[1] Due to the Great Depression, his vast Midwest holding company empire collapsed, and he was accused of profiting personally by selling worthless stock to unsuspecting investors who trusted him because of his position and reputation.

[7] Through a newspaper ad, the 19-year-old became the private secretary and bookkeeper to Colonel George Gouraud, the London representative of Thomas Edison's telephone companies.

Those loyal to Edison accused Insull of selling out, and in fact he did welcome the infusion of capital, from the Vanderbilts, from J. P. Morgan, and others, as necessary for the company's future development.

In 1907, Insull's two companies formally merged to create the Commonwealth Edison Co. During a Chicago meeting on October 8, 1918, he introduced Professor Thomas Garrigue Masaryk as the president of the future Czechoslovak Republic, de facto.

[citation needed] His Chicago area holdings later included Federal Signal Corporation, Commonwealth Edison, Peoples Gas, and the Northern Indiana Public Service Company, and held shares of many more utilities.

He used economies of scale to overcome market barriers by cheaply producing electricity with large steam turbines, such as the installations in the 1929 State Line Generating Plant in Hammond, Indiana.

[16][17] The Wall Street Crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression, caused the collapse of Insull's public utility holding company empire.

[citation needed] When Insull's fortune started to fade, he sold both WENR and WBCN along with W9XR, to the National Broadcasting Company in March 1931.

[17][18] On May 22, 1899,[21] Samuel Insull married a "tiny, exquisitely beautiful and clever"[22] Broadway ingénue actress whose stage name was (Alis) Gladys Wallis (1875–September 23, 1953).

Gladys played the role of Maggie Rolan in Brother John (1893); a New York Times reviewer listed her as one of the most popular players, one who "deserved quite all the applause [she] received.

[21] The Insulls lived outside Libertyville, Illinois, in a Mediterranean styled mansion with extensive grounds that later became the Cuneo Museum, in Vernon Hills.

[7] Samuel Insull was also known for his charitable works in other areas, donating large sums of money to local hospitals, then calling on others with similar resources to do the same.

At the time the US entered WWI, Insull was named head of the Illinois Defense Council by President Woodrow Wilson; his efforts sold over a million dollars of War Bonds.

Nevertheless, Insull had made frequent declarations that he was "now a poor man" and on July 16, 1938, he descended a long flight of stairs at the Place de la Concorde station.

[35] Often regarded as a fictionalized biography of William Randolph Hearst, Orson Welles's film Citizen Kane is, in part, inspired by the life of Samuel Insull.

[37] Welles gave Maurice Seiderman a photograph of Insull, with mustache, to use as a model for the makeup design of the old Charles Foster Kane.

[38]: 42, 46 Welles denied that the character of Susan Alexander was based on Gladys Wallis,[37] but co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz did incorporate a related experience into the script.

In June 1925, after a 26-year absence, Gladys Wallis Insull returned to the stage in a charity revival of The School for Scandal that ran two weeks in Chicago.

[39] When the performance was repeated on Broadway in October 1925, Herman J. Mankiewicz – then the third-string theatre critic for The New York Times – was assigned to review the production.

After her opening-night performance in the role of Lady Teazle, drama critic Mankiewicz returned to the press room "full of fury and too many drinks", wrote biographer Richard Meryman: He was outraged by the spectacle of a 56-year-old millionairess playing a gleeful 18-year-old, the whole production bought for her like a trinket by a man Herman knew to be an unscrupulous manipulator.

After Kane's second wife makes her catastrophic opera debut, Leland returns to the press room and passes out over the top of his typewriter after writing the first sentence of his review: "Miss Susan Alexander, a pretty but hopelessly incompetent amateur ..."[40] Tom Holland plays Insull in the 2019 historical drama film The Current War.