Howard Hughes

Howard Robard Hughes Jr. (1905 to 1976) was an American aviator, aerospace engineer, business magnate, film producer and investor, one of the richest and most influential people in the world in his lifetime. The son of Howard Hughes Sr., an inventor and businessman who patented the two-cone roller bit and founded the Hughes Tool Company, he showed an early engineering aptitude and built Houston's first wireless radio transmitter at age 11. He became prominent as a film producer in the late 1920s, with Hell's Angels and Scarface among his films, and acquired the RKO Pictures studio in 1948. In 1932 he founded Hughes Aircraft Company and spent the next two decades setting world air speed records and building landmark planes such as the Hughes H-1 Racer of 1935 and the H-4 Hercules, the Spruce Goose of 1947, the largest flying boat in history. He won the Harmon Trophy twice, the Collier Trophy in 1938 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1939, expanded Trans World Airlines, and in his last years built a business empire in Las Vegas. He died of kidney failure in 1976, and his legacy continues through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.