Gordon McKay

shoe industry, his most lucrative idea was to lease his "McKay machines" rather than selling them outright, collecting a small royalty on each pair of footwear made with his equipment. He then secured his market position by, helping create the United Shoe Machinery Corporation cartel with his potential competitors. Upon his death, after providing for his family and mistresses, he left the bulk of his estate to Harvard University as an endowment to support capable professors to train future engineers. The gift grew to over half a billion dollars and was indirectly responsible for Harvard's inability to merge with MIT

apprentice in a machine shop at age 12.^[1] He briefly worked on a railroad and on the Erie Canal.^[3] In 1844, at age 23, he established his own machine shop in Pittsfield.^[1] Partnering with J.C. Hoadley as McKay and Hoadley, the firm employed over 100 men before moving in 1852 to Lawrence.^[1] While there, he served as treasurer of the Lawrence Machine Shop.^[1]

$8,000 in cash and an agreement to pay a further $62,000 from future profits.^[4] While contesting an earlier agreement Blake had made for less money,^[3] the two men then further improved and streamlined the design, with McKay receiving another patent in 1862.^[1]

royalties on future sales.^[1] (The machines included devices that tallied their uses.)^[3] The low overhead, increased productivity, ready market, and glowing reports prompted more and more companies to adopt them as well.^[1] Blake helped install the machines until retiring in 1874.^[1] Ultimately, McKay's company received royalties on billions of pairs of footwear, making $500,000—about 750 kg of gold—a year at the system's height of profitability around 1876.^[4] Over 120,000,000 pairs were tallied on McKay's machines in 1895 alone, over half of US production.^[4] The legal arrangements were partially handled by Gardiner Greene Hubbard,^[5] who later became the first president of the Bell Telephone Company

Surinamese-American immigrant Jan Ernst Matzeliger finally solved the problem with his own machine in 1883 and then developed a commercially viable prototype in 1885, McKay swiftly bought out the resulting company, creating the Consolidated McKay Lasting Machine Company.^[7] In 1899, this merged with the McKay Shoe Machinery Company, the Goodyear Shoe Machinery Company, and a few smaller manufacturers to create the United Shoe Machinery Corporation

School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) in 1891. In 1893, McKay placed an initial $4 million in trust for Harvard to provide for its later endowment.^[3]

William Rockefeller in 1905 and used as his family

life trusts he separately established for his second exwife^[a] Minnie Treat, "the prettiest and sweetest young lady the world has produced"^[3] and the 36-year-younger daughter of his former housekeeper; for Minnie's two sons allegedly fathered by a Florentine during a period of abstinence in their relationship;^[b] for Minnie's mother and sister; and for 13 other women^[c] of no apparent relation with whom he negotiated life trusts in consideration of their love and affection,^[d] to such an extent that a neighbor complained about him as a "miserible old whore master" filling his house "with loose women under the noses of respectable people".^[3] Harvard got its first million in 1909.^[4] By the time Harvard received the full amount, the total came to $16 million, the largest single gift received by the university up to that time and still one of the most generous when adjusted for inflation.^[4] The inability of Harvard to share the bequest with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was an important impediment to the repeated attempts of its president Charles William Eliot to merge the two universities.^[1]