WHAT’S INANAME?
Twomen named Howard Hughes made an indelible mark on modern state
The two men had a lot in common. They were innovative, visionary and entrepreneurial. Each entered industries in their formative years and pushed them to new frontiers. Neither was content to live off past successes.
They shared one more aspect: Their name.
Howard Hughes Sr. and Howard Hughes Jr. made an indelible mark on business and Texas, a remarkable father-and-son combination that helped shape modern Texas and America. While the younger Hughes is best known, he may never have become the flamboyant and eccentric billionaire that captured the nation’s attention without the success of his father.
Howard Hughes Jr.’s fortune was built on an innovation hundreds of feet beneath the soil in Goose Creek, now Baytown.
There, Howard Hughes Sr., along with wildcatting partner Walter Sharp, tested Hughes’ dual-cone rotary drill bit — later known as the Rock Eater — in 1908 by drilling a 1,000-foot-deep well in 11hours, according to Peter Harry Brown and Pat Broeske’s “Howard Hughes: The Untold Story.”
With 166 teeth on each rotating cone, the drill bit would become a required tool for its ability to turn previously impenetrable layers of rock into powder. Within four years, the Harvard-educated Hughes and Sharp had founded the Sharp-Hughes Tool Co. and built a drill-bit research laboratory before Sharp died in 1912.
By the time the senior Hughes died of a heart attack at his company’s offices in 1924 at age 54, he had 75 patents to his name. His company, Hughes Tool Co., had built Houston’s largest manufacturing complex by World War I, according to University of Houston oil historian Joe Pratt. The company would help make Houston the epicenter for an oil industry that literally fed the growth of the automobile industry.
Howard Hughes Jr., born in Humble, was 18 years old and attending Rice University when his father died; his mother Allene died in 1922.
He had other ideas besides drill bits.
With a family fortune of about $650,000 (about $10 million in 2020 dollars) and controlling ownership of the tool company, Hughes set out to California to make movies and build aircraft.
Within eight years of his father’s death, Hughes had produced films, including “Hell’s Angels” (1930) and “Scarface” (1932), and founded Hughes Aircraft Co. And with Hughes Tool Co. developing the tri-cone drill bit and banking on a 17-year patent starting in1934, Hughes would expand his fortune further. In addition to producing 26 films between 1926 and1957, Hughes in1935 broke the world speed record by flying his H-1 “Silver Bullet” at 355 miles per hour before crashing into a beet field (the event was immortalized in the 2004 Hughes biopic, “The Aviator”).
Four years later, Hughes bought control over what was then Trans World Airlines while expanding Hughes Aircraft’s presence as a defense contractor during and after World War II. Hughes would also have a couple notable setbacks, nearly killing himself in 1946 when he crashed a plane hewas testing into a Beverly Hills home and spending an estimated $40 million (about $18 million of his own money and $22 million of the U.S. government’s, according to Boeing) on the H-4 Hercules “flying boat”, also known as The Spruce Goose.
The 400,000-pound aircraft, designed to carry either 750 soldiers or two Sherman tanks, only took flight once (with Hughes at the controls) and was airborne over Long Beach Harbor for less than a minute.
Hughes was also no stranger to the boomtown sensibilities synonymous with the oil industry that his father helped grow. In 1952, Hughes acquired about 25,000 acres near Las Vegas, though the land would remain undeveloped until Summa Corp., thecompany funded by his estate, began building what would become the Summerlin masterplanned community in the early 1990s (the community was named for Jean Amelia Summerlin, the mother of Hughes Sr.)
In 1966, Hughes acquired Las Vegas’s Desert Inn (reportedly because he didn’t want to vacate its penthouse) and bought casino properties such as the Sands and Frontier as well as land near the Strip and McCarren Airport, according to the Las Vegas Sun.
Hughes Tool Co. went public in 1972 (the company merged with Baker International in 1987 to form the Houston oil field services company Baker Hughes, netting Hughes an estimated $150million. By that time, Hughes was already regarded as an eccentric for his reclusive and germaphobe habits.
Hughes died at 70 in 1976. He was in flight, no less, traveling from Acapulco to Houston. Estimates of his wealth varied because of his extensive land holdings, but the Associated Press pegged it at as much as $2 billion, or more than $9 billion today.
Hughes is buried at Glenwood Cemetery, which is also the final resting place of Houston luminaries such as Judge Roy Hofheinz and William P. Hobby.
And Howard Hughes Sr.