Rodman Wanamaker
Lewis Rodman Wanamaker was a department store magnate. He owned stores in Philadelphia, New York City, Paris, France, he was a patron of the arts, of education, of golf and athletics, of Native American scholarship, was an investor in early aviation. He served as a Presidential Elector for Pennsylvania in 1916, he was born on February 1863 in Philadelphia to John Wanamaker and Mary Erringer Brown. He entered Princeton University in 1881, graduating in 1886. In college, he sang in the choir, was a member and business manager of the Princeton Glee Club, he was a member of the first eating club at Princeton University. He was a member of the 1885 Tiger football team that won the national championship when a dramatic last-minute punt return bested the Yale Bulldogs. In 1886, he joined his father's business, married Fernanda Henry of Philadelphia, he went to Paris as resident manager in 1889, lived abroad for more than ten years. When his father purchased the former Alexander Turney Stewart business in New York in 1896, he helped revolutionize the department store with top quality items and is credited in particular with fueling an American demand for French luxury goods.
In 1911 he bought the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph. Wanamaker was content to live in his father's shadow and did not seek the limelight except for some official ceremonial positions he held in the City of New York toward the end of his life. Before John Wanamaker died in 1922 he turned all his holdings of the two stores over to Rodman. John Wanamaker had been the sole owner of the business, with his death in 1922, complete control and management passed from father to son. No other retail merchandising business on so large a scale in the world was in the hands of a single man. Rodman Wanamaker suffered from kidney disease in the last decade of his life and the toxins from this condition took their toll on his health. Rodman Wanamaker had a son, Captain John Wanamaker, two daughters; the son had a number of personal problems that made his choice as successor to the father problematic. After his death control of the stores passed to a board of trustees charged with serving the interests of the surviving Rodman Wanamaker family.
He died on Atlantic City, New Jersey. He was interred in the Wanamaker family tomb in the churchyard of the Church of St. James the Less in Philadelphia; the Wanamaker Organ in Wanamaker's department store at 13th and Market Streets in Philadelphia, was enlarged by Rodman Wanamaker in 1924. It is presently the world's largest functioning pipe organ. Wanamaker sponsored elaborate recitals in the Grand Court of the Philadelphia store featuring Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra; as many as 15,000 people attended these admission-free events, at which all display counters and fixtures were removed by an army of workers so that seating could be put in place. Under Wanamaker's guidance famous organists were brought to play the Wanamaker Organs in Philadelphia and New York, including Marcel Dupré, Louis Vierne, Marco Enrico Bossi and Nadia Boulanger. Wanamaker sponsored a Concert Bureau to book European organists on trans-American concert tours. In 1926 Wanamaker commissioned a 17-ton bell from founders Johnston.
It was placed atop the Wanamaker Men's Store at Broad Street and Penn Square in the Lincoln-Liberty Building. Named the "Founder's Bell" in honor of Rodman's father John, founder of the store, it was the largest tuned bell in the world when it was cast. Toward the end of his life, Wanamaker gathered a huge collection of stringed instruments, known as The Cappella, that featured violas and violins from such masters as Guarnerius and Stradivarius, they were heard at the Wanamaker Phladelphia store and at the White House on December 15, 1927. The orchestra concerts ended with Wanamaker's death in 1928, the stringed instruments were sold at that time. Rodman Wanamaker was a pioneer in sponsoring record-breaking aviation projects and in particular and an important early backer of transatlantic flight development. In 1913 he commissioned Glen Curtiss and his aircraft company to further develop his experimental flying boat designs into a scaled-up version capable of trans-Atlantic crossing in response to the 1913 challenge prize offered by the London newspaper The Daily Mail.
The resulting America flying boat designed under John Cyril Porte's supervision did not cross the Atlantic because of the outbreak of World War I, but was sufficiently promising that the Royal Navy purchased the two prototypes and ordered an additional fifty aircraft of the model for anti-submarine patrolling and air-sea rescue tasks, roles flying boats of today still perform. Concurrently, the design with some improvements from both British and Americans matured during the war spurring the explosive post-war growth of the flying boat era of International Commercial Aviation, giving Wanamaker at least some claim to being a founding father of an new industry, the modern world with its characteristically shortened international travel times. Through the American Trans-Oceanic Company he funded efforts to increase aircraft range throughout the next decade so that Wanamaker's entry, the Fokker trimotor America, belatedly flown by Commander Richard E. Byrd transited across the Atlantic only a few days after Lindbergh's historic solo crossing on May 21–22, 1927 that won the cash prize in the contest.
In both cases and arguably the world benefited from the sponsorship of Wanamaker. Rodman Wanamaker was a patron of many i
United States
The United States of America known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U. S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D. C. and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico; the State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean; the U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The diverse geography and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Paleo-Indians migrated from Siberia to the North American mainland at least 12,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century; the United States emerged from the thirteen British colonies established along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the colonies following the French and Indian War led to the American Revolution, which began in 1775, the subsequent Declaration of Independence in 1776; the war ended in 1783 with the United States becoming the first country to gain independence from a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, with the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, being ratified in 1791 to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties; the United States embarked on a vigorous expansion across North America throughout the 19th century, acquiring new territories, displacing Native American tribes, admitting new states until it spanned the continent by 1848. During the second half of the 19th century, the Civil War led to the abolition of slavery.
By the end of the century, the United States had extended into the Pacific Ocean, its economy, driven in large part by the Industrial Revolution, began to soar. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the country's status as a global military power; the United States emerged from World War II as a global superpower, the first country to develop nuclear weapons, the only country to use them in warfare, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Sweeping civil rights legislation, notably the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, outlawed discrimination based on race or color. During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed in the Space Race, culminating with the 1969 U. S. Moon landing; the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the world's sole superpower. The United States is the world's oldest surviving federation, it is a representative democracy.
The United States is a founding member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States, other international organizations. The United States is a developed country, with the world's largest economy by nominal GDP and second-largest economy by PPP, accounting for a quarter of global GDP; the U. S. economy is post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge-based activities, although the manufacturing sector remains the second-largest in the world. The United States is the world's largest importer and the second largest exporter of goods, by value. Although its population is only 4.3% of the world total, the U. S. holds 31% of the total wealth in the world, the largest share of global wealth concentrated in a single country. Despite wide income and wealth disparities, the United States continues to rank high in measures of socioeconomic performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP, worker productivity.
The United States is the foremost military power in the world, making up a third of global military spending, is a leading political and scientific force internationally. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a world map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America in honor of the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci; the first documentary evidence of the phrase "United States of America" is from a letter dated January 2, 1776, written by Stephen Moylan, Esq. to George Washington's aide-de-camp and Muster-Master General of the Continental Army, Lt. Col. Joseph Reed. Moylan expressed his wish to go "with full and ample powers from the United States of America to Spain" to seek assistance in the revolutionary war effort; the first known publication of the phrase "United States of America" was in an anonymous essay in The Virginia Gazette newspaper in Williamsburg, Virginia, on April 6, 1776. The second draft of the Articles of Confederation, prepared by John Dickinson and completed by June 17, 1776, at the latest, declared "The name of this Confederation shall be the'United States of America'".
The final version of the Articles sent to the states for ratification in late 1777 contains the sentence "The Stile of this Confederacy shall be'The United States of America'". In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote the phrase "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA" in all capitalized letters in the headline of his "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence; this draft of the document did not surface unti
Christmas seal
Christmas seals are labels placed on mail during the Christmas season to raise funds and awareness for charitable programs. They have become associated with lung diseases such as tuberculosis, with child welfare. Christmas seals are regarded as a form of cinderella stamp in contrast with Christmas stamps used for postage. At the beginning of the 1900s tuberculosis was a feared disease, its harmful effects on children seemed cruel. In 1904, Einar Holbøll, a Danish postal clerk developed the idea of adding an extra charitable stamp on mailed holiday greetings during Christmas; the money raised could be used to help children sick with tuberculosis. The plan was approved by the King of Denmark. In 1904 the world’s first Christmas seal was issued, bearing the likeness of the Danish Queen and the word Julen. Over 4 million were sold in the first year at DKK 0.02 per seal. During the first six years, enough funds were raised to build the Christmas Seal Sanatorium in Kolding, opened in 1911; the same year the sanatorium was transferred to the administration of the Danish National Association to Combat Tuberculosis as it was considered a waste of resources to have two organisations working towards the same purpose.
The Danish Christmas Seal Committee – today known as Julemærkefonden - decided at that time to put all future collected funds to use in building and operating convalescent homes for children. Soon after Denmark issued the first Christmas seal and Iceland followed. Seals spread throughout Scandinavia and every major country in Europe, are still popular today. Christmas seals have been issued by hundreds of different societies and locally in Asia, Africa and South America, Australia; the majority of all TB seals since were issued at Christmas time and included the international symbol against TB, the double barred Cross of Lorraine. They were introduced to the United States by Emily Bissell in 1907, after she had read about the 1904 Danish Christmas seal in an article by Danish-born Jacob Riis, a muckraking journalist and photographer. Bissell hoped to raise money for a sanitarium on the Brandywine Creek in Delaware. Bissell went on to design a Delaware local Christmas seal in 1908. Local Christmas seals have existed alongside national issues in the US since 1907, are catalogued by the Christmas Seal & Charity Stamp Society.
By 1908, Bissell's idea grew to a national program administered by the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis and the American National Red Cross. The seals were sold in post office lobbies in Delaware at 1 cent each. Net proceeds from the sales would be divided between the two organizations. By 1920, the Red Cross withdrew from the arrangement and sales were conducted by the NASPT known as the National Tuberculosis Association. Various promotional schemes were tried: in 1954 the small town of Saranac Lake, New York won a nationwide competition selling Christmas seals, the reward for, hosting the world premiere of the Paul Newman film The Silver Chalice. After World War II with the development of the antibiotic streptomycin TB became a curable disease, although it would be decades before it could be considered under control in developed countries. To reflect the expanding scope of the organization's goals, the name was changed to the National Tuberculosis and Respiratory Disease Association in the late 1960s.
The NTRDA became the American Lung Association in 1973, though the 1974 seals continue to show the NTRDA inscription on the sheet margin. The Christmas song and Holly was selected as the theme song for the 1960 Christmas Seals appeal. Today the Christmas seals benefit other lung related issues. Tuberculosis was declining, but has been on the rise. TB is still one of the most common major infectious diseases in the world. In 1987 the American Lung Association acquired a trademark for the term "Christmas Seals" to protect their right to be the sole US national fundraising Association to issue them. Of course, this trademark would not apply to Christmas seals issued outside the US or local and regional Christmas seals, used in the US by many organizations since 1907 when the Kensington Dispensary in Philadelphia PA issued their own local Christmas seal. By 1908, the campaign had reached Canada. Interested people in Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario began Christmas seal campaigns to build and support sanatoria, as TB hospitals were called.
The Toronto Globe came promptly to their aid. Early in December, the Globe began running a daily story on the front page giving news of the campaign; the column was bordered by holly so that readers could spot it. One story told. Another issue announced that out in Regina, Saskatchewan another paper, the Regina Leader, had written to say its staff would sell the seals and send the money back for the sanatorium being built in Muskoka. From Saint John, New Brunswick, the Rev. G. A. Moore wrote to say that he and other volunteers would sell 8,500 and send the money to Toronto for the sanatorium; that first year, the Toronto campaign brought in $6,114.25 and Hamilton citizens gave $1,244.40. Year by year, other cities across Canada tried the Christmas seal campaign as a means not only of raising money but of creating the awareness that tuberculosis could be controlled. In 1927, it was agreed that the Christmas seal campaign was to be the official method for tuberculosis associations to ap
Grover Cleveland
Stephen Grover Cleveland was an American politician and lawyer, the 22nd and 24th president of the United States, the only president in American history to serve two non-consecutive terms in office. He won the popular vote for three presidential elections—in 1884, 1888, 1892—and was one of two Democrats to be elected president during the era of Republican political domination dating from 1861 to 1933. Cleveland was the leader of the pro-business Bourbon Democrats who opposed high tariffs, Free Silver, inflation and subsidies to business, farmers, or veterans, his crusade for political reform and fiscal conservatism made him an icon for American conservatives of the era. Cleveland won praise for his honesty, self-reliance and commitment to the principles of classical liberalism, he fought political corruption and bossism. As a reformer, Cleveland had such prestige that the like-minded wing of the Republican Party, called "Mugwumps" bolted the GOP presidential ticket and swung to his support in the 1884 election.
As his second administration began, disaster hit the nation when the Panic of 1893 produced a severe national depression, which Cleveland was unable to reverse. It ruined his Democratic Party, opening the way for a Republican landslide in 1894 and for the agrarian and silverite seizure of the Democratic Party in 1896; the result was a political realignment that ended the Third Party System and launched the Fourth Party System and the Progressive Era. Cleveland was a formidable policymaker, he drew corresponding criticism, his intervention in the Pullman Strike of 1894 to keep the railroads moving angered labor unions nationwide in addition to the party in Illinois. Critics complained that Cleveland had little imagination and seemed overwhelmed by the nation's economic disasters—depressions and strikes—in his second term. So, his reputation for probity and good character survived the troubles of his second term. Biographer Allan Nevins wrote, "n Grover Cleveland, the greatness lies in typical rather than unusual qualities.
He had no endowments. He possessed honesty, firmness and common sense, but he possessed them to a degree other men do not." By the end of his second term, public perception showed him to be one of the most unpopular U. S. presidents, he was by rejected by most Democrats. Today, Cleveland is considered by most historians to have been a successful leader ranked among the upper-mid tier of American presidents. Stephen Grover Cleveland was born on March 18, 1837, in Caldwell, New Jersey, to Ann and Richard Falley Cleveland. Cleveland's father was a Congregational and Presbyterian minister, from Connecticut, his mother was the daughter of a bookseller. On his father's side, Cleveland was descended from English ancestors, the first of the family having emigrated to Massachusetts from Cleveland, England in 1635, his father's maternal grandfather, Richard Falley Jr. fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, was the son of an immigrant from Guernsey. On his mother's side, Cleveland was descended from Anglo-Irish Protestants and German Quakers from Philadelphia.
Cleveland was distantly related to General Moses Cleaveland, after whom the city of Cleveland, was named. Cleveland, the fifth of nine children, was named Stephen Grover in honor of the first pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Caldwell, where his father was pastor at the time, he became known as Grover in his adult life. In 1841, the Cleveland family moved to Fayetteville, New York, where Grover spent much of his childhood. Neighbors described him as "full of fun and inclined to play pranks," and fond of outdoor sports. In 1850, Cleveland's father moved to Clinton, New York, to work as district secretary for the American Home Missionary Society. Despite his father's dedication to his missionary work, the income was insufficient for the large family. Financial conditions forced him to remove Grover from school into a two-year mercantile apprenticeship in Fayetteville; the experience was valuable and brief, the living conditions quite austere. Grover returned to his schooling at the completion of the apprentice contract.
In 1853, when missionary work began to take a toll on his health, Cleveland's father took an assignment in Holland Patent, New York and the family moved again. Shortly after, he died from a gastric ulcer, with Grover reputedly hearing of his father's death from a boy selling newspapers. Cleveland received his elementary education at the Fayetteville Academy and the Clinton Liberal Academy. After his father died in 1853, he again left school to help support his family; that year, Cleveland's brother William was hired as a teacher at the New York Institute for the Blind in New York City, William obtained a place for Cleveland as an assistant teacher. He returned home to Holland Patent at the end of 1854, where an elder in his church offered to pay for his college education if he would promise to become a minister. Cleveland declined, in 1855 he decided to move west, he stopped first in New York, where his uncle, Lewis F. Allen, gave him a clerical job. Allen was an important man in Buffalo, he introduced his nephew to influential men there, including the partners in the law firm of Rogers and Rogers.
Millard Fillmore, the 13th president of the United States, had worked for the partnership. Cleveland took a clerkship with the firm, began to read the law, was admitted to the New York bar in 1859. Cleveland
Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph
The Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph was an evening daily newspaper published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1927 to 1960. Part of the Hearst newspaper chain, it competed with the Pittsburgh Press and Post-Gazette until being purchased and absorbed by the latter paper; the Sun-Telegraph's history can be traced back through its 19th- and early 20th-century forebears: the Chronicle, Chronicle Telegraph, Sun. The Morning Chronicle was established on June 1841 by Richard George Berford. At first a semi-weekly paper, it became a daily on September 8 of the same year; the original editor was 19-year-old J. Heron Foster, who would be the founding editor of the Spirit of the Age and the Pittsburgh Dispatch. A weekly edition of the paper first appeared in November 1841 with the title The Iron City and Pittsburgh Weekly Chronicle. On August 30, 1851 the daily paper started issuing in the day, becoming the Evening Chronicle. Historian Leland D. Baldwin described the Chronicle's existence as "undistinguished for several decades".
On January 2, 1884, the Pittsburgh Evening Chronicle merged with the Pittsburgh Telegraph to form the Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph. In 1892, the Chronicle Telegraph Building on Fifth Avenue gained brief notoriety as the site where anarchist Alexander Berkman attempted to assassinate industrialist Henry Clay Frick. In October 1900 the paper sponsored the Chronicle Telegraph Cup, a postseason baseball series won by the Brooklyn Superbas over the Pittsburgh Pirates. Held only once, the contest was a precursor to the current World Series. Iron and steel manufacturer George T. Oliver a U. S. senator, purchased the evening Chronicle Telegraph in November 1900 to complement the morning paper he had acquired earlier in the year, the Commercial Gazette. The papers were soon housed under the same roof and exchanged or shared staff members. In 1915, a new eight-story building on the current site of the U. S. Steel Tower opened as home to the Chronicle Telegraph along with Oliver's merged and retitled morning paper, the Gazette Times.
Upon the death of George T. Oliver in 1919, control of the Chronicle Telegraph and Gazette Times passed to his sons George S. and Augustus K. Oliver; the Pittsburgh Sun was an evening paper first issued on March 1, 1906 by the publisher of the morning Pittsburgh Post. On August 1, 1927, William Randolph Hearst completed a purchase of the two Oliver papers, including the building, he coordinated the transaction with publisher Paul Block, who at the same time became owner of Pittsburgh's other morning-evening combination: the Post and Sun. An ensuing trade between the two buyers gave Hearst both evening dailies, which he merged to form the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph, while Block created the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from the two morning papers; the first issues of the new publications rolled off the presses the next day. The deal stipulated that the Sun-Telegraph, but not the Post-Gazette, would publish on Sundays though the latter paper's predecessors had Sunday editions and the former's did not.
The combined Sunday circulation that the Post-Gazette would have inherited was instead transferred to the Sunday Sun-Telegraph. The Sun-Telegraph was patterned after Hearst's other twenty-five newspapers in its use of screaming headlines, large type, sensational reporting, unconventional picture layouts, splashes of color, front-page box scores. In the 1950s the "Sun-Telly" was losing subscribers and advertisers to its direct competitor in the evening and Sunday fields, the Pittsburgh Press, to a lesser degree the Post-Gazette; the Post-Gazette's co-publisher William Block Sr. recalled that "The Press, which had a great deal of newer equipment, was in a position to give news, better distribution, was killing on Sunday." In 1960 the Hearst organization sold its floundering Pittsburgh operation to the Post-Gazette, which in absorbing its rival gained a Sunday edition. The deal turned out badly for the purchaser: The Sunday edition proved unprofitable; these problems helped spur the Post-Gazette to enter into a joint operating agreement with the stronger Press in the following year.
The Post-Gazette bore the subtitle "Sun-Telegraph" from 1960 through 1977, though by late 1962 the subtitle's font size had shrunk to unnoticeable proportions. Andrews, J. Cutler. Pittsburgh's Post-Gazette: The First Newspaper West of the Alleghenies. Boston: Chapman & Grimes. Thomas, Clarke M.. Front-Page Pittsburgh: Two Hundred Years of the Post-Gazette. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 978-0-8229-4248-1
Emily Bissell
Emily Perkins Bissell was an American social worker and activist, best remembered for introducing Christmas Seals to the United States. Born in Wilmington, she made a name for herself at a young age as the founder of that city's first public kindergarten and for her efforts to introduce child labor laws in that state. In 1883, she founded an organization, now known as the West End Neighborhood House that provided social services to Wilmington's immigrant Irish and German families. Bissell wrote under the pseudonym Priscilla Leonard. Bissel was identified with the anti-suffragist movement, she wrote "The vote is part of man's work. Ballot-box, cartridge box, jury box, sentry box all go together in his part of life. Women cannot step in and take the responsibilities and duties of voting with assuming his place largely". In 1896 Bissell published an essay called "The Mistaken Vocation of Shakespeare's Heroines," taking the form of a report of a lecture to suffragettes; the purported speaker launches an attack on the Elizabethan playwright Shakespeare for placing his female characters in unsuitable situations, where they are not allowed to demonstrate their true abilities.
For example, instead of having Ophelia as his wife, Hamlet would have been much better served by the more forceful Lady Macbeth, while Macbeth himself would have been better served by Portia. The audience greets her attack on Shakespeare with delight, ending up shouting "Down with Shakespeare!" The spoof was supposed to show. In 1900, she testified before the United States Senate Committee on Woman's Suffrage, arguing that women had no place in politics. In March 1903 she addressed a packed meeting in Concord, New Hampshire speaking against a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would strike out the word "male" from the suffrage clause; the amendment failed to pass. Several years in 1907, she was drawn to the cause of helping people with tuberculosis, she had heard of an idea in Denmark in which people attached a special stamp to their mail, the proceeds of which would go to fight the disease, decided to introduce the same idea in Delaware. Her goal was to raise $300 for a local sanitarium, using a bright red stamp she designed herself, convinced local post offices to sell them for just 1 cent.
This way, she believed the poorest people could help in the fight against TB. Though the idea failed at first, Bissell was able to gain enough publicity from a Philadelphia newspaper to make $3,000 for the National Tuberculosis Association, ten times the amount she hoped to get. People were intrigued by the idea of Christmas Seals, the following year, Howard Pyle, a notable illustrator from Wilmington, donated the design of the second stamp. Bissell spent the remainder of her life promoting Christmas stamps and helping to eliminate tuberculosis, she died in 1948. A public hospital outside Wilmington bears her name. In 1980, on the 119th anniversary of her birth, the U. S. Postal Service issued a 15 cent stamp in her honor. W. David Lewis. "Emily Perkins Bissell". In Edward T. James. Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary. 2. Harvard University Press. Pp. 152–153. ISBN 978-0-674-62734-5
Henry Phipps Jr.
Henry Phipps Jr. was an American entrepreneur known for his business relationship with Andrew Carnegie and involvement with the Carnegie Steel Company. He was a successful real estate investor. After selling his stock in Carnegie Steel, he devoted a great deal of his time and money to philanthropic works. Henry Phipps Jr. was born on September 1839 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was the son of English born Hannah Frank and Henry Phipps, an English shoemaker who migrated to Philadelphia in the early part of the 19th century before settling in Pittsburgh in 1845, he was educated at public schools in Pennsylvania. He had one sister, Amelia Phipps Walker, two brothers: William Henry Phipps, John Phipps, friends with Carnegie and who died young. Phipps began working as a young man as an office boy and a bookkeeper with Dillworth & Bidwell. In 1861, he became a partner in Bidwell & Phipps, an agent for the du Pont Powder Company, a partner in Kloman & Phipps, a small iron mill. In 1865, he became a partner in childhood friend and neighbor's Andrew and Thomas Carnegie's Union Iron Mills, created from a merger between Phipps' Kloman & Phipps and Cyclops Iron Company, an iron company which the Carnegies had acquired an interest in.
Kloman and Phipps at first refused, but Thomas made an offer of all the shares in Cyclops plus an additional payment of $50,000. Therefore, on May 1, 1865, the new Union Iron Mills Company was formed. For the next year and Carnegie went to Europe on tour, when they returned in 1866, went to work. Phipps toiled for the next 20 years and proved a capable financier, becoming Carnegie's business partner in Carnegie Steel Company, founded in 1892, which would make him a wealthy man as the company's second largest shareholder. In 1901, Carnegie Steel Company was sold to the United States Steel Corporation, it sold for $400 million, of which $226 million went to Carnegie himself, $48 million went to Phipps. In 1907, Henry Phipps established Bessemer Trust Company to manage his substantial assets that would be shared by his offspring following his death. In 1909, Phipps expanded his Cape Cod holdings to the entire 800 acre Great Island on Cape Cod, purchasing the remaining 50 acres from Charles B. Cory.
The Cape Cod estate was next to Aberdeen Hall and was near Andrew Carnegie, Henry M. Flagler, Henry Clay Frick's estates. In 1912, Phipps divided $3,000,000 worth of real estate in Chicago, Illinois realty among his three sons. In the same year, he gave his sons $10,000,000 worth of property in Pittsbugh. In 1916, he purchased property in Great Neck, Long Island in the Village of Lake Success and in 1917, began construction on a thirty-nine-room Georgian mansion summer home, completed in 1919, he named the home, Bonnie Blink, Scottish for Pretty View. After his death, the mansion and property were donated to the school district and have since become William A. Shine Great Neck South High School. In 1926, he bought Island Beach, sold by his heirs in 1953 to the State of New Jersey. Now known as Island Beach State Park, it is the last remaining stretch of undeveloped barrier island on the central New Jersey coast. Phipps was one of the pioneer investors in Florida real estate. At one time, he and his family owned one-third of the town of Palm Beach, 28 miles of oceanfront between Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, prime bay front property in downtown Miami, 29,653 acres of land in Martin County.
The Phipps family donated to the town of Palm Beach one of the most significant gifts in county history: an ocean-to-lake frontage property, now known as Phipps Park. Phipps believed that those who have achieved great wealth should give back for the public good and create institutions dedicated to that purpose; as such he was involved with a number of philanthropic causes, the best known of, the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens in Schenley Park, an 1893 gift to the city of Pittsburgh. Among his many benevolent works, he funded the Phipps Institute for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis at the University of Pennsylvania and The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital which in 1913 made possible the first inpatient facility in the United States for the mentally ill constructed as part of an acute care hospital. Phipps was an advocate of decent housing for the poor and in 1905 Phipps funded the non-profit Phipps Houses to build affordable housing in New York City.
He gave $1,000,000 to build tenement houses for "working people." Phipps Houses still operates to this day. In 1872, Henry Phipps married Anne Childs Shaffer, the daughter of Margaret and John Shaffer, a Pittsburgh wagon builder. Since their estate Bonnie Brink was completed in 1919, they spent their summers in Great Neck, Long Island; the couple had two daughters and three sons: Amy Phipps, who in 1905 married Frederick Edward Guest, the grandson of John Spencer-Churchill, 7th Duke of Marlborough and Winston Churchill's first cousin. John Shaffer Phipps, who in 1903 married daughter of Michael P. Grace. Helen Margaret Phipps, who in 1904 married Bradley Martin in Scotland, brother-in-law of Willi
