FOUNDING FATHERS

You already know the names—here are the people behind them.

CHARLES GULDEN

Gulden ran a spice company in New York City in the 1860s. At the time, many spice merchants only offered mustard in a dry, white, very strong powder that had to be mixed with water. Gulden had an idea: He mixed a variety of mustard powders with mustard seed, other spices, and aged vinegar, then combined all of them (along with turmeric, for color) with water and sold the concoction in glass jars. This was the first prepared yellow mustard ever made. Gulden’s Mustard went national in 1875 and is still one of the best-selling condiments in the United States.

HERMAN LAY

In 1932, 24-year-old Herman Lay, a failed ice-cream salesman, took a job with Barrett Food Company, an Atlanta potato-chip maker. He drove all over the South selling cases of potato chips to stores out of the trunk of his car. He did so well that in 1938 he bought the Barrett Food Company and changed its name to the HW Lay Company. But potato chips had to be made and sold locally—they got broken in shipping. And that’s how Lay’s grew: It bought up smaller potato-chip processors all over the country. By the 1950s, Lay’s had became the top-selling brand of potato chips in the world.

JOSHUA VICK

Lunsford Richardson was a pharmacist in Selma, North Carolina, in the early 1880s. One night his son came down with a bad cold. Back then, the most common cold remedy was to spread a mustard paste on the chest. The strong aroma was thought to open up air passages, but it also caused skin to break out into painful blisters. Trying to find a way to reduce the blisters, Richardson experimented with several substances—unsuccessfully—until he combined petroleum jelly, menthol, nutmeg, cedar, and eucalyptus oils. That mixture worked. First marketed as Richard’s Croup and Pneumonia Salve, it flopped. So he renamed it Vick’s Magic Croup Salve after his brother-in-law, Joshua Vick, a popular town doctor. (Besides, “Vick’s” fit better on the tiny blue jars). The product became known as Vick’s VapoRub in 1908, when it was purchased by Proctor and Gamble and became available nationwide.

JACK RUSSELL

Russell (1795–1883), an Oxford divinity student and avid hunter known as the “Sporting Parson,” dreamed of the perfect fox-hunting dog: compact like a terrier but aggressive enough to root foxes out of their small holes. One day he saw a milkman walking a small dog that looked like the one he’d imagined. Russell bought the dog (named “Trump”) on the spot and went into business breeding them for fox hunting. As a result, any small hunting terrier came to be known as a “Parson Russell Terrier” and then a “Jack Russell Terrier.”

RAY DOLBY

Dolby, born in Portland, Oregon, was a UN advisor in India in the 1960s. But technology, not diplomacy, was his dream. He wanted to improve the sound of recorded music and films, which hissed very loudly in those days. So in 1965, he founded Dolby Labs in England, and soon figured out a way to reduce the noise on magnetic tapes, a discovery that helped usher in the cassette era of the 1970s. In 1976, Dolby took his labs to San Francisco and sold his “Dolby Noise Reduction” technology to the film industry, revolutionizing that medium, too. In all, Dolby holds more than 50 U.S. patents.

SEBASTIAN S. KRESGE

In 1899, this Pennsylvania native purchased two five-and-dime stores in Detroit, Michigan. By 1912, the SS Kresge Company had 85 stores in the Midwest. In his day, the wealthy Kresge was a well-known philanthropist, but today we know him only by his last initial. After Kresge retired in 1959, a former newspaper reporter named Harry Cunningham took over the company and wanted to expand the dime stores into larger markets, or “marts.” He opened the first one in Detroit in 1962. Believing that “Kresgemart” was too hard to pronounce, Cunningham shortened it to Kmart.

Spain’s name comes from Span or Spania, meaning “Land of rabbits.”