoax.
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Howard Hughes’ greatest legacy to Southern California is the family of Hughes companies founded during his lifetime. These include Hughes Aircraft Co. (1935) and Hughes Space and Communications Co. (1961), a unit of Hughes Electronics Corp. Based in Westchester, Calif., Hughes Space and Communications is the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial satellites, the designer and builder of the world’s first synchronous communications satellite, Syncom, and the producer of nearly 40% of the satellites now in commercial service. Hughes Electronics is owned by General Motors. Hughes Aircraft merged with Raytheon Company in 1998 and is now called Raytheon Systems Co. Prior to the merger, Hughes Aircraft was a world leader in high technology systems for scientific, military and global applications.
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During his early years Howard Hughes had a major influence in the world of film, aviation and the world of business. Without Hughes there would be no modern-day Las Vegas, satellites, censorship in movies or the Spruce Goose.
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To support his aviation ventures, Howard Hughes created the Hughes Aircraft Company in Glendale, California in 1932. The company consisted initially of Hughes' own small team of designers and mechanics. Howard Hughes was hailed as the second Charles Lindbergh, at one time holding every significant aviation speed record. In 1939, Hughes became the principal stockholder of TWA (then Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc.). He had a hand in the design and financing of both the Boeing Stratoliner and the Lockheed L-049 Constellation, which he acquired for TWA. When the Constellation was ready for its test flight in 1944, Hughes dressed the plane in TWA's signature red and flew it non-stop cross country in under seven hours, breaking his own 1937 transcontinental speed record.
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When Howard Hughes thought he thought big and he never hesitated to take new directions. Conceived when German U-boats were ravaging Allied shipping in the Atlantic, the "Spruce Goose" was built primarily of birch -- not spruce -– in response to a wartime metal shortage. It had eight engines and the capacity to carry 700 troops or a load of 60 tons. In terms of wingspan (320 feet, which is longer than a football field) and weight (400,000 pounds) it is still the largest plane ever built. The war ended before it was completed. But it was flown -- once -- in Long Beach Harbor on Nov. 2, 1947.
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Howard Hughes was born at Houston, Texas on December 24, 1905. He began flying at age 14, manifesting exceptional piloting skills. In 1924 he inherited Hughes Tool Company and soon thereafter began the transition that developed it into a corporate conglomerate that eventually produced aircraft, electronics, and space vehicles. In the early 1930's he established Hughes Aircraft Company and with it, designed his first aircraft, the H-1 racer. This aircraft established a world record of 352 miles per hour in 1935.
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Howard Hughes