Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was born to Howard Robard Hughes, Sr. on 24 December 1905 in Texas. A precocious child, Hughes erected Houston's first wireless broadcast system at age eleven, and at age twelve he was photographed for the local newspaper as being the first boy in Houston to have a "motorized" bicycle, which he built himself. But, he was an indifferent student.

Hughes took to flying at age fourteen. He became a lifelong aircraft enthusiast, pilot and aircraft engineer. He set many world records and designed and built several aircraft himself with heading Hughes Aircraft. Hughes received many awards as an aviator, including the Harmon Trophy in 1936 and 1938, the Collier Trophy in 1938, the Octave Chanute Award in 1940, and a special Congressional Gold Medal in 1939 "in recognition of the achievements of Howard Hughes in advancing the science of aviation and thus bringing great credit to his country throughout the world."

When his father died in 1924, Hughes received three-quarters of his father's fortune. He dropped out of Rice University, married Ella Botts Rice and moved to Los Angeles to make movies. Hughes' first two films, Everybody's Talking (1927) and Two Arabian Knights (1928) were financial successes, and he went on to make many other Academy-Award winning films. He produced Scarface in 1932, The Outlaw featuring Jane Russell and Hell's Angels, a flying film, in 1930. Hughes' wife left him in 1929 and returned to Houston to file for a divorce. After that, Hughes was seen escorting many famous women, including Billie Dove, Bettie Davis and Katharine Hepburn.

In 1936, Hughes struck and killed a pedestrian with his car. Although witnesses at first said that the pedestrian was standing in the safety zone of a streetcar stop, by the time the case went to court, witness testimonies told a different story. Hughes was cleared of responsibility. In 1946, Hughes was involved in a near-fatal aircraft accident while piloting the experimental U.S. Army reconnaissance XF-11 over Los Angeles. Hughes tried to save the craft by landing it on the Los Angeles Country Club golf course, but seconds before he could reach his attempted destination, the XF-11 started to drop dramatically and crashed in the Beverly Hills neighborhood surrounding the country club

Hughes sustained significant injuries in the crash; including a crushed collar bone, 24 broken ribs and numerous third-degree burns. Many attribute his long-term addiction to opiates to his use of morphine as a painkiller during his convalescence. The trademark moustache he wore afterward was meant to cover a scar on his upper lip resulting from the accident.

In 1957, he married actress Jean Peters. But, as early as the 1930s, Hughes began to show signs of mental illness. He because obsessed with the size of peas, bought up chains of hotels throughout Texas, screened movies in a darkened screening room for more than four months at a stretch, was consumed with revitalizing Las Vegas and eventually became one of the most famous hermits in American history. Hughes is remembered most for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle in later life, caused in part by a worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder. Hughes' legacy is maintained through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and heremains one of the most influential aviators in history.

Hughes died on 5 April 1976 while on an aircraft en route from his penthouse in Freeport Grand Bahama to the Methodist Hospital in Houston. When the press released photos of the old man, it was learned that his reclusive life and drug use made him unrecognizable. The FBI had to resort to fingerprints to identify the body. A subsequent autopsy noted kidney failure as the cause of death; X-rays revealed broken-off hypodermic needles still embedded in his arms and severe malnutrition.

Despite Hughes' extreme wealth and assets, the courts declared that Hughes had died intestate. Hughes' US$2.5 billion estate was eventually split in 1983 among 22 cousins. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Hughes Aircraft was owned by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, who sold it to General Motors in 1985 for US$5.2 billion. Suits brought by the states of California and Texas claiming they were owed inheritance tax were both rejected by the court. In 1984, Hughes' estate paid an undisclosed amount to Terry Moore, who claimed to have been secretly married to Hughes on a yacht in international waters off Mexico in 1949 and never divorced. Although Moore never produced proof of a marriage, her book, The Beauty and the Billionaire, became a bestseller.

Image: Howard Hughes "standing in front of his new Boeing Army Pursuit Plane" in Inglewood, California in the 1940s.