About Howard Hughes
Howard Robard Hughes Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, film director, and philanthropist with an estimated net worth of $7 billion.
Hughes inherited a fortune from his family and made a name for himself producing films in Hollywood. At the same time he broke aviation records, but later led a reclusive life. He was born in Texas in 1905 and from an early age he showed an incredible talent for building machines. When he turned 18, both of his parents had died and he found himself worth a fortune of millions of dollars. And that was at a time when $1 million dollars is the equivalent of $17 million dollars today.
A year later he bought out the remaining company shares from his relatives and took full control over the family tool business. He married Ella Rice, a Houston socialite, and together they relocated to Hollywood.
Hughes hit the ground running with successful films that earned Oscar nominations and even an award for his second film, Two Arabian Knights. Over the next 30 years he went on to produce more than 25 films that included classics like Scarface, Hell’s Angels and The Outlaw starring Jane Russell.
After his wife, Ella Rice filed for divorce from Hughes in 1929, he began to date many of Hollywoods leading ladies, including Bette Davis, Ava Gardner and Katharine Hepburn.
With always a passion for aviation, even taking flying lessons as a teenager, in 1932, he launched Hughes Aircraft, a major aerospace and defense contractor. Hughes quickly became a key figure in the development and advancement of the science of flight. A few years later, he set a new air speed record of 352 mph at the controls of the H-1 Racer, one of the many planes that he commissioned and even helped to design.
For the remainder of the ’30s, Hughes pushed the envelope breaking both transcontinental and international aviation records. His company, Trans World Airlines, promoted flights from Los Angeles to Newark, NJ that took just 7 and a half hours, a major record for the time. As well as launched a trip around the world in only 91 hours, competing with Pan Am.
While Hughes’ personality made him successful in business, he pushed it too far on more than one occasion when trying to break aviation records. Hughes suffered two major crashes during his lifetime, the first was in 1943 when he was flying over Lake Mead near to Las Vegas. The crash that killed two onboard left Hughes with a serious head wound that may have impacted him more than he would know. The second aviation accident was in 1946 while flying over Los Angeles, resulting in a shattered collar bone, collapsed lung and some third-degree burns.
Even after making a recovery, Hughes’ health continued to decline all the while struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder and an addiction to codeine, didn’t help. What started as a way of controlling the pain, led to addiction that took over his life,
Hughes soon vanished from the public eye often spending months holed up alone in hotel rooms in cities like London, Boston, Vancouver, Acapulco. He would book the penthouse and became extremely weary of strangers, not leaving and often causing a standoff between him and the hotel. So much so that on one occasion in Las Vegas, when a hotel threatened to evict him, the billionaire simply purchased it. On April 5th 1976, Howard Hughes died of kidney failure considered to have been related to malnutrition. He was on board an aircraft en route to a hospital in Houston.
