Whereas he’s barely remembered at the moment, his munificent generosity left a everlasting mark on MIT and Boston. Throughout his life, Hayden was a president of the MIT Alumni Affiliation and a “life member” of the MIT Company. His identify is one in every of six gracing the doorway of the East Campus dorm, the results of a $100,000 present that he made supporting the dorm’s development. He additionally paid for the development of MIT school rooms and laboratories within the new Cambridge campus. Earlier than his dying, his present of $150,000 to buy and home the Zeiss projector made potential the first Hayden Planetarium, on the American Museum of Pure Historical past in New York Metropolis. 

When Hayden died, in 1937, he left practically all his huge fortune—$50 million (about $1 billion in at the moment’s {dollars})—to the Charles Hayden Basis, which went on to fund the MIT Hayden Library, the Hayden Planetarium on the Boston Museum of Science, and the Charles Hayden Memorial Constructing at Boston College. Nonetheless in existence, the muse is proscribed to creating grants that serve kids and younger folks aged 5 to 21 within the metropolitan areas of New York and Boston. It made greater than $16 million in grants in 2021.

“Time is cash to a businessman, however they don’t appear to know that,” Hayden was quoted as saying. “They pinch pennies and throw away 1000’s of {dollars}’ price of time.”

Hayden’s largesse most benefited his hometown. Born in 1870 to a profitable Boston shoe producer, he grew up within the Again Bay and graduated from English Excessive, on the time identified for educating boys destined for careers in enterprise and engineering. He was the twenty fourth provoke at MIT’s Theta Xi fraternity and was “lively in arranging the transfer” to Boylston Place in March 1888, in keeping with Qiong Zhou Huang, the scholarship chair and secretary of at the moment’s chapter. 

After graduating with a level in MIT’s “Normal Course,” Hayden took a “grand tour” of Europe (common on the time) after which spent a 12 months apprenticing at a brokerage agency. He and his 31-year-old accomplice, Galen Stone, every borrowed $20,000 from their fathers and opened the non-public banking agency Hayden, Stone & Co. in 1892. 

Hayden had realized concerning the rising significance of electrical energy and the important position of copper from his coursework at MIT, so he and Stone spent $25 and purchased an inventory of particular person traders within the US who owned copper shares. To every they despatched an funding letter. The agency quickly had a rising record of personal purchasers—purchasers who did very effectively with its skilled recommendation and evaluation. Hayden, Stone opened its New York workplace in 1906 and expanded into different areas. Though most of its data had been destroyed within the terrorist assaults of September 11, 2001, it’s identified that Joseph Kennedy (the longer term ambassador and father of John F. Kennedy) labored there in 1919, and that the agency employed a number of bond saleswomen at a time when the occupation was largely closed to girls. It was Stone who contributed the funds that Wellesley School used to construct Inexperienced Corridor and the long-lasting Galen Stone Tower. When Stone died, in 1926, Hayden assumed full management of the agency.

Not content material with being a passive investor, Hayden joined the boards of the businesses that he funded and was lively of their administration. He invested in all kinds of expertise. In 1929, he helped arrange the Aviation Company of the Americas, which turned Pan Am in 1931. He helped lay the groundwork for the unification of New York Metropolis’s subway traces. He was finally on the board of greater than 80 corporations. He managed this partially by scheduling conferences again to again in his workplace and making fast selections. “Time is cash to a businessman, however they don’t appear to know that,” he was quoted as saying. “They pinch pennies and throw away 1000’s of {dollars}’ price of time.” 

From the file, it’s clear that Hayden additionally loved having a very good time. In 1914, he joined a syndicate to assemble a yacht to compete for the America’s Cup. For a 1923 celebration marking the seventieth anniversary of the Rock Island railroad system, a particular practice left Chicago “piloted” by Hayden, chairman of the railroad’s board of administrators. “Fairly women in attire of mid-nineteenth century design waved good-by from the remark automobile, because the gala practice left the La Salle road station,” reads an account within the Journal of the Illinois State Historic Society. He loved wonderful artwork, paying $52,000 in 1928 for Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s fetching self-portrait. He was a director of the Affiliation In opposition to the Prohibition Modification, which formally disbanded on December 5, 1933, at a celebration on the Waldorf after passage of the twenty first Modification, which legalized (once more) the consumption of alcohol in the US.

Hayden’s wealth and affect had been so immense that in 1930 James W. Gerard, a former ambassador and a serious participant in Democratic Get together politics, named him as one of many 64 rulers of the US, “who’re too busy to carry political workplace, however decide who shall.” It was not a praise: Hayden was a staunch supporter of President Herbert Hoover, who returned the favor by opening the Waldorf Astoria in 1931 after which transferring there in 1932 after his loss to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

However, Hayden clearly believed deeply within the significance of service to others. In 1932 he was the featured night speaker at his highschool’s One hundred and tenth-anniversary dinner and introduced a bronze statue that confirmed a warrior supporting one other who had been stripped of his armor in battle. On the bottom is inscribed, “Service to mankind is honor and achievement.”

Hayden died in 1937, sufferer of an an infection he acquired throughout a minor operation at a New York hospital. His brother, J. Willard Hayden, turned head of the newly created Charles Hayden Basis and was named to the MIT Company, taking his brother’s seat. “Notable amongst different establishments aided largely by the Hayden benefactions are MIT (Charles Hayden Memorial Library); Northeastern, Brandeis, Columbia, New York, and Boston Universities; and the Museum of Science (Hayden Planetarium),” wrote MIT president James Killian on Willard’s dying in 1955. Each Willard and Charles are buried at Mt. Auburn Cemetery. 

As for the agency, Hayden, Stone continued with its non-public purchasers till 1974, when it merged with Shearson, Hammill & Co. as a part of a wave of trade consolidations. In the present day that firm is a part of Shearson/American Specific.

In some ways, Charles Hayden continues to drive gold-plated rivets to this very day—besides fairly than strengthening metal, they enrich the lives of the younger women and men touched by his enduring generosity.