Howard Hughes Jr. (1905–1976) businessman and entrepreneur

Born in Houston, Hughes’s family was in the oil drilling business. His father developed an oil bit capable of drilling to previously unreachable areas, and the company became the Hughes Tool Co. Howard Jr. was a tinkerer as a youth and attended several colleges, including Rice Institute, but never graduated. When he was 19, his father died and the company passed to him. His newfound wealth became the basis for the wide array of entrepreneurial enterprises he undertook beginning while he was in his early 20s.

After inheriting Hughes Tool, he embarked upon a career in Hollywood, directing several movies that achieved notable success. He also continued to develop an interest in flying. In 1932, he became interested in the aviation industry and formed the Hughes Aircraft Corp., which developed a plane called the H-1. He also flew a twin-engine plane around the world, a trip that helped prove that passenger air travel was the wave of the future. Subsequently, he bought TWA in 1937 and financed the Lockheed Constellation, an advanced-design passenger airplane.

During World War II, Hughes took up defense contracting, but his projects did not materialize before the war ended. One was a reconnaissance plane and the other a huge wooden plane, nicknamed the Spruce Goose. Like many of his projects, they never fully succeeded while he was personally involved with them. Hughes acquired a reputation as an eccentric whose close personal involvement with a project often spelled its demise. His personal involvement in test piloting was not always successful, either. On a test flight of his reconnaissance plane, the XF-11, in 1946, it crash-landed in California, and he was seriously injured, spending nine months in the hospital recuperating.

The Spruce Goose also proved a failure, being unable to carry the large number of military equipment and soldiers as originally planned because war was over. Hughes Aircraft began to succeed after the war as Hughes distanced himself from the company. He also lost control of TWA when the airline needed to purchase its first generation of jet liners, and Hughes could not finance the purchase from company resources. But he still managed to earn more than $500 million when he divested. He also continued to produce the occasional Hollywood movie, but none of the later films achieved the success of his earlier ones.

In later life, Hughes became extremely reclusive and never appeared in public. Much speculation about his private life ensued. He made a substantial investment in several Las Vegas resorts, which were eventually sold. One of his few ventures into the public light came just before his death when he called the press to state that a recent biography of him was a fake. He died in 1976 and was buried in Houston.

See also AIRPLANE INDUSTRY.

Further reading

• Barlett, Donald, and James B. Steele. Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes. New York: W. W. Norton, 1979. 
• Drosnin, Michael. Citizen Hughes. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985. 
• Phelan, James. Howard Hughes: The Hidden Years. New York: Random House, 1976.