Walter Patton Murphy (1873-1942)

He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His grandfather emigrated from Ireland to Vermont in 1840. His father moved the family to a small farm at Dighton near Kansas, where Walter grew up up, but when it failed in they moved to St. Louis. His father then acquired a patent for a box-car roof and went into the railway supply business and not before long his company, the Standard Railway Equipment Co., was dominating the field. Walter joined his father in 1898 and registered another 40 patents, greatly improving freight cars for transport. When his father died in 1919, he succeeded him as the head of the company. In 1939, he gave $6.7 million to Northwestern University to fund the new Technological Institute. He kept several homes across the States, in Montreal and London, but all mainly for business. His principal residence was "Stonebridge," a 360-acre estate at Lake Bluff, Illinois, and he had a winter home at the Rancho Cienega de Los Paicines in California. He had no hobbies, but kept a yacht "Intrepid" that he sold to the U.S. government for $1. He was unmarried.