Harrison Williams (entrepreneur)

Harrison Charles Williams (1873–1953) was an American entrepreneur, investor and multi-millionaire.

Harrison Williams was born in Avon Township, Ohio in 1873 to Everett Williams and Laurett A. Williams. He graduated from Elyria High School in 1890. Williams abandoned an unsuccessful bicycle manufacturing business in Lorain in 1903. He went to New York City and took a job with a carpet sweeper company.

In 1900, he married Katherine Gordon Breed in Pittsburgh. She died in 1915.

In 1906 he created American Gas & Electric Co., and six years later created another holding company, Central States Electric Corp.

During World War I he served as an assistant to Bernard Baruch, at the War Industries Board, in Washington D.C., through Baruch he was introduced to attorney John Foster Dulles, who represented Williams throughout his business career.

When the Prince of Wales visited the United States on various occasions, he was Williams' guest at Glen Cove, Long Island, in the house Williams rented from banker J. P. Morgan, Jr., and later at Williams' own estate, Oak Point, located just a few miles east, in Bayville, on Pine Island.

In 1923, Williams financed and sponsored a trip to the Galápagos Islands through the New York Zoological Society that was led by naturalist William Beebe. Because of his patronage, there is a volcano in the Galapagos named after him. With Vincent Astor and Marshall Field he also financed Beebe's expedition to the Sargasso Sea. He also contributed financially to the American Museum of Natural History's 1926 expedition to Greenland, led by George P. Putnam.

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