When Andrew Carnegie sold the
Carnegie Steel company in 1901 to create
US Steel, he became - at least by some measures - the richest private person then or since. But Carnegie had accomplished something even more impressive:
Carnegie Steel had attracted and nurtured a technology base in the Pittsburgh region that would be unmatched until the rise of Silicon Valley nearly a century later. The Mellon and Pittsburgh National banks had grown rich financing the fledgling steel industry, and would continue to invest in Pittsburgh's entrepreneurs and engineers to develop the modern electrical power industry (Westinghouse), the aluminum industry (Alcoa), processed food (Heinz), and heavy manufacturing (Blaw-Knox, American Bridge and others).
At the same time that Andrew Carnegie had been building
Carnegie Steel, John D. Rockefeller was building the
Standard Oil empire. While the automobile had not yet been invented, neither had the the electric light bulb or commercial electricity generation; petroleum products were in demand for lighting, heating and increasingly for commercial lubrication. In 1900 a number of Pittsburgh businessmen lead by William Mellon decided to get into the growing petroleum industry, and it wasn't their style to make a small investment in someone else's company; instead they got together and built a refinery near the newly discovered oil fields in Texas, followed by a number of pipelines, service stations, a fleet of oil tankers and other bits of infrastructure to support the rapidly growing automobile industry. A few years later, these investments were consolidated as the
Gulf Oil company, which would soon grow to rival giant
Standard Oil.
Born in 1908, in a
really small town in Texas not too far from Austin and the East Texas oil fields,
Irion Grady Davis (you sometimes see him use his first initial, but mostly he just went by "Grady") had studied geology at Texas University, followed by a few years of polishing at Harvard. Fresh out of school, he went to work for Gulf Oil, spending 20 years in their Venezuelan operation. He apparently knew how to work with foreign governments to get things done, and in the mid 1950s was promoted to Administrative Vice President of Gulf Oil and transferred to Gulf's headquarters in Pittsburgh. A few years later he was promoted to Executive Vice President - the number 2 spot in the company. He would play a big part negotiating with the Kuwaiti government for access to cheap middle eastern oil, which would allow Gulf to expand into Europe.
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Grady Davis - early 1960s |
Image shamelessly stolen from the Corvette Hall of Fame website, lots of good stuff there.