Howard Hughes

NAME Howard Robard Hughes Jr. (1), (2)

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Howard Hughes was a polymath of American industry, becoming a billionaire tycoon, record-breaking aviator, film director, and eccentric recluse. He is best known for producing controversial films like Hell's Angels and The Outlaw, controlling Trans World Airlines (TWA), and building the "Spruce Goose," the largest flying boat ever constructed. In his later years, he became a symbol of reclusive obsession and germaphobia.

BIRTH Howard Hughes was born on December 24, 1905.  His exact birthplace is disputed: a 1941 affidavit birth certificate states he was born in Harris County, Texas, while the Motorsports Hall of Fame lists his birthplace as Humble, Texas, and other sources cite Houston. His certificate of baptism, recorded on October 7, 1906, at St. John's Episcopal Church in Keokuk, Iowa, lists his date of birth as September 24, 1905, adding further uncertainty. (1)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Hughes was the only child of Howard Robard Hughes Sr. (1869–1924) and Allene Stone Gano (1883–1922). His father was a successful inventor and businessman from Missouri who patented the two-cone roller bit in 1909 — a device that revolutionised rotary drilling for petroleum in previously inaccessible locations — and founded the highly profitable Hughes Tool Company that same year. 

His mother's family were considered "monarchs of Dallas society." (2)

His uncle was the celebrated novelist, screenwriter, and film director Rupert Hughes. 

Hughes had English, Welsh, and some French Huguenot ancestry, and was a distant fifth cousin once removed of the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, through John Gano's sister Susannah. 

CHILDHOOD Hughes was a curious, inventive child with a strong aptitude for science and engineering. He built Houston's first "wireless" radio transmitter at age 11, became one of the first licensed ham-radio operators in Houston (callsign W5CY), and at 12 was photographed for the local newspaper as the first boy in Houston to have a "motorised" bicycle, which he had assembled from parts of his father's steam engine. He also showed an ability to build things with wires and scraps of metal from an early age. (3)

 He took his first flying lesson at the age of 14.

His mother Allene died in March 1922 from complications of an ectopic pregnancy; his father Howard Sr. died of a heart attack in 1924. 

Hughes in April 1912

EDUCATION Hughes attended Fessenden School in Massachusetts in 1921, followed by a brief stint at The Thacher School in California, where the principal's son, Anson Thacher, reportedly described Hughes as "the brightest student in physics the school had in years." (2) 

He went on to study mathematics and aeronautical engineering at Caltech.Hughes withdrew from Rice University shortly after his father's death in 1924. (3) 

On his 19th birthday he was declared an emancipated minor, enabling him to take full control of his inherited fortune and business interests. 

CAREER RECORD 1924 Following the death of his father, Hughes took control of the Hughes Tool Company at age 18. He soon moved to Los Angeles to enter the film industry. 

1927 Produced his first financial successes, Everybody's Acting and Two Arabian Knights, the latter winning the first Academy Award for Best Director of a comedy picture. 

1930 Released the epic Hell's Angels, which he directed. It was one of the most expensive films of its time and showcased his obsession with aviation.

1932 Founded the Hughes Aircraft Company. During this decade, he also produced the controversial gangster film Scarface. 

1935 Set a world airspeed record of 352 mph in his H-1 racing landplane. 

1939 Began quietly purchasing a majority share of Transcontinental & Western Air (TWA), eventually transforming it into a global powerhouse.

1947 Piloted the H-4 Hercules ("Spruce Goose") on its only flight, traveling one mile at an altitude of 70 feet. 

1948 Gained control of RKO Pictures, one of the "Big Five" Hollywood studios. 

1966 Sold his shares in TWA for $546 million and moved to Las Vegas, where he began a massive acquisition of hotels and casinos. 

APPEARANCE Hughes stood 6 ft 4 in tall. In his youth and prime he was considered strikingly handsome, lean, and athletic. (2) 

Howard Hughes in 1938

In his final years his reclusive lifestyle and neglect of his health left him dramatically wasted: when he died his tall frame weighed barely 90 pounds, and his hair, beard, fingernails, and toenails had grown extremely long. The FBI had to use fingerprints to conclusively identify the body. (3)

A trademark moustache he wore from the mid-1940s onwards hid a scar on his upper lip sustained in the 1946 XF-11 crash. 

FASHION In his youth and during his Hollywood years, Hughes was known as a dapper and stylish dresser who moved comfortably in the highest social circles. (2) 

As his OCD worsened in later life, his relationship with clothing became increasingly obsessive: he developed elaborate contamination rituals around handling clothes and objects. In his final years he wore virtually nothing, having descended into a state of extreme physical neglect. 

CHARACTER As a teenager, Hughes declared that his three goals in life were to become the world's best golfer, the world's best pilot, and the world's best movie producer. (3) 

Driven, bold, and brilliantly inventive, he possessed exceptional technical aptitude and a ferocious competitive streak. He was also a loner who could be imperious, secretive, and deeply controlling in business dealings. 

His worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder — which manifested in phobias about contamination, elaborate rules for handling food and objects, and compulsive rituals — gradually overwhelmed his personal life and contributed to his complete withdrawal from public view from around 1950. 

SPEAKING VOICE Hughes spoke with what contemporaries described as an occasionally quavering Texas drawl — a voice characterised by soft, quiet delivery and distinctive Southern verbal mannerisms. When seven journalists who had previously known him personally questioned a voice claiming to be Hughes during a 1972 telephone press conference, they unanimously agreed that the drawl, the verbal habits, and the sometimes rambling descriptions of aviation minutiae "could only have come from Hughes" — a verdict later corroborated by his former aide Noah Dietrich, who had known him intimately for 32 years. 

Hughes also suffered from progressive deafness in his later years, which contributed to his social withdrawal. Rather than meet his staff in person, he communicated primarily through extraordinarily long, detailed written memos or by telephone, using both as a buffer that allowed him to maintain total control while keeping people at a physical distance. (4)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Hughes had a taste for audacious practical jokes and an irreverent streak, reflected in his deliberate provocation of censors with films like Scarface and The Outlaw. He once took a job as a baggage handler for American Airlines under the alias "Charles Howard" and was eventually promoted to co-pilot before his true identity was discovered. (

RELATIONSHIPS On June 1, 1925, Hughes married Ella Botts Rice, socialite daughter of David Rice and Martha Lawson Botts of Houston, and great-niece of William Marsh Rice, for whom Rice University was named. In 1929, after four years of marriage, Ella returned to Houston and filed for divorce.  (3)

Hughes went on to date many famous women, including Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Ava Gardner, Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth, and Gene Tierney. When Gene Tierney's daughter Daria was born deaf, blind, and with a severe learning disability as a result of Tierney's exposure to rubella during pregnancy, Hughes ensured that Daria received the best medical care and paid all expenses.

On January 12, 1957, Hughes married actress Jean Peters, described by associates as the only woman he ever truly loved. They divorced fourteen years later. (3)

Jean Peters in the 1950s

Hughes never had children. 

BUSINESS CAREER Howard Hughes did not so much have a career as conduct a prolonged experiment in seeing how many industries one human being could reasonably collect before lunch. Oil tools, aeroplanes, motion pictures, missiles, casinos—if it involved machinery, money, or mild peril, Hughes tended to have a go.

It all began, as these things often do, with a rather good idea from someone else—his father. The Hughes Tool Company was built on a two-cone roller drill bit patented in 1909, which proved so useful to the النفط business that it might politely be described as indispensable. When Hughes inherited the company at the age of 18 in 1924, he displayed the rare wisdom of immediately hiring someone competent—an accountant named Noah Dietrich—to run it. Dietrich obligingly turned a $1 million inheritance into $75 million in about five years, which is the sort of financial growth that makes modern hedge fund managers lie down in a darkened room. Hughes would eventually sell the oil-tool side in 1972 for $150 million, by which point it had done quite enough heavy lifting.

Having secured a steady river of money, Hughes turned to Hollywood, because where else does one go when one has both ambition and a dangerous surplus of cash? Beginning in 1926, he financed and produced films, culminating in Hell’s Angels (1930) and Scarface (1932), which announced him as a serious player—if a somewhat extravagant one. In 1948, he bought RKO Pictures for $8.8 million, becoming the first person since the silent era to own a major studio outright. His tenure there was widely regarded as a masterclass in how not to run a film company. He bought out the remaining shareholders for $24 million, then sold the whole enterprise less than a year later, somehow emerging with a $6 million profit, which suggests that even his missteps had a curious tendency to land on their feet.

Meanwhile, in aviation—his true love—Hughes founded Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932, initially to build racing planes because ordinary planes were evidently too pedestrian. During and after the Second World War, the company blossomed into a defence giant, producing everything from radar systems to spacecraft components, and even the first working laser, which is not the sort of thing one casually knocks together in a shed. In 1953, Hughes donated the entire company to the newly formed Howard Hughes Medical Institute, thereby turning a weapons manufacturer into a tax-exempt charity—an arrangement that must have raised at least one thoughtful eyebrow. After his death, the institute sold the company to General Motors for $5.2 billion, which gives some indication of how far the enterprise had travelled from its tinkering origins.

Not content with dominating the skies, Hughes also set about acquiring an airline. By 1944, he had quietly amassed a 78% stake in Transcontinental & Western Air—later Trans World Airlines—and played a pivotal role in developing the elegant Lockheed Constellation, an aircraft so stylish it looked as though it might ask you to dress for dinner. Unfortunately, Hughes’s aversion to appearing in court led to his losing control of the airline in an antitrust case. In 1966, he sold his shares for $546.5 million, the largest single payout of his career, which probably softened the blow.

With this windfall, Hughes did what any sensible billionaire might do: he went to Las Vegas and bought a good portion of it. Arriving in 1966, he embarked on a spending spree that would make a lottery winner look restrained, acquiring hotels, casinos, an airline, a television station, vast tracts of land, and even a respectable number of mining claims—just in case. Over four years, he spent roughly $300 million and, in the process, helped nudge Las Vegas away from its mob-inflected adolescence toward something approaching respectability, or at least a more polished version of impropriety.

Throughout all this, Hughes accumulated real estate on a scale that suggested he might be planning to misplace a small country. Acres in Culver City, thousands more in Tucson for missile production, and an impressive spread near Las Vegas were eventually gathered into what became the Howard Hughes Corporation. Among its developments was Summerlin, Nevada—a carefully planned community, which is perhaps the closest Hughes ever came to doing anything in a modest, orderly fashion.

In the end, Hughes’s business career reads less like a résumé and more like a particularly ambitious shopping list—one in which the items include “Hollywood studio,” “defence contractor,” and “city, lightly used.”

MONEY AND FAME Hughes inherited substantial wealth at 18 and grew it into one of the largest fortunes in the United States.  In 1966 the sale of his TWA shares alone brought him $546,549,771. 

During his Las Vegas years he spent an estimated $300 million acquiring hotels, casinos, and real estate, becoming the largest employer in the state of Nevada. 

During the 1940s and 1950s he was one of the most famous men in the world, receiving a ticker-tape parade in New York City after his 1938 round-the-world flight. 

In later decades his reclusive behavior generated enormous speculation, and a 1971 fraudulent "authorised biography" by Clifford Irving — exposed as a hoax — illustrated the extent of public fascination with him. (5)

FOOD AND DRINK Hughes had highly particular and at times obsessive eating habits. He kept a ruler in his hotel room to measure any peas he ordered, sending back those that were deemed "too big." 

 His aides once shipped 350 gallons of his favourite ice cream — Baskin-Robbins' banana nut flavour — from Los Angeles to the Desert Inn. A few days after it arrived, Hughes announced he was tired of banana nut and wanted only French vanilla. The Desert Inn ended up distributing the banana nut ice cream free to casino customers for a year. (3) 

MUSIC AND ARTS As a film producer Hughes was a significant patron of the visual arts of cinema. He spent lavishly on production values: Hell's Angels (1930) cost $3.5 million and featured spectacular aerial sequences, and he pursued authenticity with a perfectionist zeal. 

He bought every available copy of the ill-fated film The Conqueror (1956), which was shot near a nuclear test site, after many of its cast and crew developed cancer, and reportedly watched it at home every night in his final years. 

LITERATURE Howard Hughes suffered from chronic constipation and filled his many hours on a toilet by reading heaps of books and magazines, often looking for stories to adapt into movies. (3) 

NATURE Hughes spent considerable time outdoors during his aviation years, flying over vast landscapes and crash-landing in remote terrain — most famously in a California beet field after running out of fuel during a speed record attempt in 1935. (3) 

In his later reclusive phase he cut himself off almost entirely from the natural world, living in sealed, blacked-out penthouse suites. 

PETS He was not particularly known for keeping pets especially in his later years, due to his extreme germaphobia and the sterile environments he demanded.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Hughes was an excellent golfer from a young age, often scoring near-par figures and holding a handicap of two or three during his twenties. He played frequently with top professionals including Gene Sarazen, and for a time aimed at a professional golf career. Hughes regularly played at the Lakeside Golf Club, the Wilshire Country Club, and the Bel-Air Country Club in Los Angeles, partnering with George Von Elm and Ozzie Carlton. 

Image by ChatGBT

Hughes was also a boxing enthusiast: he once asked heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey to spar with him, reportedly wanting to find out "what it would be like" — and Dempsey knocked him out. (3)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Hughes was a gifted engineer and scientist from childhood, building Houston's first wireless radio transmitter at age 11. At Caltech he studied mathematics and aeronautical engineering.

After the near-fatal XF-11 crash in 1946, and despite his serious injuries, Hughes designed from his hospital bed a customised six-section hospital bed operated by 30 electric motors with hot and cold running water, specifically to alleviate the pain of moving with severe burns. He never used the finished bed himself, but it served as a prototype for the modern hospital bed. (3)

 In 1953 he founded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute with the express goal of understanding, in his own words, "the genesis of life itself," and it grew into one of the world's largest biomedical research organisations with an endowment of $20.4 billion as of June 2018. 

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Hughes was baptised in the Episcopal faith on October 7, 1906, at St. John's Episcopal Church in Keokuk, Iowa. He does not appear to have been publicly devout in later life. His obsessive-compulsive rituals and his lifelong drive to test the limits of human and mechanical performance suggest a character oriented more towards a secular, empirical worldview — defined by an almost Promethean belief in the power of technology and individual will. 

POLITICS Hughes was a powerful behind-the-scenes political operator. He cultivated high-level connections in Washington throughout his career, using them to advance military contracts and secure airline route rights for TWA. 

During the Red Scare of the late 1940s, after acquiring RKO Studios in 1948, Hughes ordered investigations into the political leanings of every studio employee and refused to approve completed pictures for release unless he was satisfied that stars had no suspect affiliations. 

He worked with the CIA in 1972 to provide cover for the covert raising of the Soviet submarine K-129. 

SCANDAL Hughes was summoned before the Senate War Investigating Committee in 1947 to account for why $22 million in government contracts had produced only two XF-11 prototypes and the incomplete H-4 Hercules. He turned the hearings to his advantage by exposing the political manoeuvring of Maine senator Owen Brewster, and the proceedings were widely seen as a victory for Hughes. 

In 1971 author Clifford Irving announced what he claimed was an authorised biography of the reclusive Hughes — which proved to be an elaborate fraud, leading to Irving's criminal conviction. 

Hughes was also indicted in connection with the leveraged buyout of Air West, accused of conspiring to drive down the airline's stock price; the charges were ultimately dismissed by a federal judge, who called the indictment one of the worst he had ever seen. 

MILITARY RECORD Hughes had no formal military service record. However, during and after World War II he turned Hughes Aircraft Company into a major U.S. defence contractor, producing aircraft, radar systems, electro-optical systems, missile systems, the first working laser, and spacecraft vehicles. His experimental XF-11 reconnaissance aircraft was developed under a USAAF contract, and he was at the centre of politically contentious congressional hearings about wartime defence procurement. 

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS In his youth and prime Hughes was athletic, a near-scratch golfer, and a physically bold aviator who survived four aircraft crashes. He suffered increasingly severe injuries in the July 7, 1946, XF-11 crash: a crushed collarbone, multiple cracked ribs, a crushed chest with collapsed left lung (his heart was pushed to the right side of his chest), and numerous third-degree burns.  Many historians attribute his subsequent long-term dependence on opiates — specifically codeine prescribed as a painkiller during his convalescence — to this crash. 

Hughes also suffered from severe, progressive obsessive-compulsive disorder and chronic constipation. His later years were marked by dramatic physical decline: by the time of his death he weighed barely 90 pounds and was also suffering from serious kidney failure. 

HOMES Hughes grew up in the upper-crust Houston society; his teenage home at 3921 Yoakum Blvd. in Houston still stands, now known as Hughes House on the grounds of the University of St. Thomas. 

After his first marriage in 1925 he moved to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. 

From 1966 onwards, in the last decade of his life, Hughes lived exclusively in hotel penthouses in various cities, beginning with the two top floors of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas — which he purchased for $13.2 million, paying half in cash, when management asked him to vacate. He subsequently moved through penthouse suites in Las Vegas, Boston, Nassau, Managua, Vancouver, London, and Acapulco, always occupying the top floor.

TRAVEL Hughes was a globe-trotting figure in his prime. His aviation career took him across the United States on record-breaking transcontinental flights. Hughes 1938 round-the-world flight took him from New York City to Paris, Moscow, Omsk, Yakutsk, Fairbanks, and Minneapolis before returning to New York. 

Hughes with his Boeing 100 in the 1940s

In his later reclusive years, however, travel became a form of flight from scrutiny rather than adventure: he moved between international hotel penthouses, rarely venturing outside. 

DEATH Hughes died on April 5, 1976, of kidney failure, at 1:27 p.m., on board an aircraft en route from his penthouse at the Acapulco Fairmont Princess Hotel in Mexico to the Methodist Hospital in Houston, Texas. 

He left no valid will, and after protracted legal battles his estate was divided among cousins and other heirs. 

Howard Hughes is buried in Glenwood Cemetery in Houston, Texas, next to his parents.

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Hughes has been depicted in numerous films and television productions. Most notably, Leonardo DiCaprio played him in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004), for which DiCaprio received widespread critical acclaim.

The 1980 film Melvin and Howard dramatised the story of a man who claimed to have given Hughes a lift and been named in his will. 

Hughes also featured extensively in the fraud scandal surrounding Clifford Irving's fake biography, dramatised in the film The Hoax (2006) with Richard Gere. 

Hughes has been a subject of numerous documentaries exploring both his aviation legacy and his mental deterioration. (1)

ACHIEVEMENTS Set the world landplane airspeed record of 352.46 mph on September 13, 1935, in the Hughes H-1 Racer — the last time a privately built aircraft set the world airspeed record. 

Set a new transcontinental airspeed record on January 19, 1937, flying from Los Angeles to Newark in 7 hours, 28 minutes, and 25 seconds. 

Flew around the world in 91 hours, 17 minutes on July 14–17, 1938, shattering Wiley Post's 1933 record by almost four days. 

Won the Harmon Trophy twice (1936 and 1938), the Collier Trophy (1938), and the Congressional Gold Medal (1939). 

Piloted the H-4 Hercules — the largest flying boat in history and the aircraft with the longest wingspan of any plane from 1947 until 2019 — on its one and only flight on November 2, 1947. 

Founded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1953, which grew into one of the world's largest biomedical research charities, with an endowment of $20.4 billion as of 2018. 

Inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1973. 

Designed a prototype hospital bed following his 1946 crash that served as the basis for the modern hospital bed. 

Transformed Las Vegas from an organised-crime-run frontier town into a legitimate cosmopolitan city during his Las Vegas years (1966–1970). 

Sources: (1) Wikipedia (2) Spartacus Educational (3) Encyclopaedia of Trivia (4) Time Magazine (5) Wisconsin Historical Society 

Edwin Hubble

 NAME Edwin Powell Hubble. He was often referred to by colleagues as "The Major" due to his military service and commanding presence.

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Edwin Hubble was a revolutionary American astronomer who fundamentally changed our understanding of the cosmos. He is best known for confirming that the universe extends far beyond the Milky Way by proving that "nebulae" like Andromeda were actually separate galaxies. He also formulated Hubble's Law, which provides the observational basis for the expanding universe and the Big Bang theory. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) was named in his honor. (1) (2) (3)

BIRTH Born November 20, 1889, in Marshfield, Missouri, USA. 

FAMILY BACKGROUND Hubble was the third of eight children, not all of whom survived childhood. His father, John Powell Hubble, held a law degree but worked as an insurance executive — a man described as strict, demanding, and Baptist in his faith, though with a fondness for pipes and cigars. John Hubble would blow smoke rings for the entertainment of his children. 

His mother was Virginia Lee James. 

The family was financially prosperous and mobile, living in well-staffed homes in the suburbs of Chicago and later Louisville. 

Edwin's grandfather was an enthusiastic amateur astronomer who introduced the young Edwin to telescope-gazing when he was around seven years old. (4)

CHILDHOOD The family relocated from Marshfield to Wheaton, Illinois, before Hubble's first birthday. 

In his early years he was noted more for athletic prowess than intellectual achievement, though his grades were consistently high in almost every subject — the exception being spelling. 

As a boy he was captivated by the adventure novels of Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard. 

His grandfather's telescope made such an impression on him that, aged around seven, he reportedly asked to stay up all night looking at the heavens rather than have an eighth birthday party. 

The young Hubble earned money during school holidays by delivering morning newspapers in Wheaton. (2)

EDUCATION Hubble graduated from Wheaton High School in 1906 with a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he studied mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1910. He also served as a student laboratory assistant to physicist Robert Millikan, a future Nobel Prize winner, and became a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity. 

He won a Rhodes Scholarship and spent three years at The Queen's College, Oxford, studying jurisprudence in deference to his dying father's wishes, also adding studies in literature and Spanish and earning a master's degree. 

After his father's death, he returned to the United States and taught Spanish and physics at New Albany High School, Indiana, also coaching the boys' basketball team, before returning to the University of Chicago to pursue graduate astronomy studies at Yerkes Observatory, earning his Ph.D. in 1917 (later revised to 1921 in some accounts) with a dissertation titled Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebulae. (2)

CAREER RECORD 1913 Following his return from Oxford, Hubble was admitted to the bar and practiced law in Louisville, Kentucky, for about a year to fulfill his promise to his dying father.

1914 He returned to the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory to begin his doctoral work in astronomy.

1919 After serving in the military, Hubble was offered a position at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California by George Ellery Hale. He remained there for the rest of his career, using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope, then the largest in the world.

1924 On November 23, 1924, Hubble's discovery that the Andromeda nebula was actually an "island universe" (a separate galaxy) was first published in the New York Times.

1929 Hubble published his observations relating the distance of galaxies to their redshift, proving the universe is expanding.

1942 During World War II, Hubble left the observatory to serve as Head of Exterior Ballistics at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.

APPEARANCE Hubble was a tall, powerfully built man, standing six feet two inches in height. A dedicated athlete throughout his youth and early career, he possessed a physique to match — broad-shouldered and imposing. 

He was rarely without his pipe, and portraits from the Huntington Library show him habitually seated with a billiard pipe in hand. 

After Oxford, he adopted a cane and a long black English cape as part of his sartorial identity. (2) (4)

Studio Portrait of Edwin Powell Hubble 1931

FASHION Oxford transformed Hubble's dress sense entirely. He returned from England as what one observer called a confirmed Anglophile, adopting tweeds, plus-fours, knickers, and British pipes, complete with whimsical turns of phrase. He affected an English manner of dress for the remainder of his life, ordering tobacco from the London Pipe Shop of Los Angeles. His biographer Gale E. Christianson noted that he carried his style so far that his California acquaintances were sometimes bemused. (4)

CHARACTER Hubble has been described as intensely ambitious, driven, and focused, yet capable of great charm in social settings. His biographer noted that after returning from Oxford he was prone to exaggerating his earlier sporting achievements and embellishing his personal history. 

He could be stubborn in his scientific convictions — notably resisting the full interpretation of his own observational data as evidence for an expanding universe, insisting the evidence was not yet conclusive. 

Hubble was described as a dutiful son who set aside his true passion for astronomy to honour his father's dying wish that he study law. (2)

SPEAKING VOICE After three years at Oxford, Hubble returned to the United States speaking with what contemporaries described as an adopted British accent, which he retained for the rest of his life. He became so thoroughly anglicised in speech and manner that he was sometimes derided as an affectation. He was known for "whimsical turns of phrase that even Bertie Wooster might have hesitated to use," as his biographer put it. (2) 

SENSE OF HUMOUR  Hubble had a wry wit. He was fond of party tricks — one favourite being to strike a wooden match, flip it into the air, catch it on its wooden end, and light his pipe with it. His wife Grace noted his party trick delighted Hollywood guests. 

When Grace's height came up in conversation and he correctly estimated it at five feet four inches, his explanation was simply: "I was a high jumper, my dear." (4) (5)

RELATIONSHIPS In 1920, Hubble met Grace Burke at Mount Wilson Observatory. She was married at the time, but was widowed in 1921 when her first husband, Earl Leib, a geologist, died in a mine accident. After a discreet courtship, Edwin and Grace married on February 26, 1924, in a private ceremony at her family home. They had no children. 

Grace, a Stanford graduate described as a brilliant woman with a keen wit, devoted herself entirely to his career and wellbeing, acting as his first reader and editor and nursing him through his heart attack in 1949. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1953. (6) (7)

MONEY AND FAME Hubble's discoveries made him one of the most celebrated scientists of his era. By the late 1940s he was famous enough to appear on the front cover of Time magazine in 1948. 

His home in San Marino became a gathering place for film stars, intellectuals, and scientists; his circle included novelist Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria, as well as many of Hollywood's luminaries. 

He spent much of the latter part of his career lobbying — ultimately without success in his own lifetime — to have astronomy classified as a branch of physics, largely in hopes of becoming eligible for the Nobel Prize. (2) 

FOOD AND DRINK Hubble was a fan of traditional English tea and was often seen with his pipe. He enjoyed formal dinners, particularly during his time in California where he socialized with movie stars like Charlie Chaplin.

His San Marino home was described as "a constant party scene with hordes of visiting movie stars." (4)

MUSIC AND ARTS Hubble was part of a glamorous social world in California in the 1930s and 1940s, mixing regularly with artists, writers, and movie stars. 

LITERATURE As a boy, Hubble's favourite reading was the adventure novels of Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard. In later life, book collecting became his principal hobby, with a particular focus on the history of science.

He became a trustee of the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, which holds his papers, photographs, notebooks, and observing logbooks. 

Hubble was the author of two notable works: The Realm of the Nebulae (1936) and The Observational Approach to Cosmology (1937). (2)

NATURE Hubble loved the outdoors. He and Grace regularly took vacations in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and went fishing and horseback riding in Colorado. Grace's journals from these trips were described as vivid and literary in their descriptions of the natural world. (6)

PETS Hubble's most celebrated companion was a black, part-Persian cat named Nicolas Copernicus. In 1946, Edwin and Grace brought home a kitten, and Hubble immediately announced: "Its name is Nicolas Copernicus." Nicolas is extensively referenced in Grace's diaries and features in numerous photographs held at the Huntington Library. 

The cat grew into what Grace described as a "part-Persian leviathan."  He was known to sprawl across Edwin's desk in his study — "over as many pages as he could cover," as Grace noted in her diary. When asked about this habit, Hubble's response was simply: "He is helping me." Nicolas was particularly fond of lying across astronomical charts. 

Image by Gemini

Hubble was devoted to the cat's comfort and independence. He habitually referred to his San Marino home as "Nicolas' estate." ( He installed a cat door at the San Marino home, declaring: "All cats should have one — it is necessary for their self-respect"). 

Pipe cleaners — scattered liberally around the house — were Nicolas's favourite toy. 

The cat slept at the foot of the master bed every night and repaid the household with gifts of lizards, live birds, dead mice, and dragonflies. (8) (9)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Sport dominated Hubble's early life. At Wheaton High School he won seven first places and a third place in a single track and field meet in 1906, set a state record in the high jump, and played baseball, football, and basketball. 

At university he was also a heavyweight boxer. He led the University of Chicago's basketball team to their first Big Ten Conference title in 1907, and after Oxford briefly coached a high school basketball team. 

His lifelong hobby was book collecting, particularly works on the history of science. He was also a keen pipe smoker, a trait inherited from his father, and was rarely seen without a pipe. (2) 

DISCOVERIES Before Edwin Hubble came along, astronomers had what might politely be called a cosmological parochialism problem. They believed the entire universe consisted of our home galaxy, the Milky Way—a bit like assuming your village is the whole of civilisation because you’ve never taken the bus to the next town. Those faint smudges in the sky—“nebulae”—were thought to be nothing more than local wisps of gas and dust, decorative but ultimately unambitious.

Hubble, however, had access to the Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, which in the 1920s was the scientific equivalent of upgrading from opera glasses to something capable of spotting a flea blinking at twenty paces. Armed with this, he set about resolving what was known, with admirable understatement, as “The Great Debate.”

The Hooker Telescope by Andrew Dunn 

On the night of October 5, 1923, while examining the Andromeda Galaxy—then still clinging to its more modest title of “nebula”—Hubble noticed what he thought were three novae. This would have been mildly interesting. But on digging through old photographic plates, he realised one of these stars wasn’t exploding at all—it was pulsing. This made it a Cepheid variable, a class of star whose rhythmic brightening and dimming conveniently reveals how far away it is.

At this point, Hubble did something delightfully human. He crossed out his original “N” (for nova) and scribbled “VAR!” in red ink. One imagines a small, satisfied nod—history rarely records whether he allowed himself a cup of tea.

Using a method pioneered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, he calculated that Andromeda was about 900,000 light-years away. This was awkward, because the Milky Way was nowhere near that large. In one stroke, the universe had gone from cosy to cavernous.

Hubble didn’t stop there. He found similar stars in other “nebulae,” including the Triangulum Galaxy, and concluded that the universe was populated by not one galaxy, but millions. It was rather like discovering that every faint light on the horizon is not a candle, but an entire city.

He then did what any orderly-minded astronomer might do when faced with a suddenly overcrowded universe: he tidied it up. The Hubble Sequence sorted galaxies into ellipticals, spirals, barred spirals, and irregulars—categories that sound reassuringly manageable given that each contains billions of stars.

But his most consequential discovery came in 1929. By combining his own distance measurements with the redshift data of Vesto Slipher and work with Milton Humason, Hubble found that galaxies are not merely sitting about looking decorative—they are rushing away from us, and the farther they are, the faster they go. This became Hubble's Law, a finding that transformed the universe from a static arrangement into something far more dynamic and, frankly, a bit excitable.

When Albert Einstein visited Mount Wilson in 1931, he conceded that the universe might indeed be expanding—an admission widely interpreted as one of the more elegant scientific about-turns in history.

It’s only fair to note that Georges Lemaître had reached a similar conclusion two years earlier, though with the misfortune of not being immediately noticed—proof that timing, in science as in comedy, is everything. The relationship is now properly called the Hubble–Lemaître Law.

Hubble’s own measurements, it turned out, were somewhat off—by as much as a factor of seven—thanks to the universe’s irritating habit of being more complicated than expected. But crucially, he got the pattern right. The universe really was expanding, and really was vastly larger than anyone had supposed.

In the end, Hubble did for the cosmos what Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei had done before him: he removed us from the centre of things. Only this time, he didn’t just move us to the suburbs—he revealed that we were living in a universe so large that “suburbs” no longer seemed an entirely adequate concept.

SCIENCE AND MATHS  Hubble’s work provided the first evidence for the "Expanding Universe." He confirmed that the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from us (Hubble's Constant). He also created the "Hubble Sequence," a system for classifying galaxies.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Hubble was raised as a Protestant Christian. His later writings suggest a growing uncertainty about religious belief. He was cautious about philosophical overreach in science, consistently refusing to endorse the "expanding universe" interpretation of his data without what he felt was sufficient proof — a scepticism that some colleagues found frustrating but which reflected a rigorous empirical temperament. (2)

POLITICS No strong political affiliations are recorded for Hubble. He served his country loyally in both World Wars — in the army in World War I and as a civilian ballistics researcher in World War II — suggesting a patriotism that transcended party lines. 

SCANDAL Hubble was accused by some historians and scientists of having downplayed or suppressed the priority of the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître, who had independently published what became known as Hubble's Law two years before Hubble. In 2011 the journal Nature reported concerns that key passages had been omitted from the 1931 English translation of Lemaître's 1927 paper. Further investigation by astronomer Mario Livio found a letter suggesting Lemaître himself had authorised the omissions, though debate continues. 

He was also known in later life for embellishing stories of his earlier sporting achievements and background, presenting himself as more thoroughly English than his Missouri roots warranted. (2)

MILITARY RECORD Hubble enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1917, assigned to the 86th Division, 2nd Battalion, 343rd Infantry Regiment. He rose to the rank of major and was found fit for overseas duty on July 9, 1918, though the 86th Division was broken up before seeing combat. He subsequently spent a year at the University of Cambridge continuing his astronomical research. 

Hubble's identity card in the American Expeditionary Forces

During World War II he served as a civilian at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, as Chief of the External Ballistics Branch of the Ballistic Research Laboratory. His development of the high-speed clock camera — enabling detailed study of bombs and projectiles in flight — significantly improved U.S. military effectiveness. 

He was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1946. 

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Hubble was in excellent physical condition throughout his early life, a dedicated multi-sport athlete who also took up heavyweight boxing at university. 

In July 1949, he suffered a serious heart attack while vacationing in Colorado. Grace nursed him back to health, but his working schedule was permanently reduced and long cold nights at the telescope came to an end. He died of cerebral thrombosis (a blood clot in the brain) aged 63.  (2)

HOMES Hubble was born in Marshfield, Missouri, and the family moved to Wheaton, Illinois before his first birthday. After his father moved the family to Shelbyville, Kentucky, in 1909, they eventually settled in Louisville's Highlands neighbourhood. 

From 1919 Hubble lived in the Pasadena/San Marino area of California, where his home at 1140 Woodstock Drive in San Marino — a National Historic Landmark — became a celebrated social gathering place for scientists and film stars. 

TRAVEL As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Hubble spent two summer vacations cycling around Europe, visiting Germany before World War I. He noted the militaristic character of the Germans and predicted a bloody war if fighting broke out between Germany and the Allied powers. 

He and Grace later travelled to England aboard the SS Statendam in 1936. He also made extended trips to the Sierra Nevada and Colorado for recreation. (6)

DEATH Hubble died of a cerebral thrombosis on September 28, 1953, in San Marino, California, aged 63. He had been walking home for lunch, as was his custom, when he collapsed; Grace picked him up. 

At his own request, no funeral was held, and Grace never revealed his burial site. 

When she died in 1980, she was interred at the same undisclosed location. His papers were donated by Grace to the Huntington Library in San Marino upon her death. (7)

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Hubble appeared on the front cover of Time magazine in 1948. 

A play, Creation's Birthday, written by Cornell physicist Hasan Padamsee, tells his life story. 

A US postage stamp honouring Hubble was issued on March 6, 2008, as part of the "American Scientists" series, with the citation: "Often called a 'pioneer of the distant stars,' astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) played a pivotal role in deciphering the vast and complex nature of the universe." (2)

ACHIEVEMENTS Hubble proved that the universe is comprised of many galaxies beyond our own. 

He provided the observational evidence for the expansion of the universe. 

Hubble  was awarded the Franklin Medal (1939), the Legion of Merit (1946), and the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1940). 

The Hubble Space Telescope, launched April 24, 1990, is named in his honour. It is approximately the size of a large school bus (43.5 feet long) and uses only around 2,100 watts of power — comparable to a household clothes dryer. 

Additional namesakes include the crater Hubble on the Moon, the Edwin Hubble Highway (a stretch of Interstate 44 through his birthplace of Marshfield, Missouri), asteroid 2069 Hubble, and Hubble Middle School in Wheaton, Illinois. 

Sources: (1) Wikipedia – Edwin Hubble (2) Famous Scientists – Edwin Hubble (3) NASA/GSFC – Biography of Edwin Powell Hubble (4) Pipes Magazine – Edwin Powell Hubble (5) National Academy of Sciences – Edwin Hubble Biographical Memoir (6) San Marino Tribune – The Story of Grace Lillian Burke Hubble (7) Huntington Library – Edwin and Grace Hubble Wedding Day (8) The Huntington – Pets Collection (9 ) Discover Magazine – 5 Cats Who Owned Famous Scientists 

Elias Howe

NAME Elias Howe Jr. 

WHAT FAMOUS FOR American inventor and pioneer of the sewing machine. He is best known for inventing the first practical lockstitch sewing machine, which utilized a needle with the eye at the point and a reciprocating shuttle. His invention revolutionized the garment industry, moving clothing production from slow hand-stitching to rapid mass production.

BIRTH Born July 9, 1819, in Spencer, Massachusetts, USA. (1)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Howe was one of eight children born to Elias Howe Sr. (1792–1867), a farmer who also ran a gristmill and cut lumber to support his large family, and Polly (Bemis) Howe (1791–1871). The family was poor. (1)

Two of Howe's father's brothers were also inventors, suggesting that a talent for mechanical invention ran in the family. (2) 

Howe was a descendant of John Howe (1602–1680), who arrived in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630 from Brinklow, Warwickshire, England, and settled in Sudbury, Massachusetts. He was also a descendant of Edmund Rice, another early immigrant to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. 

CHILDHOOD As early as age six, Howe was put to work alongside his brothers and sisters sewing wires onto cards by hand at home — piecework for a local cotton mill that brought in a little extra money for the family.  He also helped repair the family farmhouse and showed great patience and determination in painstaking tasks, often repairing farm machinery — work he genuinely enjoyed. 

He attended school during the winter months but spent the other seasons working on the farm. By the time he was twelve, his father could no longer afford to feed and clothe him, so he was hired out to work on a neighbor's farm. 

Howe had been born small and frail, however, and his physical limitations meant he never had the strength or stamina needed for hard labor — a challenge he would contend with for the rest of his life. He was also congenitally lame. (2)

EDUCATION Howe received only a basic schooling, attending school in the winter months while working on the farm the rest of the year.  His real education was practical and mechanical: in 1835 he moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, where he apprenticed in a textile factory, acquiring skills that shaped the rest of his career. 

After the mills closed during the economic Panic of 1837, he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked in a hemp-carding company before securing a position in the shop of Ari Davis, a master mechanic who built and repaired chronometers and precision instruments for seamen and for scientists at Harvard University. 

It was in Davis's workshop — a gathering place for inventors — that Howe first conceived the idea of the sewing machine after overhearing Davis declare that whoever invented a practical sewing machine would be a rich man. (2)

CAREER RECORD 1835: Howe moved to Lowell, Massachusetts, to work as an apprentice in a cotton machinery factory.

1837: After the Panic of 1837 closed the Lowell mills, Howe moved to Cambridge to work as a mechanic. He eventually found employment in the shop of Ari Davis, a master mechanic in Boston who specialized in repairing precision instruments.

1839–1844: While working for Davis, Howe overheard a conversation about the need for a sewing machine. He spent five years of spare time developing a prototype, eventually leaving his job to focus on the invention full-time while being supported by his friend George Fisher.

1845: He completed his first successful sewing machine, which outperformed five fast seamstresses in a demonstration.

1846: On September 10, 1846, Howe was granted U.S. Patent #4,750 for his sewing machine.

1847–1849: Howe traveled to London to work with William Thomas, a corset manufacturer, to adapt his machine for industrial use. The venture was unsuccessful, and Howe returned to the U.S. in poverty.

1850–1854: Upon his return, he discovered that several manufacturers—most notably Isaac Singer—were selling machines that infringed on his patent. He engaged in a grueling five-year legal battle.

1854: The courts ruled in Howe's favor, restoring his patent rights and forcing competitors to pay him royalties on every machine sold.

1865: He established the Howe Machine Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

APPEARANCE Howe was born small and frail, and remained slight and physically fragile throughout his life; he was also congenitally lame. 

A statue of Howe erected in Seaside Park, Bridgeport, Connecticut, after his death depicts a man with a large, solid face, a prominent nose, soft eyes, and firmly set lips — described by biographer Patricia E. Sweeney as "the face of a determined Yankee inventor."  He is shown holding a hat in one hand and a cane in the other, which reflects his lifelong physical infirmity. (2) 

Elias Howe, circa 1850

FASHION During his years of struggle, he was often seen in worn, threadbare clothes. When he returned from England nearly destitute in 1849 to attend his dying wife's bedside, his brother-in-law had to lend him a suit to wear to her funeral — a detail that vividly captures the depths of poverty to which he had sunk before his patent victory restored his fortune. (2)

CHARACTER Those who knew Howe described him as easygoing, companionable, and fun-loving in his youth, with a humorous side to his personality.  He was also possessed of remarkable patience, determination, and perseverance — qualities evident in the years he spent doggedly developing his sewing machine with little money and no certainty of success. 

His one profound regret was that his first wife, Elizabeth, had died before he achieved the wealth and recognition he had worked so hard for; her death, according to biographer Sweeney, robbed him of much of his characteristic humour and lightness. 

He was generous with his money once he acquired it, sharing his wealth with the friends and relatives who had supported him in his years of struggle. (2)

SENSE OF HUMOUR Howe was described as humorous and fun-loving — a quality that marked him as a youth and in his early adult life, though contemporaries noted that it largely deserted him after the death of his beloved first wife in 1849. (2)

RELATIONSHIPS On March 3, 1841, Howe married Elizabeth Jennings Ames, daughter of Simon Ames and Jane B. Ames, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

They had three children: Jane Robinson Howe (1842–1912), Simon Ames Howe (1844–1883), and Julia Maria Howe (1846–1869). 

Elizabeth battled tuberculosis (consumption) for two years and died shortly after Howe's return from England in 1849. Her death was a blow from which he never fully recovered emotionally, though he channelled his grief into renewed dedication to his work. (

He later married Rose Halladay, who survived him and died on October 10, 1890; she is buried with him at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. 

A close friendship with George Fisher, who provided Howe with $500 and a home for his family during the crucial years of invention, was another significant relationship; Howe later shared his patent winnings generously with Fisher. (2)

MONEY AND FAME Howe spent much of his early adult life in severe poverty, at times unable to clothe or feed his family, reliant on a friend's charity for board and equipment. His fortunes were transformed after winning his patent lawsuit in 1854, after which he earned royalties from every sewing machine manufacturer in America. His income could reach as much as $4,000 a week — an enormous sum in the 1850s. (3) 

Howe died in 1867 a multi-millionaire. 

He became a respected public figure in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where a statue was erected in his honour in Seaside Park. 

In 1940, the United States government commemorated him with a 5-cent stamp in the Famous American Inventors series. 

Howe commemorative, 1940 issue

FOOD AND DRINK No specific information about Howe's eating or drinking habits appears to have been recorded.

MUSIC AND ARTS While not a noted patron of the fine arts, he viewed the mechanical design of his machines with an aesthetic eye, ensuring they were as elegant as they were functional

The 1965 Beatles film Help! is dedicated to his memory — a whimsical tribute by one of the most famous bands in history to the inventor of the sewing machine. 

LITERATURE Howe's working methods, however, suggest a man who relied more on mental ingenuity than on written plans — he built his sewing machine from a mental design without blueprints or sketches. (2)

NATURE Having grown up on a farm, he had a foundational respect for nature, though his life's work was dedicated to the industrial and mechanical world that sought to tame

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Howe's consuming passion from at least his mid-twenties was mechanical invention. He would spend his evenings watching his wife sew, mentally working through the problems of the sewing machine, and gave up paid employment entirely for extended periods in order to pursue his project. (2) 

INVENTION OF THE SEWING MACHINE It is one of history’s more cheering notions that a world-changing invention began, as many do, with a slightly offhand remark in a workshop and a man who decided to take it far more seriously than intended. In the early 1840s, a young mechanic named Elias Howe was working in Cambridge, Massachusetts, under a master machinist called Ari Davis, who one day observed—perhaps with the breezy confidence of someone not intending to do it himself—that whoever invented a practical sewing machine would make a fortune. Howe, who clearly had a taste for both practicality and fortune, took this as less of a musing and more of a personal challenge.

By October 1844, according to Howe’s biographer James Parton, he experienced what inventors like to describe as a “flash of insight,” which in practice usually means a long period of thinking followed by a moment when everything finally lines up. Howe’s revelation was deceptively simple: perhaps a machine need not imitate the human hand at all. This was rather like realising that birds fly perfectly well without flapping their arms. From this came the idea of a two-thread system using a shuttle and a needle with its eye at the point—a detail so small you could miss it, and yet so important that the entire enterprise depended upon it.

From this modest epiphany emerged three innovations that would quietly underpin the entire future of sewing machinery. First, the eye-pointed needle—placing the hole at the tip rather than the blunt end, which sounds obvious now but had previously eluded everyone. Second, the shuttle, which passed a second thread beneath the cloth to create a sturdy lockstitch instead of the rather unreliable chain stitch. And third, the automatic feed, which relieved the operator of the tedious business of pushing the fabric along by hand, thereby allowing the machine to get on with it at a pace no human could sensibly match.

There is also, as with many Victorian inventors, a dream. In Howe’s case it involved cannibals brandishing spears with holes near the tips, which obligingly demonstrated where the eye of the needle ought to go. This story appears in family lore and has been treated by historians with the polite scepticism usually reserved for tales involving prophetic vegetables or unusually helpful livestock.

Practical matters, however, proceeded without the assistance of dream-spears. With $500 from a friend named George Fisher—a sum that would today buy you either a small machine or a large disappointment—Howe retreated to his father’s attic and got to work. By May 1845, he had a functioning device. When demonstrated, it stitched at a brisk 250 stitches per minute, compared with the roughly 50 a human could manage, which must have been rather like watching a tortoise race a locomotive.

Elias Howe Sewing Machine September 10, 1846

One might imagine that such a triumph would be greeted with enthusiasm. Instead, it was met with a distinct lack of customers. Tailors and seamstresses, understandably, viewed the machine as a contraption designed to render them obsolete, which is rarely a persuasive selling point. Howe secured a patent in 1846, but found America curiously uninterested. His brother Amasa Howe took the machine to England, where it was sold to a London corset-maker named William Thomas for £250—proof that even transformative technologies sometimes begin life as export items.

It should be noted that Howe was not the first to attempt a sewing machine. Thomas Saint had built one as early as 1790, and Walter Hunt produced a working model in the 1830s, but declined to patent it for fear it would put seamstresses out of work—a touching concern that, in the long view, proved about as effective as declining to invent the rain. What distinguished Howe was not originality in isolation, but the happy combination of several clever ideas into a machine that actually worked, and worked well.

When Howe returned to America in 1849, he discovered that others had been less hesitant about the commercial possibilities. Chief among them was Isaac Singer, who, after examining Howe’s design, spent eleven industrious days producing an improved version with various practical refinements and began selling it with admirable enthusiasm—and without paying Howe anything at all. This led to a legal battle of five years, at the end of which Howe prevailed, securing royalties from manufacturers and inadvertently helping to create one of America’s first patent-sharing arrangements, the Sewing Machine Combination.

In the end, Howe’s machine did what all truly significant inventions do: it quietly changed everything. It helped make clothing cheaper and more widely available, and established the lockstitch as the foundation of modern sewing. Nearly two centuries on, every sewing machine still carries, somewhere within its agreeable clatter, a small but essential echo of that moment in a Cambridge attic when one man decided that the hand was not the only way to sew.

SCIENCE AND MATHS Howe was a self-taught mechanical genius who, working without formal scientific training or engineering qualifications, devised three innovations — the eye-pointed needle, the lockstitch shuttle, and the automatic feed — that became the fundamental principles of virtually all subsequent sewing machines. (4) 

Howe also patented an early form of the zipper in 1851. 

Howe helped to create the first industrial patent pool in American history in 1856, a business model with lasting implications for how competing companies manage intellectual property. (2)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Howe was raised in a traditional New England Protestant environment. His work ethic reflected the "Protestant work ethic" of the time—viewing diligent labor and the improvement of society through industry as a moral calling

POLITICS Howe's political activity was largely expressed through his Civil War service. He enlisted as a private in the Union Army in August 1862, despite his age and chronic infirmities, personally financing the equipment of the entire 17th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry and paying the men out of his own pocket when their army wages were delayed. (2)

His 1863 remark that over a million Union soldiers were clothed by machines based on his inventions reflects pride in his contribution to the Northern cause. (3)

SCANDAL William Thomas of London, to whom Howe's brother Amasa sold the rights to the sewing machine in 1846, obtained a British patent for the machine in his own name rather than Howe's as promised, and also reneged on a verbal agreement to pay Elias a royalty on each machine sold in Britain. Howe and his family moved to London on the basis of Thomas's assurances, and Thomas subsequently treated Howe with contempt, ordering him to work as a factory repairman after he had completed the agreed commission. (2) 

The dispute with Isaac Singer was the most significant controversy of Howe's career: Singer had perfected a copy of Howe's lockstitch machine and was selling it without acknowledging Howe's patent. Singer's lawyers attempted to undermine Howe's claim to priority by producing a rival inventor, Walter Hunt, who had made a sewing machine model earlier than Howe. The court rejected this challenge when it emerged that Hunt's machine did not work and had never been patented. (2)

MILITARY RECORD Howe enlisted in the Union Army on August 14, 1862, as a private in Company D of the 17th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry. Despite his age (43) and lifelong physical frailty, he served in a Union Army camp near Baltimore, Maryland, where he took on the role of Regimental Postmaster, regularly riding to and from Baltimore with war news. He was often seen walking with the aid of a shillelagh. 

He helped to organise the regiment, outfitted it entirely at his own expense, provided horses for the officers, and paid the men from his own funds when army wages were delayed. He mustered out on July 19, 1865. 

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Howe was born small and frail and was congenitally lame.  His fragile health was a constant limitation: it ended his hired farm work as a boy, made army service difficult in his forties, and was the ultimate reason he had to leave his post as Regimental Postmaster. 

HOMES Howe was born and raised in Spencer, Massachusetts. 

As a young man he lived and worked in Lowell and then Cambridge, Massachusetts. For a period he and his family lived in the attic of his father's house in Cambridge while he worked on his sewing machine invention, and later were boarded in the home of his patron George Fisher. 

In 1847–1848, the Howe family moved to a poor district of London in connection with his business arrangement with William Thomas. 

After returning to America and winning his patent battles, Howe settled in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he became a prominent and respected citizen and built his Howe Machine Co. factory. (2) 

TRAVEL Howe's travels were largely driven by commercial necessity rather than pleasure. He sent his brother Amasa to England in 1846 to seek a buyer for his sewing machine patent, and in 1847–1848 moved his entire family to London to work for William Thomas.  Following disputes with Thomas and the death of his wife, he returned nearly destitute to New York. (2) 

During his Civil War service he traveled regularly between his army camp near Baltimore and Washington. 

DEATH Howe died on October 3, 1867, aged 48, of gout and a massive blood clot, while visiting his daughter's home in Brooklyn, New York. 

He was buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. His second wife, Rose Halladay, who died on October 10, 1890, is buried with him. 

His father died just two months later, on December 28, 1867, one day after his 75th birthday. 

The large factory Howe had established in Bridgeport, Connecticut, passed to his son, who managed it until a fire destroyed it on July 26, 1883. (2) 

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA His story has been covered in numerous reference works and encyclopaedias, and he has appeared in documentary programmes about the history of American invention.

ACHIEVEMENTS Received U.S. Patent for the lockstitch sewing machine (1846).

Won the legal battle that established the "Sewing Machine Combination," the first patent pool in American history.

Awarded a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1867.

Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2004) (5)

In 1863, he prided himself on the fact that over a million Civil War soldiers were "clothed, kitted and covered by fabric sewn on machines using my inventions."

Sources: (1) Wikipedia: Elias Howe (2) EBSCO Research Starters: Elias Howe (3) Encyclopaedia of Trivia: Sewing Machine (4) National Inventors Hall of Fame: Elias Howe (5) Britannica: Elias Howe

John Howard

NAME John Howard. He was often referred to as "The Philanthropist" or simply "The Prisoner’s Friend" during the height of his fame in the late 18th century. 

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Howard was the founding father of modern prison reform. He is best known for conducting an exhaustive, self-funded survey of the horrific conditions in British and European jails. His 1777 masterpiece, The State of the Prisons, exposed the "jail fever" (typhus) and the corruption of the fee-based system, leading directly to the passage of landmark legislation for sanitary and humanitarian improvements.

BIRTH John Howard was born on September 2, 1726, in London — most likely in Hackney, though some sources suggest Enfield in North London. (1) 

A picture published in 1826, supposedly of the house where Howard was born.

FAMILY BACKGROUND His father, also named John Howard, was a wealthy upholsterer with a business at Smithfield Market in the City of London, a strict disciplinarian who held strong Calvinist Protestant beliefs. 

His mother, Ann (née Pettitt or Cholmley), died when Howard was just five years old. The family owned property at Cardington, Bedfordshire, some fifty miles north of London, where the young Howard was sent to live after his mother's death. 

Howard's father died in 1742, leaving him a sizeable inheritance. 

Howard was a cousin and close friend of his Cardington neighbour, the brewer Samuel Whitbread, to whom he was related through his paternal grandmother Martha Howard. 

CHILDHOOD Howard was described as a "sickly child," and his frail constitution meant he was sent from London to the rural estate at Cardington, Bedfordshire, for the benefit of his health. 

EDUCATION He attended a school in Hertford run by John Worsley, before being sent to a dissenting academy in London run by John Eames — an education that reflected his family's Nonconformist Protestant faith. 

After his schooling, his father apprenticed him to a wholesale grocery firm to learn business methods, though the young Howard was unhappy in the role.

He was never a university man; his real education came from his extensive travels across Europe and from the harrowing observations he made on his prison inspection tours. 

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 1756, a mark of his standing as a serious and careful observer of the world around him. 

CAREER RECORD 1742 Howard was apprenticed to a wholesale grocer in London, but he bought himself out of his indenture after his father's death to travel.

1756 He set out for Portugal to view the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake but was captured by French privateers and imprisoned in Brest, an experience that first alerted him to the plight of prisoners.

1773 Howard was appointed High Sheriff of Bedfordshire. Shocked to find that many prisoners were kept in jail because they could not pay the "release fees" to the jailer—even after being acquitted—he began his lifelong quest for reform.

1774 He gave evidence before a Select Committee of the House of Commons, leading to two Acts of Parliament that abolished jailer fees and mandated better health standards.

1777 Howard published The State of the Prisons in England and Wales, a landmark text in sociology and human rights.

1789 He published An Account of the Principal Lazarettos in Europe, focusing on quarantine stations and the plague.

APPEARANCE Howard was short, thin, and sallow in complexion — not a naturally commanding physical presence. Contemporary sources describe him as "unprepossessing" apart from the attraction of a penetrating eye and a benevolent smile.(2)

He had lively eyes, prominent features, and a notably quick, energetic gait. (3) 

John Howard by Mather Brown

FASHION Howard gave little thought to dress and none to fashion, favouring simplicity and neatness above all else. He was a a committed Christian and, later in life, a committed vegetarian and teetotaller, and his personal austerity extended to his clothes, which were plain and functional. (3)

Given that he regularly visited the most squalid and disease-ridden prisons in Britain and Europe, his clothing was inevitably tainted by the experience: the smell from the gaols was so penetrating and offensive that, after a prison visit, Howard would ride home alone on horseback rather than inflict the stench on other passengers in a public carriage. (4) (5)

CHARACTER Howard was widely regarded as one of the most single-mindedly dedicated and selfless reformers of the eighteenth century. His faith was the driving force behind his compassion for prisoners and the destitute. 

He was modest, quiet, and serious by disposition, with little appetite for public recognition or personal comfort. Howard's persistence in the face of official indifference, physical danger, and the constant risk of contracting gaol fever (typhus) marked him out as a man of extraordinary moral courage. 

Some found him rigid and eccentric; he was not a natural communicator or politician, but rather a dogged, solitary investigator. 

SPEAKING VOICE Howard was quiet and firm, though he spoke with great authority when addressing Parliament or local magistrates. His influence came from his written work and his personal visits rather than from platform rhetoric. 

SENSE OF HUMOUR Howard was serious, austere, and devout, with little recorded taste for levity.  His one documented remark with a sardonic edge was made about a particularly grim gaol: "The Keeper maintains, or starves, his prisoners." (6)

RELATIONSHIPS Howard married twice. His first wife was his landlady Sarah Loidore, who had nursed him back to health after a serious illness in Stoke Newington around 1751–52; despite her being approximately thirty years his senior, Howard married her out of gratitude and genuine affection. She died within three years of their marriage. 

His second wife, Henrietta Leeds, whom he married in 1758, died in 1765, just one week after giving birth to their son, also named John. 

The younger John Howard attended Cambridge but was later expelled for homosexual offences, was judged insane at the age of 21, and died in 1799 after spending thirteen years in a lunatic asylum — a painful irony for the man who fought to humanise such institutions. 

Howard never remarried after Henrietta's death. 

MONEY AND FAME Howard inherited "considerable wealth" from his father in 1742. He used his personal fortune to fund his extensive prison inspection tours, which by 1784 had covered over 42,000 miles across Britain and Europe. 

In April 1777, his sister's death left him a further £15,000 (equivalent to approximately £2,000,000 in 2025), which he put directly to use in continuing his reform work. (

Fame came to him gradually and almost reluctantly; he was publicly thanked at the bar of the House of Commons, awarded the Freedom of the City of London, and given an honorary doctorate by the University of Dublin. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1790. 

FOOD AND DRINK Howard was a strict vegetarian and teetotaller. He lived on a simple diet of milk, fruit, vegetables, butter, tea, and water, and once commented that in his London house there were "not a dozen joints of meat in seven years." 

He was fond of tea and habitually carried a kettle with him on his travels. 

During a visit to Sweden, he found his vegetarian principles sorely tested; few vegetables were available in winter, and he was reduced to surviving on coarse bread. (1)

MUSIC AND ARTS Howard's life was austere and devotional, leaving little space for aesthetic pleasures. 

LITERATURE Howard's own writing was meticulous, factual, and purposeful rather than literary. The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777) was a detailed exposé, complete with plans, maps, statistical data, and first-hand observations, more akin to an official inquiry than to a literary work.  He followed it with An Account of the Principal Lazarettos of Europe (1789). (7)

His writing was widely read and admired for its clarity, precision, and moral force; Edmund Burke praised him in Parliament as one of the greatest men of the age. (8)

The first Marshalsea prison in 1773

NATURE Howard spent his settled years at Cardington, Bedfordshire, on a 200-acre estate which had formerly been two farms. He enjoyed gardening and landscaping on his estate at Cardington, where he built model cottages for his tenants

PETS  Howard a man of notable compassion toward animals. He was especially attached to his horses, which served as his primary means of transport on prison inspection tours. He refused to dispose of horses who had passed their working years. (9)

HOBBIES AND SPORTS In his years at Cardington before his prison work began, Howard busied himself with improving his estate, building model cottages for his tenants, erecting schools, and conducting meteorological observations.  By the time his prison reform career took hold, such pursuits were largely set aside in favour of his exhausting travel and research. 

SCIENCE AND MATHS Howard was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1756, reflecting his engagement with scientific observation, particularly meteorology. (

His meticulous approach to prison documentation — collecting statistics, drawing maps and floor plans, recording measurements of cells — reflected a systematic and quantitative cast of mind.

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Howard was a devout Calvinist Nonconformist. His faith was not a background detail but the animating force of his life: the conviction that every human being, however wretched, possessed dignity and deserved humane treatment was rooted in his Protestant religious belief. 

He attended dissenting academies in his youth, and his Nonconformist identity placed him outside the established Church of England, aligning him with a tradition of conscience-driven social action. 

PRISON REFORM If ever there were a man who woke up one morning, peered into a perfectly ordinary civic duty, and found instead a moral abyss staring back at him, it was John Howard—a gentleman of such brisk determination that he could make even misery seem methodically catalogued.

In 1774, upon becoming High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, Howard did something quite shocking for a man of rank: he actually turned up to inspect the local gaol himself. What he discovered was less a prison and more a sort of entrepreneurial dungeon. Prisoners acquitted in court—declared innocent in the eyes of the law—remained firmly locked up because they couldn’t afford the “release fee,” which sounds like a particularly nasty sort of theatre surcharge.

Even more astonishingly, the jailers were unpaid. Their entire income depended on extracting fees from inmates, which gave the whole enterprise the faintly queasy air of a business model one might expect from pirates rather than public servants.

Howard, being the sort of man who did not merely sigh and go home, marched his findings straight to Parliament. The result was a rare outbreak of legislative efficiency: in the same year, 1774, two Acts were passed. One abolished the practice of holding prisoners for unpaid fees and introduced proper salaries for gaolers (a concept so sensible it is hard to believe it needed inventing). The other made local justices responsible for prisoners’ health, which had previously been treated as an optional extra.

Howard, never one for complacency, later noted that these reforms were not exactly obeyed with enthusiasm. In fact, one suspects they were observed in much the same spirit as modern speed limits on an empty road.

Undeterred, Howard embarked on what can only be described as the least appealing grand tour in history, visiting hundreds of prisons across Britain and Europe at his own expense. The result was The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777), a work so painstakingly detailed it included floor plans, statistics, and descriptions of filth that would make even a hardened rat reconsider its accommodation choices.

The book caused a stir—though perhaps not among the rats—and prompted further Acts in 1778 and 1781. It turns out that when you present Parliament with diagrams of squalor, they occasionally feel obliged to act.

In 1779, Howard teamed up with the formidable William Blackstone and MP William Eden to produce the Penitentiary Act 1779. This was a landmark moment, proposing state-run prisons and—most radical of all—that imprisonment might replace hanging or being shipped off to the colonies.

The Act envisioned institutions where inmates would experience “solitary imprisonment” combined with labour and religious instruction, which sounds austere but was, by the standards of the day, a leap toward something resembling moral purpose rather than mere containment.

Howard’s influence spread far beyond Britain, shaping prison systems in Europe, America, and even the Russian Empire. In London alone, vast sums were spent rebuilding prisons along lines he had sketched, suggesting that, once presented with undeniable evidence, even governments can be persuaded to part with money.

His legacy persists in organisations like the Howard League for Penal Reform, founded in 1866, which continues the agreeable tradition of pointing out that locking people up need not involve quite so much gratuitous misery.

All in all, Howard achieved something rather rare: he took an institution everyone preferred not to think about and made it impossible to ignore—an accomplishment that, in any century, is no small feat.

POLITICS Howard was not a politician and held no elected office. His political influence operated through moral suasion and evidence: he appeared before House of Commons select committees, provided detailed testimony, and persuaded Parliament to pass legislation. 

He was a Whig in temperament but largely apolitical, willing to work with any government official who would listen to his evidence.

SCANDAL Howard's first marriage — to his landlady Sarah Loidore, a woman approximately thirty years his senior — raised eyebrows among his contemporaries, though Howard saw nothing scandalous in an act of gratitude and affection. 

His son John was expelled from Cambridge for homosexual offences and was later confined to a lunatic asylum for thirteen years — a deeply painful private sorrow for a man who was publicly fighting to reform such institutions. 

MILITARY RECORD Howard  was effectively a prisoner of war, albeit briefly, when his ship was captured by French privateers in 1755 while he was sailing to Portugal. He was imprisoned for six days in Brest before being transferred to another French coastal prison, and was eventually exchanged for a French officer. On his return to England he lobbied the Commissioners for Sick and Wounded Seamen on behalf of his fellow captives. (10)

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Howard was never physically robust. He was described as a sickly child, and as a young man he suffered a prolonged and serious illness that confined him to his lodgings. 

Despite his poor constitution, he sustained one of the most physically gruelling programmes of travel of any reformer in the eighteenth century — riding on horseback across Britain and Europe, entering the most disease-ridden buildings in existence. (

He attributed his resistance to gaol fever to his strict vegetarian diet and teetotalism. He eventually succumbed, however, contracting typhus — the very "gaol fever" he had spent his life fighting — while visiting a prison in Kherson in the Crimea. 

HOMES Howard's principal home was his estate at Cardington, Bedfordshire, a 200-acre property incorporating two former farms. His Cardington estate was the base from which he conducted his philanthropic work, and he used estate revenues to pay for the schooling of local children; a survey of 1782 recorded that he was funding the education of 23 children on his land.

He also had a house in London — described as austere in its habits — and spent time at Watcombe in Hampshire. 

TRAVEL Howard was one of the most widely travelled private individuals of the eighteenth century. By 1784, he calculated that he had covered more than 42,000 miles (68,000 km) visiting prisons in England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and beyond.  His final journey took him deep into Eastern Europe and to Crimea, where he visited prisons in the Russian Empire. 

He travelled by horseback and stage-coach, and after visiting prisons, often preferred to ride alone on horseback to spare others from the offensive smell that clung to his clothes. (4) (5)

John Howard by Gemini

DEATH  Howard died on January 20, 1790, at Kherson in Crimea, in the Russian Empire, at the age of 63.  He contracted typhus — "gaol fever" — while visiting a prison there, reportedly after attending a young woman suffering from the disease. (11)

He was buried in a walled field at Dophinovka (Stepanovka), some six kilometres north of Kherson. 

Despite his explicit wish for a quiet funeral, the ceremony was elaborate and attended by the Prince of Moldavia, Count Nikolay Mordvinov, and British naval officer Admiral John Priestman. 

When news of his death reached England in February 1790, commemorative John Howard halfpenny Conder Tokens were struck — one, which circulated in Bath, bore the inscription "Go forth" and "Remember the Debtors in Gaol." 

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Howard became the first civilian to be honoured with a statue on the main floor of St Paul's Cathedral, London. 

A large bronze statue was erected in Bedford in 1890, on the centenary of his death. 

Statue of John Howard, Bedford

A terracotta bust of Howard is incorporated into the gatehouse of HM Prison Wormwood Scrubs, and another bust is set over the entrance to Shrewsbury Prison. 

The John Howard Pavilion at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. — a forensic psychiatric hospital whose most notorious inmate was John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981 — bears his name. 

Samford University in Alabama, originally founded as Howard College in 1841, was named in his honour; its Howard College of Arts and Sciences remains part of the university. 

The town of Howard Lake, Minnesota, was named in his honour in 1869. 

ACHIEVEMENTS Published The State of the Prisons in England and Wales (1777), one of the most influential social reform documents of the eighteenth century. 

Persuaded Parliament to pass two penal reform Acts in 1774, abolishing jailers' fees for acquitted prisoners and requiring justices to attend to the health of those in custody. 

Co-drafted the Penitentiary Act 1779 with William Blackstone, establishing the first policy of state-run prisons in the United Kingdom. 

Pioneered the concept of single-celling in prisons. 

Advocated for salaried prison staff, adequate diet, access to religious instruction, and prisoner rehabilitation. 

Travelled more than 42,000 miles visiting and documenting prisons across Britain and Europe, funding the work entirely from his personal fortune. 

First civilian to receive a statue on the main level of St Paul's Cathedral, London. 

His legacy endures through the Howard League for Penal Reform — Britain's largest penal reform organisation — and the John Howard Societies across Canada

Sources: (1) Wikipedia — John Howard (prison reformer) (2) Theodora Encyclopaedia — John Howard (3) John Howard Society of Alberta — Portrait of a Hero (4) Gibbs, J.A. — *John Howard* (Archive.org biography) (5) John Howard Society of Alberta — Portrait of a Hero (6) Landmark Trust — House of Correction History Album (7) Samford University Library — John Howard (8) John Howard Society of Canada — Biography of John Howard (9) Georgian and Victorian Britain — Animal Rights (10) John Howard Association of Illinois — History (11) Theodora Encyclopaedia — John Howard