Henry Perky

He was born in Saltcreek township, Holmes County, Ohio, the fifth son of Daniel Jefferson Perky (c. 1808–1862) and Magdalena Drushel (c. 1812–1911), both of Pennsylvania.

Sue followed from Wahoo later that same year and, in Denver, Colorado, she gave birth to their only surviving child, Scott Henry Perky (born 1880).

To promote his cylindrical steel rail passenger car, Atkinson hired Henry Perky, who had quite a reputation for making money during times that ruined other businessmen.

Perky finally found backing in St. Joseph, Missouri, and there, in late 1888, at a cost of some $70,000, he erected a building on a large plot of land east of the city "beyond Wyatt Park".

In the early 1890s, at a Nebraska hotel, Perky, suffering from diarrhea, encountered a man similarly afflicted, who was eating boiled wheat with cream.

They presented the machine at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, probably while Perky was trying to attract buyers for his cylindrical steel rail passenger car.

Whether he developed his ideas on nutrition before the machine or after, Perky was a food faddist who believed the fundamental issue was how to nourish a man so that his condition will be natural.

Although John Harvey Kellogg and Charles William Post are better known, Perky was a pioneer of the "cookless breakfast food" and he was the first to mass-produce and nationally distribute ready-to-eat cereal.

In 1901, drawn by the idea of inexpensive electrical power for baking, and the natural draw of a popular tourist attraction, he hired Edward A.

The factory itself was called the "Palace of Light", and was white-tiled, air-conditioned, well-lit with floor to ceiling windows, and equipped with showers, lunchrooms (a free lunch for women – men had to pay 10¢), and auditoriums for the employees.

Having made his fortune, the following year Perky arrived in Glencoe, Maryland, and began purchasing large tracts of land in the region.

His dream was to build a boarding school for men and women that would offer an innovative curriculum of scientific farming and domestic science subjects free of tuition.

By 1915 the Pacific Coast Shredded Wheat Company had been added in Oakland, California, and by 1925, a factory in Welwyn Garden City, England, had joined the family.