Victorian
John Jacob Astor
1864–1912
John Jacob Astor IV (1864–1912) was born in Rhinebeck, New York, into one of America's wealthiest families, and built on the family fortune as a real estate developer, hotelier, and inventor, holding patents for a bicycle brake and a turbine engine among other devices. His one venture into fiction, A Journey in Other Worlds (1894), imagines a twentieth-century expedition to Jupiter and Saturn packed with speculative technology, reflecting his own enthusiasm for scientific invention. He served as a colonel in the Spanish-American War and died at forty-seven when the RMS Titanic sank, reportedly last seen helping women and children into lifeboats before going down with the ship.
Sources: Bibliomancer editorial note, written from standard reference facts (dates, places, principal works).
Indexed works
Books by John Jacob Astor
Same era