Industry Genius

This book presents the inventive genius behind technological breakthroughs by ten global companies including Alcoa, DaimlerChrysler, Honda, ST Micro and Visteon. Readers will gain understanding and insight into how cutting-edge technology is helping protect the climate and/or the ozone layer, while contributing to the company's bottom line. Each chapter chronicles the challenge and triumph of invention, introduces the engineers and executives who overcome conventional wisdom, and demonstrates the contribution these companies are making to environmental protection. In full colour and crammed with graphics to illustrate the creative process of technological breakthroughs, the book is accessible and informative. The genius of these ten companies will inspire the engineer, the policy-maker, the student, the environmentalist, the CEO and the investor alike.

Charles Schwab was known to his employees, business associates, and competitors as a congenial and charismatic person-a 'born salesman.' Yet Schwab was much more than a salesman-he was a captain of industry, a man who streamlined and economized the production of steel and ran the largest steelmaking conglomerate in the world. A self-made man, he became one of the wealthiest Americans during the Gilded Age, only to die penniless in 1939. Schwab began his career as a stake driver at Andrew Carnegie's Edgar Thomson steel works in Pittsburgh at the age of seventeen. By thirty-five, he was president of Carnegie Steel. In 1901, he helped form the U.S. Steel Corporation, a company that produced well over half the nation's iron and steel. In 1904, Schwab left U.S. Steel to head Bethlehem Steel, which after twelve years under his leadership, became the second-largest steel producer in America. President Woodrow Wilson called on Schwab to head the Emergency Fleet Corporation to produce merchant ships for the transport of troops and materials abroad during World War I. Kenneth Warren presents a compelling biography that chronicles the startling success of Schwab's business career, his leadership abilities, and his drive to advance steel-making technology and operations. Through extensive research and use of previously unpublished archival documentation, Warren offers a new perspective on the life of a monumental figure--a true visionary--in the industrial history of America.

A biography of the Englishman who, concerned over the heavy human toll the Industrial Revolution was taking in England, left for America despite laws trying to keep textile workers from emigrating, and established the American textile industry.