Howard hughes who is

He was hailed as a hero and honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York City and celebrations around the country.

Known by various names, including the H-4 Hercules, the Flying Boat and most commonly, the Spruce Goose a moniker Hughes detested , it had a wingspan of feet and was the largest aircraft ever constructed. However, the war ended before the plane was completed, and in Hughes was called to testify before a U.

And I mean it. The Spruce Goose the nickname came from the fact it was constructed of wood due to wartime restrictions on steel and aluminum; however, birch, not spruce, was the primary building material traveled for a mile about 70 feet above the water at Long Beach, California, before landing. In March , during the Cold War, a Soviet submarine carrying nuclear-armed ballistic missiles accidentally sank in the Pacific Ocean.

The Soviets embarked on a two-month search for the sub but were unable to locate it; not long afterward, the U. Believing the 1,ton sub was a source of important intelligence information, the CIA launched a complex covert operation, codenamed Project Azorian, to recover it.

He successfully flew the second prototype on April 5, In a Senate war investigating committee questioned him at length about his failure to deliver on wartime contracts.

Hughes remained active in the s. Hughes also invested in Trans World Airlines, and in pushed the company into the jet age by purchasing sixty-three jets. He quarreled with engineers at Hughes Aircraft in , causing a shakeup that imperiled contracts with the Pentagon.

That same year, he founded the Hughes Medical Institute in Delaware, thus funding the Medical Center he earlier had designated as the main recipient of his will. In he again shook the Hughes empire by firing his long-time associate Noah Dietrich. During the s in Hollywood Hughes had squired many actresses and socialites, particularly Katherine Hepburn.

In he married actress Jean Peters; the marriage ended in divorce in Hughes remained in Los Angeles until , then began traveling and eventually rented a penthouse in the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. The next year he began buying properties to build a business empire in Nevada. In he took over Air West. By this time he was becoming increasingly reclusive and conducted most of his business through memos. He now had little control over his empire.

This ended his role as a businessman and entrepreneur. In poor health and accompanied by a squadron of personal aides, he went to Panama, Canada, and London, then to Acapulco. He was indicted in a case relating to the Air West takeover, but it was dismissed. In Los Angeles a break-in occurred at the Hughes headquarters, and many of his personal papers were stolen. With his health rapidly deteriorating, he boarded a plane en route to a hospital in Houston on April 5, , but died on the way.

The Treasury Department made fingerprints to confirm his identity. In the estate was settled among twenty-two cousins on both sides of his family. For eight years Texas and California pursued inheritance-tax claims, although Hughes executives insisted that Nevada which has no estate taxes was Hughes's home.

The United States Supreme Court reviewed the case three times before it was settled. Donald L. He was also addicted to painkillers. Some biographers allege that his aides, nicknamed the "Mormon Mafia," deliberately cut him off from the outside world and enabled his addiction to painkillers. For years, he communicated with his aide, Maheu, only by phone or written notes—one of Hughes' highest ranking employees never met his employer face-to-face.

Hughes became so reclusive that Governor Laxalt insisted on talking to him by phone in to make sure he was really alive. On Thanksgiving Day, , four years to the day of his arrival, Hughes—who had never emerged from his hotel suite those four years—secretly left Las Vegas, with the help of his remaining assistants, in a stretcher.

In , while in the Bahamas, Hughes consented to a long interview, by phone, with news reporters to denounce a supposed biography of him as a forgery. He told them he was interested in moving back to Las Vegas to oversee his Strip hotels once again, but he never returned there.

With no one but his aides around him, Hughes neglected his personal appearance and hygiene. He rarely bathed; his hair was down to his shoulders, his fingernails long and claw-like, and his body almost skeletal. But in , Hughes cleaned up and went off painkillers briefly so that he could take up flying again in London, England. He made four flights in a twin-engine propeller plane, including one over the English Channel to Belgium, and his spirits were high.

However, after suffering a fall in his hotel room in London later that year, doctors put him back on painkillers, and his addiction resumed. In , Hughes, weighing only ninety-three pounds, was found unconscious from painkillers in his hotel room in Acapulco, Mexico. His aides chartered a jet plane to take him to a hospital in Houston, Texas, but he died during the flight, at age seventy. Hughes was perhaps Las Vegas' first true casino mogul. His main legacy to Las Vegas is that, by buying six major Strip casinos in the late s, he removed the perceived taint of organized crime on casino gambling in the national marketplace.

His actions triggered a major trend, still evident today, whereby public companies bought, held interests in or granted loans to most of Nevada's largest casinos. That involvement vastly increased the investment capital available from Wall Street, and led to the multibillion-dollar expansion of the Las Vegas Strip that started in the late s. Nevada Humanities produces and supports dynamic educational and cultural programs that enrich our lives and encourage us to explore challenging ideas.

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