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By Phineas Upham

Clayton Mark was an industrialist who pioneered the process of making steel pipes in the United States. He was the founder of Mark Manufacturing Company, a firm he started in 1888. He created multiple products aside from piping, including water-well supplies. He created a planned worker community in the 1900s, which is today registered on the Northwest Indiana National Register of Historic Places.

The Mark Manufacturing Company was a co-partnership between Clayton and his father Cyrus. The two began with the concept of manufacturing small casings that were used to help construct wells, known as well points. That business led logically into the construction of pipes used to transport the water.

As business grew, the father-son team needed steel. So Mark built his own mill in Indiana Harbor, after constructing a new pipe mill to fulfill demand.

It was around that time that Mark began feeling like it was time to give something back to his workers. He created a community near Indiana Harbor and named it “Marktown.” He wanted to build a recreation center, school, post office, movie theater and everything else a self-sustaining town would need. He also wanted to give workers the chance to purchase homes with the money they’d earned working under him, which went contrary to his competition, like The Pullman Company, which restricted a worker’s rights to own.

Mark’s designs mimicked an English country village, but the project was never fully completed. World War I had take a toll on the company, and Mark was forced to sell his steel mill. The structures still stand today, where it is regarded as an important cultural resource by the state of Indiana.

About the Author: Phineas Upham is an investor at a family office/ hedgefund, where he focuses on special situation illiquid investing. Before this position, Phin Upham was working at Morgan Stanley in the Media and Telecom group. You may contact Phin on his Phineas Upham website or Facebook page.

By Phin Upham

Computers require RAM to function, and An Wang is one of the most important contributors in the field of magnetic core memory. This was the dominant form of ram throughout the 60s and early 70s, which helped to fuel much of the development of modern computing and infrastructure.

Wang developed Wang Laboratories in 1951, a company he began as a sole proprietorship. In order to start the company, he sold a third of it to a machine tools manufacturer for $50,000. He began his work on core memory, winning a patent in 1955. He sold the property to IBM for $500,000 and used the capital to finally incorporate.

They grew slowly, but had $1 million in sales by 1964. The company made its money selling calculators with digital displays, and also pioneered a centralized calculator with remote terminals. Similar to the cloud technology of today with a much smaller range of uses. The business began scaling very quickly with the manufacture of dedicated word processing machines. They brought the idea they had already created of a central work station to word processing. It used an 11-bit asynchronous ASCII format, an incredible feat for its time.

Wang retired in 1986, having built his company from a two man operation to one that employed 30,000 employees nation-wide. He passed the reins on to his son Frederick, but Frederick was unable to keep up with the changing computer industry. An Wang took his seat back in 1989, but would die a year later. The company would remain, but had to file for bankruptcy in 1992.

Wang is also known for his aphorisms, small truths he’d pick up through his life. One of the more famous ones being “Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.”

Phin Upham is an investor from NYC and SF. You may contact Phin on his Phin Upham website or Twitter page.

By Samuel Phineas Upham

Brazil had a challenge during the 1930s. In order to preserve its substantial surplus of coffee, and have room for the annual harvest, it needed someone to sell to. That someone was Nestle, who hired Max Morgenthaler to lead the development effort. By April 1, 1938 the brand Nescafe had been released, with a freeze-dried “gold” version in Europe.

Nescafe’s initial launch in the United States was somewhat mixed. The company kept the branding throughout the 1960s, then it changed to a new brand called Taster’s Choice. This took over the spot that Nescafe occupied for several years, even going so far as to brand the coffee as superior to Nescafe and at a higher price point.

Nestle tried an interesting stunt that today’s audiences might take for granted. They produced a series of episodic commercials for the brand called “The Gold Blend.” This campaign took place only in the UK, and it featured a woman asking a man for coffee to help with a house party. The two become friends over the 12 installments, with a novelization of their friendship released in 1993.

Nescafe came back to the United States as “Nescafe Taster’s Choice,” and it’s sold in both glass and plastic packaging. There was once a Nescafe coffee, and it was entirely accurate to say at one point that Nescafe was no different from Taster’s Choice. Today, that is no longer true. The Nescafe brand has come to mean any one of 37 different freeze-dried coffees.

Truly a worldwide coffee, Nescafe is voted as one of India’s top 100 trusted brands.

Samuel Phineas Uphamis an investor from NYC and SF. You may contact Phin on his Samual Phineas Upham website or Facebook page.