Howard Hughes
December 24, 1905 — April 5, 1976
Howard Hughes was an American aviation pioneer, filmmaker, industrialist, and billionaire whose extraordinary achievements as a pilot and aerospace engineer were equaled only by the mystery and tragedy of his final decades — during which severe OCD and addiction turned one of the most vivid and ambitious figures of American life into the world's most famous recluse.
Texas Oil and Hollywood Dreams
Born Howard Robard Hughes Jr. on December 24, 1905, in Houston, Texas, he inherited his father's Hughes Tool Company — which held a lucrative monopoly on a drill bit essential to oil drilling — at age 18, following the deaths of both his parents within two years. Rather than manage his inheritance conservatively, he immediately moved to Hollywood and began producing motion pictures, including the highly successful gangster film Scarface (1932) and the aviation epic Hell's Angels (1930), which he produced and directed at enormous expense, rebuilding it as a sound picture after it was filmed silent. He had a gift for assembling talent and an absolute insistence on perfection that was already becoming obsessive.
Aviation Records and the H-4 Hercules
In 1935, Hughes set a world airspeed record of 352 mph; in 1937, he set a transcontinental speed record, flying from Los Angeles to Newark in 7 hours and 28 minutes; in 1938, he flew around the world in 91 hours, setting another record and returning to a ticker-tape parade in New York City. He acquired Trans World Airlines and built the Hughes Aircraft Company into a major defense contractor. During World War II, the government commissioned him to build the world's largest aircraft ever: the colossal flying boat later nicknamed the "Spruce Goose" (actually mostly made of birch). It flew exactly once, in 1947, with Hughes himself at the controls.
Did You Know?
By the late 1950s, Howard Hughes was already in serious mental decline. He lived in sealed rooms that he had employees sterilize meticulously, ate only certain foods prepared in precise ways, and reportedly watched the same film — Ice Station Zebra — over 150 times in succession. He would go months without cutting his hair or nails. He moved between various hotel penthouses — in Las Vegas, London, the Bahamas — never appearing in public. When he died on April 5, 1976, aboard an aircraft en route to Houston, he was nearly unrecognizable and had not been photographed publicly in over a decade.
A Contested Legacy
Hughes died intestate, touching off one of the most complex estate battles in American legal history. His Hughes Aircraft Company was eventually donated to a medical research foundation and generated over a billion dollars for research through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The complexities of his personality — a genuine visionary and aviation pioneer who descended into paranoid illness — have fascinated writers and filmmakers for decades; Martin Scorsese's The Aviator (2004), with Leonardo DiCaprio playing Hughes, received five Academy Awards. He remains one of the most compelling and tragic figures in American business history.