Philip Danforth Armour

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Chicago, Illinois}}

Philip Danforth Armour
Born
May 16 1832 Stockbridge, New York

Philip Danforth Armour (born in Stockbridge, New York in 1832-January 6 1901) was an American businessman of Scottish-Irish descent.

1 Biography
2 References
3 Further reading
4 See also
5 External links

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Biography

Armour was educated at Cazenovia Academy in New York before he dropped out and went to work on the family farm. In 1852 he walked across the country to mine the gold fields of California, and earned US$8,000 by the time he was 24. He used those funds to set up his first meat market in Placerville, California.

He moved from California to Milwaukee, Wisconsin with a sizeable fortune and started a wholesale grocery business. With his brother, Herman, he entered the grain business and bult several meat packing plants. Together they formed the Armour and Company in 1867, which soon became the world's largest food processing and chemical manufacturing enterprise, headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

In order to get his products to market Armour followed the lead of rival Gustavus Swift when he established the Armour Refrigerator Line in 1883. Armour's endeavor soon became the largest private refrigerator car fleet in the U.S., which by 1900 listed over 12,000 units on its roster, all built in Armour's own car plant. The General American Transportation Corporation would assume ownership of the line in 1932.

In 1893, he donated $1 million to found the Armour Institute of Technology (a privately endowed coeducational college), which merged with the Lewis Institute to become the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1940.

His meat packing plants pioneered new principles of large-scale organization and refrigeration to the industry. Armour was one of the first to take action to reduce the tremendous waste inherent in the slaughtering of hogs and to take advantage of the resale value of waste products. The company's reputation was tarnished by the scandals of 1898–99 in which it was charged with selling tainted beef.

Armour died on January 6, 1901 of pneumonia at his Chicago home. The town of Armour, South Dakota was named for him in 1885.

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