Founders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs.
Walter Chrysler began as a Kansas railroad machinist, earned a mechanical degree by correspondence and became the founder and namesake of Chrysler.
William Wrigley Jr. arrived in Chicago in 1891 with $32, sold soap and baking powder, and found his fortune when the free chewing gum premium outsold everything else.
King Gillette took his friend William Painter's advice to invent something disposable and created the thin, inexpensive stamped-steel razor blade that founded Gillette.
William Colgate apprenticed with a New York soap-boiler, then in 1806 set up a starch, soap and candle business on Dutch Street that became Colgate-Palmolive.
C. W. Post, a former Springfield, Illinois farm-machinery inventor with a plow, harrow and hay-stacker patent, founded the company that became Post Consumer Brands.
John Harvey Kellogg ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium and developed Granose and cornflakes as breakfast foods, though he also co-founded the eugenics-promoting Race Betterment Foundation.
F. W. Woolworth pioneered fixed prices, direct buying from manufacturers and self-service display cases with his Five-and-Dime variety stores.
George Eastman patented a roll film camera that made amateur photography accessible to the public, founded Kodak and gave heavily to Rochester, MIT and Tuskegee.
Henry J. Heinz co-founded the Pittsburgh food company that bears his name and helped secure passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.
Thomas Edison registered 1,093 US patents, built Menlo Park, the first industrial research laboratory, and his Edison General Electric merged into General Electric.
Andrew Carnegie arrived in Pittsburgh at 12, worked in a cotton mill, built Carnegie Steel and sold it to J.P. Morgan for $303 million in 1901, then gave away almost 90 percent of his fortune.
Cornelius Vanderbilt quit school at 11, started his own ferry at 16 with $100 borrowed from his mother, and built shipping and railroad monopolies that made him one of the richest Americans in history.
