Great Moments in the History of the American Entrepreneur
When the Constitution was ratified in 1788, the United States was a bankrupt, failing start-up venture. Today it is the world’s greatest economy, producing almost one-third of the goods and services on earth.
How did we do it?
In large part, through the sweat and brainpower of millions of American entrepreneurs who have written true tales of daring, courage, and triumph across the pages of business history. Here are just a few of our greatest achievements and turning points, which are moments that will echo through the halls of time:
Between 500 and 200 BCE: Native peoples of America establish vital regional trade networks across the continent, buying and selling flint, knives, arrowheads, animal products, vegetables, copper, marine shells, pottery, and countless other goods. They are the spiritual godfathers and godmothers of today’s American entrepreneurs.
1600s: English American settlements and colonies are set up as for-profit entrepreneurial ventures in Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Virginia. Cod fishing takes off in the waters of New England, kicking off a long economic boom for the region. The unofficial motto of these new ventures might as well be “Let’s make deals, let’s build, make, and sell things—let’s make as much money as we can. Cash is king!”
1618: The West Indian tobacco crop takes off as a highly profitable business, making Virginia wealthy. The tragic downside is tobacco’s link to cancer, which won’t be definitively proven until the 1960s.
1624: The Dutch West India Company sets up a beaver-pelt trading post in present-day New York. “New Amsterdam” is a colony of entrepreneurial go-getters, hustlers, wheeler-dealers, and speed-talkers, setting the pace for the modern American metropolis.
1646: John Winthrop establishes the Saugus Iron Works in Massachusetts, representing the arrival of heavy industry in America. Unable to turn a profit, it collapses and fails by the 1670s amid management squabbles and lawsuits. It’s a familiar tale for American entrepreneurs. Sometimes you’ve got to try three, four, or more times to make a business click.
1671: New England ships six million pounds of dried cod to international markets. Cod is tasty, profitable, and abundant. Fortunes are made and mansions are built in Boston. Let’s face it, there’s nothing like a good down-home backyard fish fry. Pass me the tartar sauce!
1700s: Lumber for shipbuilding becomes New England’s first great industry and a lucrative cash crop. Sawmills blossom along the area’s rivers.
1775: Virginia entrepreneur and agribusinessman George Washington takes charge of the colonial rebellion against the British. He’s a tall, sturdy horseman whose executive skills have been honed by many years in the world of business as a land speculator and as the operator of a diversified, for-profit agro-industrial enterprise at Mount Vernon that includes a fishery, meat processing facility, textile and weaving manufactory, distillery, gristmill, blacksmith shop, brickmaking kiln, cargo-carrying schooner, and fields of grain. Washington’s black slaves provide the muscle power.
1776: The Declaration of Independence is signed by a group of fifty-six men that includes many entrepreneurs and self-made businessmen like Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, Philip Livingston, and John Hancock.
1776: The Continental Congress, fearing capture by British forces, flees Philadelphia, leaving entrepreneur Robert Morris behind to finance and run the revolutionary government as the de facto CEO for three months. Morris rescues General Washington and his freezing, starving troops with emergency supplies in the nick of time to complete their historic crossing of the Delaware on Christmas Day 1776. In 1781, Morris comes to the rescue again, running Washington’s army finances and the American revolutionary government’s budget out of his own pockets, juggling a blizzard of credit and paperwork. Morris again rushes food, supplies, and payments to the rebels in the nick of time. Great work! Lesson learned: if you want something impossible done, call in an entrepreneur.
1781: In a bold, risky campaign financed by Robert Morris and Philadelphia bond broker and Jewish American entrepreneur Haym Salomon, George Washington leads thousands of French and American troops on an epic march down the Atlantic coast from New York to Yorktown, Virginia, and knocks the British out of the war. To finance the operation, Morris uses his own personal credit and currency (“Morris notes”), juggled with loans and supplies from Spain, France, and Cuba. Independence is formally achieved in 1783.
1784: A group of American investors launches The Empress of China, which sails from New York to Asia loaded with furs and ginseng root, which it trades for tea, silks, china and porcelain, exotic plants and birds, and other luxury goods. The venture makes a huge profit, kicking off the era of large-scale American commerce with Asia.
1785: George Washington launches America’s first trade development company, the Potomac Company, a partnership of private and public capital.
1790: The Philadelphia-Lancaster Turnpike is authorized and generates immediate profits for the company that built it. Commerce booms along the route, which inspires similar road and turnpike projects throughout the mid-Atlantic and New England states, including the Cumberland Road, which eventually extends all the way from Maryland to Illinois.
1792: Twenty-four stockbrokers gather under a sycamore tree in lower Manhattan and sign the Buttonwood Agreement, the beginning of the New York Stock Exchange.
1793: America’s first multimillionaire entrepreneur, French immigrant Stephen Girard, risks his life to spearhead the rescue and treatment of yellow fever victims in Philadelphia.
1780s–90s: Robert Morris’s idea for a national bank is approved by Congress and helps stabilize the postcolonial economy. Thomas Jefferson designs a currency system for the new nation. Morris turns down the post of secretary of the Treasury, so Washington appoints young Alexander Hamilton, who proves to be a brilliant choice, and, in 2015, the star of a smash-hit Broadway musical. By 1795, six years after taking charge of the bankrupt United States, George Washington’s government restores America’s credit to a level that international bankers declare is better than that of any European power. Government bonds sell at a premium in European markets. Washington puts the nation on a path toward strong tax and customs powers and an effective monetary system, which unleashes the entrepreneurial and free market destiny of the new nation. The Bank of the United States circulates notes throughout the nation, creating a reliable money supply for the nation’s entrepreneurs and citizens.
1797: George Washington returns to Mount Vernon to be a full-time entrepreneur at age sixty-five, expands to breeding sheep, hogs, cattle, and deer for profit, and launches a whiskey distillery, which soon becomes one of the biggest in the new nation.
1807: Inventor and entrepreneur Robert Fulton builds a flat-bottom paddlewheel steamboat, inaugurating a new age of reliable public and commercial transportation.
1807: Eli Whitney’s cotton gin is patented and ignites the South’s production of cotton, which soars from 1 percent of the world’s total in 1793 to almost 70 percent of the world’s total in 1850. The machine allows a single worker to do in one day what used to take fifty. A tragic consequence is the expansion and strengthening of human slavery in the United States.
1811: Boston merchant Francis Cabot Lowell takes a tour of English textile mills, makes mental notes of the equipment and processes, and clones the technology when he returns to the United States by building the world’s first fully integrated textile mill in Waltham, Massachusetts. This sneaky act of industrial espionage helps trigger the wave of American mass-production manufacturing that transforms the nation.
1818: New York starts the first scheduled shipping service with Europe, and transatlantic trade begins booming.
1825: Rebecca Lukens takes over her family’s near-bankrupt Brandywine Iron Works and Nail Factory in Pennsylvania. She becomes the first prominent American female CEO by leading a successful steel enterprise that operated into the twenty-first century. In 1994, Fortune calls her “America’s first female CEO of an industrial company” and inducts her into the National Business Hall of Fame.
1825: The Erie Canal is completed ahead of schedule and under budget, becomes one of the first successful government-funded mega-projects and a business superhighway for entrepreneurial activity, and launches a business boom all along its 363-plus-mile route. Until then it took three weeks and $120 to ship a ton of flour from Buffalo to New York City. Now it takes eight days and only costs $6. By connecting the Hudson with the Great Lakes, New York is now linked with the Midwest, which unleashes a tidal wave of new business activity.
1830: There are twenty-three miles of railroad track in the nation. By the time of the Civil War, there are more than 30,000, and by 1900, there are nearly 200,000.
1830s: Former fur mogul and German immigrant entrepreneur John Jacob Astor gobbles up huge amounts of New York City real estate, betting that land values will skyrocket as the city moves north. They do, and he becomes the wealthiest man in early America.
1825–40: The annual Rocky Mountain Rendezvous trade fair is held in present-day Utah and Wyoming, bringing together Native Americans, white trappers, and their families.
1833: After years of experimentation and failure, New England entrepreneur Frederic Tudor manages to ship a 180-ton load of ice from Boston all the way to Calcutta—a 16,000-mile, four-month trip—in the days before electricity and refrigeration. The British population in Calcutta rejoices with chilled wine and beer parties to celebrate. An international ice-shipping empire is born. Profits roll in and the refrigerated foundation of the modern food industry is born.
1835: Young entrepreneur Samuel Colt creates the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company in Paterson, New Jersey, and registers his first patent, launching the age of reliable, mass-produced guns.
1844: Inventor-entrepreneur Samuel Morse introduces the blockbuster technology of instant long-distance communication with a test message of his telegraph machine between Washington and Baltimore, with the biblical phrase “What hath God wrought!”
1848: A pea-shaped object catches the attention of a worker at John Sutter’s mill near Sacramento, California. He feels his heart thump and exclaims, “Boys, by God, I believe I have found a gold mine,” and the California Gold Rush begins, kicking off a wave of economic and entrepreneurial growth in California and the American West.
1850: Isaac Singer invents the Singer sewing machine and builds America’s first multinational consumer product company with it.
1856: Cyrus McCormick’s factory is making four thousand mechanical reapers a year for domestic and foreign markets, leading to a global revolution: the mechanization of agriculture. He makes a fortune.
1858: Rowland Hussey Macy, who has failed at five different business ventures, opens up the R. H. Macy Dry Goods store on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Fourteenth Street in New York City. Through clever merchandising, he builds it into the world’s first “department store,” and by 1866 the store employs four hundred people, including women in leadership roles. In 1902, Macy’s opens its world-famous flagship megastore on Herald Square, occupying an entire city block. The brand grows to become a household name, with over eight hundred retail locations.
1861: Entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt achieves dominance of the transatlantic and transcontinental steamship lines and later becomes the nation’s leading railroad operator, exerting major influence on the financial and transportation markets. Big railroad ventures are powering the commerce of the nation.
1864: At age twenty-five, John D. Rockefeller and partners make one of the best business investments in history by buying Cleveland’s biggest oil refinery. It is the beginning of a saga that will create the world’s first great modern multinational corporation and make Rockefeller the wealthiest man in modern history.
1872: Jewish immigrant and San Francisco store owner Levi Strauss invents blue jean pants and waist-high work overalls made of rivet-reinforced, sturdy denim cotton. They take the clothing and fashion world by storm.
1875: Teenage entrepreneur Milton Hershey borrows $150 from his aunt and opens a candy shop in Philadelphia. It fails. He tries again in Chicago and fails. He comes to New York and fails again. Years go by. Still convinced he can build a successful candy company, and eager to build a factory to mass-produce and mass-distribute milk chocolate candy, he moves to Pennsylvania and eventually opens up the Hershey Chocolate Company. A global brand is born, along with Hershey’s Kisses, Almond Joy, Mounds, and Reese’s. Hershey became a philanthropist and set up a model community that endures to this day, including housing, churches, schools, parks, recreational facilities, cultural activities, and a hotel and trolley, all for his employees and community members.
1883: William Procter and James Gamble, two Ohio brothers-in-law who started the Procter & Gamble Company, launch their first major brand, Ivory Soap. The company grows to become a global consumer product powerhouse.
1880s: After the Civil War, America booms into a vast, vibrant national market for entrepreneurs. Real gross domestic product (GDP) increases more than seven times between 1865 and 1920, and real per capita product doubles.
1889: Andrew Carnegie writes “The Gospel of Wealth,” arguing that the rich have a moral obligation to give away most of their money, and that personal wealth should be considered as a trust fund to create economic opportunity for the less fortunate. A century later, Chuck Feeney, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and other entrepreneurial super-tycoons use the Carnegie article as inspiration for the “Giving Pledge.”
1898: John Merrick launches the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, catering to the lucrative, underserved African American market.
1898: In an accidental baking discovery, brothers John and Will Kellogg create a tasty wheat cereal flake. The brothers squabble and split, and Will winds up creating the company behind Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, becoming one of America’s wealthiest men and greatest philanthropists in the process. Pass the milk, please.
1900: America’s population grows to 76 million, nearly doubling in the last quarter century. One-third of the increase comes from immigration.
1900: Black leader Booker T. Washington builds the National Negro Business League into six hundred chapters, encouraging African Americans to uplift themselves and their communities by launching their own business ventures.
1906: Madam C. J. Walker starts her own line of hair-care and beauty products aimed at the African American market, including the top-selling “Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower,” forming the basis of a national business network. Walker will become one of her era’s greatest black philanthropists.
1907: Financial entrepreneur J. P. Morgan rescues Wall Street during a major financial crisis.
1908: William “Billy” Crapo Durant, a horse-buggy manufacturer and the favorite grandson of Michigan timber mogul and Michigan governor Henry Crapo (now there’s a name I wouldn’t wish on anybody), pulls together car manufacturers Cadillac, Buick, and Oldsmobile and creates General Motors Company, the world’s first automotive conglomerate. He soon loses control of the company, then founds the Chevrolet Motor Company, then takes over General Motors in 1915. In 1920, he is booted out by the board of directors and devotes his life to being a gambler, drinker, and bowling alley operator, losing his fortune in auto stock in the Great Depression.
1900–09: Powered by immigration, the U.S. population jumps from 76 million to 92 million, by far the fastest rate of growth in the century, creating vast new markets for entrepreneurs.
1922: Juan Trippe starts the company that will eventually become Pan American Airways. The son of a Wall Street banker, he watched Wilbur Wright’s 1909 flight around the Statue of Liberty and was inspired to become an aviator. After World War I, he bought scrapped seaplanes from the navy and started giving rides at Coney Island, then began an air taxi and mail-carrying service, as well as an international passenger service throughout the Caribbean and the Americas that became the world’s largest commercial airline. In 1935, Pan Am inaugurated the first “China Clipper” flight with a flying boat packed with 111,000 letters, taking off from San Francisco and bound for Manila, and cheered by a throng of 150,000 people. In World War II, Pan Am planes shuttle American troops to war zones. In 1958, Pan Am launches the era of commercial jets with a non-stop flight from New York to Paris.
1928: On board a train from New York to Hollywood, illustrator and failed entrepreneur Walt Disney draws a rodent on a piece of paper. Mickey Mouse is born, and Disney’s company eventually soars to become a global media and entertainment powerhouse.
1937: Margaret Rudkin, a broke Connecticut housewife whose family lost everything in the Great Depression (including a 125-acre farm and a Tudor-style mansion with a five-car garage and a twelve-horse stable), makes a batch of her Pepperidge Farm bread in her kitchen and sells it to a local grocery store. The bread is hailed as a sensation through word of mouth and local media, and, with the help of an ad campaign showing a friendly older man delivering bread in a horse-drawn wagon, becomes a classic American food brand. Rudkin, who originally baked the wholesome bread to help her sickly son’s allergies, sold her company to Campbell Soup in 1961 and served on Campbell’s board of directors. “There isn’t a worthwhile thing in the world that can’t be accomplished with good hard work,” she once said. “You’ve got to want something first and then you have to go after it with all your heart and soul.”
1939: The symbolic birth of Silicon Valley and the Information Age occurs when Stanford University students William Hewlett and David Packard start a technology company in a garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California, paving the way for other garage-style start-ups like Apple, Google, Cisco, Intel, Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb.
1945: World War II ends and consumer demand takes off like a rocket. American entrepreneurs enjoy a golden age.
1948: Estée Lauder starts selling her kitchen-brewed skin cream concoctions at a counter at New York City’s Saks Fifth Avenue luxury superstore. By 1998, Time magazine ranks her the only woman on their list of the twentieth century’s “most influential business geniuses,” and when she dies six years later, her company’s sales exceed $5 billion.
1959: Ruth Handler invents the Barbie doll, which powers her Mattel company to global leadership in the toy business, reaching the Fortune 500 in the 1960s, and today achieving global sales of over $5 billion.
1968: Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore start Intel, which in 1971 introduces the world’s first commercial microprocessor chip, a foundation of the modern computer industry.
1971: The first Starbucks coffee shop opens in Seattle, Washington.
1974: Sandra Kurtzig starts a business in her spare bedroom that becomes ASK Computer Systems, one of the fastest-growing computer software companies in the United States. In 1981, she becomes the first woman to lead a technology company public stock offering.
1975: Fred Smith’s start-up overnight delivery service Federal Express is running out of money and down to its last $5,000 after a critical business loan was denied. Smith hops on a plane to Las Vegas, sits down at a blackjack table, and wins $27,000, enough to meet the next week’s payroll and help keep the company afloat. Today FedEx is a $60 billion global company and Fred Smith is still chairman.
1977: The Apple II is introduced, launching the age of the personal computer.
1978: Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield start Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings, Inc., and open their first shop in Burlington, Vermont.
1980: IBM signs a contract with start-up software company Microsoft to create an operating system for its new PC. In one of the most brilliant business moves of all time, the twenty-six-year-old Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates inserts a clause in the agreement that permits Microsoft to sell the operating system to other computer manufacturers. Gates foresaw that other companies would clone IBM’s hardware. IBM, apparently, did not fully grasp this. The clause shapes the course of technology history, allowing Microsoft to become a dominant force in the technology industry. By 1983, one-third of the world’s PCs are running Microsoft software, and by 1986 Gates is a billionaire.
1984: Steve Jobs unveils the Apple Macintosh computer, unleashing a torrent of products that transform the world of consumer technology, media, communications, and entertainment.
1987: Reginald Lewis stages the $985 million takeover of the international division of Beatrice Foods, creating the first black-owned billion-dollar company and representing the then-biggest leveraged buyout of overseas assets by an American company in history.
1988: Oprah Winfrey launches her multimedia company, Harpo Studios, and later becomes the cofounder of Oxygen Media and is named by Businessweek as the greatest African American philanthropist in American history.
1995: Jeff Bezos opens Amazon.com on the Web, launching the age of consumer e-commerce.
1998: Google is started by Stanford University doctoral students Larry Page and Sergey Brin with an investment of only $100,000. Just ten years later, Google’s parent company reaches $820 billion in market value as the world’s largest search engine.
2004: Mark Zuckerberg launches Facebook and drops out of Harvard University. By 2018, his personal wealth is estimated to be about $72 billion.
2011: African American–owned businesses total some two million and enjoy the highest largest growth rate in minority-owned companies from 2002 to 2011.
2012: The Latino share of American entrepreneurs grows to almost 20 percent in 2012, up from 10.5 percent in 1996.
2014: Almost 30 percent of companies are majority-owned by women, and they generate more than $1 trillion in revenues and employ more than seven million people.