A daring financier was Jonathan Ogden Armour, heir to the meat-packing fortune of famed, hard-boiled old Merchant Philip Danforth ("P. D.") Armour (1832-1901). Sometimes J. Ogden would rush in and buy where more conservative tycoons feared to tread. Result: The great packing concern his father and he had built up found itself at the War's end overstocked with high-priced meat for the Allies. Armour's personal $150,000,000 fortune, involved in grain as well as meat, dwindled by $1,000.000 a day for some 130 days. He died in London in 1927 insolvent, owing much money. It was the most awful financial tragedy in the personal history of onrushing Chicago.
His widow, Lolita Sheldon Armour, sold their beautiful 838-acre estate, Mellody Farm (on the "North Shore" near Lake Michigan, in Lake Forest), and almost all her private securities, but still there were creditors. Then she offered them 400 shares of Universal Oil Products Co. for which, when he was most needy, she had paid her husband $1,500,000 of her own fortune. The creditors laughed, said the stock was a liability.
Last week Mrs. Armour sold that stock, as part of a larger deal (see below), for $8,216,058. She moved back to Lake Forest to a five-acre estate about two miles east of Mellody Farm, which is being converted into a country club. She prepared to have the record of her husband's insolvency stricken off the county books, crying: "I guess this shows that Mr. Armour was justified! . . . And those bankers who called my stock a liability! Well, I can laugh now at them!"
Universal Oil Products. Only a financier as daring as Mr. Armour would have possessed 400 share's of that stock at the outset. He it was who, during a trip west in 1914, gathered together a few associates and formed the company (originally as National Hydro-Carbon Co.) to take over certain oil refining patents of Pennsylvania Inventor Jesse A. Dubbs. In 1916 Promoter Hiram J. Halle was made president. Halle's entire staff consisted of Jesse Dubbs, two assistants, and the two Dubbs sons, Carbon and C. A. No attempts were made to operate with the patents. Chief business was the perfecting of the patents and the attempt to license them to oil companies, toward which Armour laid out about $3,000,000.
"Cracking." The Dubbs patents were based upon one type of a process of refining crude oil known as "cracking the molecules." The heavy oil is pumped through a steel-pipe coil, the interior of which is kept at about 900° F. heat and under great pressure. Dubbs's invention: making the oil compress itself. Suddenly this heated and compressed oil passes into an insulated chamber. There it breaks down into gasoline. The latest Dubbs "cracking" unit will convert 3,000 bbl. of oil per day, making 60% or more high-test antiknock motor fuel.