Who Is the Greatest Entrepreneur Ever?

Bill Gates's last day as chairman of Microsoft made some people ask, "Is Gates the greatest entrepreneur of all time?" Others responded with lists of their own. The BusinessWeek list certainly put out all the conventional choices (Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford) and some not quite so conventional (Oprah Winfrey). But some of the greatest entrepreneurs are the ones who aren't celebrities or mentioned in every history book. They're the ones who started doing something that is now accepted as so basic and conventional that we often don't even think that somebody had to come up with it.

Take Malcolm McLean, for just one example. He never went to college, and he started out pumping gas. He went from that to owning his own trucking business, which he eventually sold so he could buy his own shipping business. Swedish author and guru of capitalism Johan Norberg explained in a speech what happened next:

Fifty years ago a North Carolinian truck driver, Malcolm McLean, thought there must be a more efficient way of transporting goods and components all over the world. Back then, people would take their trucks down to the harbor. The boat would sit there for a week or so while the unionized work force slowly and steadily loaded every single piece of cargo on the boat. The reverse would happen in the destination harbor.

McLean thought, "What if I use wheel-less boxes and just put all the goods in the boxes and hoist them onto the trucks, drive down to the harbor, and then just put the unopened boxes on the ship?

It seems now like an obvious thing to do, but the impact of McLean's idea on the global economy turned out to be revolutionary. He completely altered the standard practice of shipping goods overseas. When you think of every time you've bought an everyday item from a store and enjoyed a lower price because the cost of shipping that product from across the world was so much lower than it could have been, you've saved untold thousands of dollars thanks to McLean's idea.

I'm not saying that McLean was a forgotten hero who never got his due—he made a fortune in his lifetime. But he certainly isn't as well known in the popular consciousness as a Gates or Winfrey. Who are some other entrepreneurs whose accomplishments make our lives exponentially more convenient today yet rarely receive thanks?