Invention Timeline: Philip Danforth Armour, American Philanthropist, Pioneer Packer of Beef and Pork
PHILIP DANFORTH ARMOUR
b. ? 1832 and d. January 6, 1901
American philanthropist, who began life as a farmer. At twenty he went West, returning four years later worth several thousand dollars, the result of hard labor as a miner on the Pacific coast. In 1856 he formed a partnership with Frederick B. Mills in a commission business, and later, one with John Plankinton, a pioneer packer; and a third with his two brothers, in beef and pork packing, which became the most extensive of its kind. They acquired enormous wealth, Mr. Armour having at his death, $50,000,000 or more. Much money was spent in charity, including the Armour Institute of Technology, Chicago, established in 1893.
The toils of alchemists, whose vain pursuit
Sought to transmute
Dross into gold, their secrets and their store
Of mystic love,
What to the jibing modern do they seem?
An ignis fatuus chase, a fantasy, a dream:
Yet for enlighten’d moral alchemists,
There still exists
A philosoph c stone, whose magic spell
No song e may tell,
Which renovates the soul’s decaying health,
And what it touches turns to purest mental health,
—Moral Alchemists: Horace Smith
