Howard Hughes

Howard Hughes was an American businessman, aviator, film producer, and engineer whose 50-year career produced his ownership and operation of multiple late-1930s and 1940s aviation, film-production, and Las Vegas casino-and-hotel industries — complicated by his later 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s reclusive obsessive-compulsive disorder behavior. He was born Howard Robard Hughes Jr. on December 24, 1905, in Humble, Texas, into an American Texas-oil-industry family. His father Howard Robard Hughes Sr. was a Texas-oil-drilling entrepreneur (the inventor of the foundational Hughes two-cone roller-bit oil-drilling drill bit, which became one of the foundational documents of the late-19th-century American oil-drilling industry), and his mother Allene Stone Gano was a homemaker. The 1922 sudden death of his mother (when Howard was 16) and the 1924 sudden death of his father (when Howard was 18) left Howard the sole heir to the Hughes Tool Company at age 18.

His 1925 inheritance of the Hughes Tool Company — at age 19, after a Texas court declared his legal majority despite his Texas-state-law minority status — launched his late-1920s and 1930s American business career. His 1927 relocation to Hollywood and his subsequent 1929 production of his first feature film Hell's Angels (the Howard-Hughes-financed-and-co-directed World-War-I-aviation film starring Jean Harlow) launched his 1930s Hollywood film-producer public profile.

His 1930s and 1940s aviation career — across his 1932 founding of the Hughes Aircraft Company, his 1935 H-1 Racer aircraft (which he piloted to a 352.39-mph world speed record on September 13, 1935), his 1937 transcontinental U.S. air-speed record (in 7 hours, 28 minutes, 25 seconds), his 1938 around-the-world flight record (in 91 hours, 14 minutes, 10 seconds, departing from Floyd Bennett Field, New York), and his 1947 single-flight test of the Hughes H-4 Hercules "Spruce Goose" (the largest aircraft ever flown at the time) — produced his mid-20th-century American aviation public profile.

His 1947 owner-and-CEO acquisition of RKO Pictures launched his 1948–1955 RKO film-production career. His 1966 Las Vegas relocation to the top-floor suite of the Desert Inn casino — and his subsequent 1966–1976 Las Vegas casino-acquisition campaign (during which he acquired the Desert Inn, Sands, Frontier, Castaways, Silver Slipper, and Landmark casinos for over $300 million) — launched his later Las Vegas casino-magnate public profile. His 1958–1976 obsessive-compulsive-disorder reclusive behavior — across his late-life Bahamas, Mexico, and London hotel-suite residences — shaped his later biographical narrative. He died on April 5, 1976, at age 70, on a chartered flight from Acapulco to Houston, of malnutrition and kidney failure.

His name Howard derives from the Old Germanic root meaning "high-warden" or "high-guardian." Howard was the second-most-popular American boys' name through the 1900s and 1910s.