34 Facts About Samuel Insull

Samuel Insull was an innovator and investor based in Chicago who helped create an integrated electrical infrastructure in the United States.

Samuel Insull was one of five siblings who survived to adulthood.

Samuel Insull's career began as an apprentice clerk for various local businesses at age 14.

Samuel Insull went on to become a stenographer at Vanity Fair.

When he learned of a job with Edison in the United States, Samuel Insull indicated he would be glad to have it, provided it was as Thomas Edison's personal secretary.

In 1881, at the age of 21, Samuel Insull immigrated to the US, complete with side whiskers to make him appear older than his years.

In 1892, Samuel Insull was offered the post of second-vice-president at General Electric, but was unhappy at not being named its president.

Samuel Insull left General Electric and moved to Chicago in 1892, where he became president of Chicago Edison that year.

Chicago Edison was losing money until Samuel Insull discovered a way to make it profitable during a Christmas visit to Brighton, England in 1894.

Samuel Insull began purchasing portions of the utility infrastructure of the city.

When it became clear that Westinghouse's support of alternating current would win over Edison's direct current, Samuel Insull switched his support to AC in the war of the currents.

Samuel Insull owned significant portions of many railroads, mainly electric interurban lines, including the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad, Chicago Rapid Transit Company, Chicago Aurora and Elgin Railroad, Gary Railways, and Chicago South Shore and South Bend Railroad.

Samuel Insull saw that federal and state regulation would recognize electric utilities as natural monopolies, allowing them to grow with little competition and to sell electricity to broader segments of the market.

Samuel Insull used economies of scale to overcome market barriers by cheaply producing electricity with large steam turbines, such as the installations in the 1929 State Line Generating Plant in Hammond, Indiana.

Samuel Insull formed the Great Lakes Broadcasting Company in 1927 and purchased Chicago radio stations WENR and WBCN; the two stations were merged on June 1,1927, with Insull paying a million dollars for WENR alone.

Samuel Insull moved the stations first into the Strauss Building, then into Samuel Insull's Civic Opera House, where WENR became an affiliate of the NBC Blue Network.

When Samuel Insull's fortune started to fade, he sold both WENR and WBCN along with W9XR, to the National Broadcasting Company in March 1931.

On May 22,1899, Samuel Insull married a "tiny, exquisitely beautiful and clever" Broadway ingenue actress whose stage name was Gladys Wallis.

At the time of their marriage, Samuel Insull was 41 and Gladys was 24.

Samuel Insull was known for his charitable works in other areas, donating large sums of money to local hospitals, then calling on others with similar resources to do the same.

Samuel Insull donated freely to African-American charities in Chicago, asking the wealthy to follow his example.

At the time the US entered WWI, Samuel Insull was named head of the Illinois Defense Council by President Woodrow Wilson; his efforts sold over a million dollars of War Bonds.

Samuel Insull controlled an empire of $500 million with only $27 million in equity.

Samuel Insull was later arrested and extradited to the United States by Turkey in 1934 to face federal prosecution on mail fraud and antitrust charges.

Samuel Insull was defended by Chicago lawyer Floyd Thompson and found not guilty on all counts.

Samuel Insull suffered from a heart ailment, and his wife Gladys had asked him not to take the Metro because it was bad for his heart.

Nevertheless, Samuel Insull had made frequent declarations that he was "now a poor man" and on July 16,1938, he descended a long flight of stairs at the Place de la Concorde station.

Samuel Insull died of a heart attack just as he stepped toward the ticket taker.

Samuel Insull was receiving an annual pension totaling $21,000 from three of his former companies when he died.

Samuel Insull was buried near his parents on July 23,1938, in Putney Vale Cemetery, London, the city of his birth.

Samuel Insull's estate was found to be worth about $1,000 and his debts totaled $14,000,000, according to his will.

Samuel Insull's legacies included electricity grid systems and the regulated monopoly, a uniquely American institution that included utility companies.

In June 1925, after a 26-year absence, Gladys Wallis Samuel Insull returned to the stage in a charity revival of The School for Scandal that ran two weeks in Chicago.

Samuel Insull was outraged by the spectacle of a 56-year-old millionairess playing a gleeful 18-year-old, the whole production bought for her like a trinket by a man Herman knew to be an unscrupulous manipulator.