Business Birthdays and Anniversaries in August

BIRTHDAYS

• Aug 2, 1754 -  Pierre Charles L'Enfant: Architect, engineer and Revolutionary War officer who designed the plan for the city of Washington, DC

• Aug 3, 1905 -  Margaret Kuhn: Founder of the Grey Panthers (after being forced into retirement at age 65) to fight age discrimination, which resulted in mandatory retirement being banned

• Aug 3, 1923 -  Anne Klein: Fashion designer, she played a major role in re-inventing the industry. Her unique style of interchangeable separates was later adopted by other major designers, beginning a new, wholly American look for working women.

• Aug 3, 1941 -  Martha Stewart: Lifestyle consultant, business magnate, entrepreneur, and home-making advocate.

• Aug 4, 1956  - Meg Whitman: President and CEO of eBay, she joined the firm when it had 30 employees. Now it has 9,000 worldwide.

• Aug 11, 1944 -  Frederick W. Smith: Founder of FedEx. Based on an idea he had in college, Smith and his company built and dominated the overnight delivery industry

• Aug 11, 1950 -  Stephen Wozniak: Co-founder with Steve Jobs of Apple computer

• Aug 13, 1422  - William Caxton: First English printer. Produced first book printed in English in 1476.

• Aug 17, 1882 -  Samuel Goldwyn: Motion picture producer and industry pioneer

• Aug 17, 1944 -  Lawrence J. Ellison: Co-founder and CEO of Oracle, the second-largest software company in the world. The company built the first commercially viable relational database and its applications power more business-to-business and administrative systems than any other software provider.

• Aug 18, 1834 -  Marshall Field: Early pioneer in the retail industry, he moved to Chicago when it was still a western outpost. His stores included innovations such as displayed price tags, open return policies, in-store restaurants and free gift wrapping.

• Aug 19, 1871 -  Orville Wright: Ohio bicycle mechanic who with brother Wilbur built and flew first successful airplane

• Aug 19, 1906  - Philo Farnsworth: Television pioneer who conceived of the idea of television broadcasting while still in high school and realized the dream at age 21. His first transmitted image was of a dollar sign.

• Aug 19, 1919 -  Malcolm Forbes: Magazine publisher, unabashed proponent of capitalism

• Aug 21, 1958 -  Steve Case: Founder of America Online

• Aug 22, 1973 -  Sergy Brin: Co-founder with Larry Page of search giant Google. The two met at Stanford while they were PhD students in computer science.

• Aug 26, 1873 -  Lee DeForest: Inventor of the electron tube, radon knife for surgery and the photoelectric cell

• Aug 30, 1930 -  Warren E. Buffet: Legendary investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway

ANNIVERSARIES IN AUGUST

• 1 - 1789: U.S. Customs begins collecting revenues and enforcing tariffs.

• 1 - 1790: First US census conducted by the local U.S. Marshals. It counted 3.9 million people in 16 states and the Ohio Territory.

• 4 - 1930: King Kullen, first U.S. supermarket, opens in Queens, New York. During his early years of employment, Michael J. Cullen learned about the grocery business and became convinced that mass merchandising– selling high volume at low profit margins–could revolutionize the industry. When his letter to the president of Kroger describing his ideas went unanswered, Cullen leased a vacant garage just a few blocks from a busy shopping district. Success was instantaneous. People came from miles around. King Kullen meant affordable food and gained recognition as the "World's Greatest Price Wrecker."

• 9 - 1995: Netscape goes public. Buoyed by the success of its Netscape Navigator browser and its Web server software, Netscape Communications Corporations becomes a public company issuing 5,000,000 Common Shares at $28. On its first day of trading, the stock climbs as high as $74 during the day, closing at $57 by the end of the month.

• 10 - 1906: The Victrola phonograph is introduced by the Victor Talking Machine Company. Unlike the earlier phonographs that used large external horns to amplify the sound, the Victrola, with its internal horn, looks like a piece of furniture and fits easily in a parlor. It launches the phonograph into millions of homes. "Victrola" is a brand name, and not a generic term for all old wind-up phonographs.

• 12 - 1851: Isaac Singer is granted a patent for the home sewing machine. An engineer, he combines elements of earlier machines produced by Thimonnier, Hunt and Howe. When Howe learned of Singer’s machine, he took him to court, winning a lump sum settlement for all machines produced. Singer then took out license under Howe’s patent, paying him $15 per machine.

• 12 - 1981: IBM introduces the personal computer. Costing the equivalent of $3,000 in today’s dollars, the PC was IBM’s first entry into desktop computing. Eventually, the PC became the standard for 90% of the desktop market, with more PCs manufactured by IBM’s competitors than by IBM itself.

• 12 - 1982: The great bull market begins. The Dow closed at 776.90 on August 12. Over the next 19 years it increased 14-fold, reaching a peak of 11,175.80 on June 5, 2001.

• 15 - 1870: Transcontinental railway is completed at Strasburg, Colorado. Although the famous meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroads at Promontory Point, Utah is often thought of as the final link in the coast-to-coast railway, it marked the completion of tracks between Omaha and Sacramento.

• 15 - 1914: The Panama Canal opens. At a cost of  $375 million, including the $10 million paid to Panama, it is the most expensive construction project in U.S. history to that time. Still, the canal cost $23 million less than the 1907 estimate, in spite of landslides and a design change to a wider canal.

• 17 - 1807: Robert Fulton makes the first steamboat trip. The150-mile journey, between Albany and New York City, takes 32 hours.

• 18 - 1872: Montgomery Ward begins the mail order business in Chicago with the first catalog. Aaron Montgomery Ward worked for Marshall Field as a clerk and traveling salesman. He listened to his rural customers, and realized he could offer them better prices by selling to them directly, via mail-order, a revolutionary new concept. Success followed and, by 1890, Ward had moved into a new building in the heart of Chicago's "Loop." By 1904 the catalog weighed four pounds. The company is credited with creating the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer character and coining the "satisfaction guaranteed or your money back" marketing slogan. Montgomery Ward ultimately fell victim to an increasingly competitive retail environment and lower-cost competitors such as Wal-Mart and Target, and closed in December 2000.

• 18 - 1960: G.D. Searle Company markets the first birth control pills. The oral contraceptive, sold under the name, Enovid, had been undergoing clinical trials since 1954. It was first synthesized by Carl Djerassi at a laboratory in Mexico in 1951. In 1964 Searle took in $24 million in net profits from Pill sales.

• 24 - 1897: The Hartford Courant newspaper editor and author Charles Warner pens the famous quote often attributed to Mark Twain: “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

• 27 - 1859: First commercial oil well is drilled by Edwin L. Drake near Titusville, Pennsylvania, launching the modern petroleum industry. The first oil was refined to make kerosene for lamps, replacing whale oil. Later it was refined to make gasoline. The first service station opened in 1907.

• 28 - 1922: WEAF in New York broadcasts first radio commercial, a spot sponsored by the Queensboro Realty Corporation promoting Hawthorne Court, an apartment complex.

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