Philip Danforth Armour

Armour was born in Stockbridge, New York, to Danforth Armour and Juliana Ann Brooks. He was one of eight children and grew up on his family's farm. Armour was descended from colonial settlers of Scottish and English origin, with his surname originating in Scotland. He was educated at Cazenovia Academy in New York until the school expelled him for taking a ride in a buggy. Among his first jobs was that of driver on upstate New York's Chenango Canal which ran through Madison County at that time and would have been a busy thoroughfare. At age 19, Armour left New York with about 30 other people for California, joining the California gold rush. They walked most of the way from New York to California. Before the journey, Armour "had received several hundred dollars from his parents," making him, for the most part, "the financier of the party," according to biographer Edward N. Wentworth. In California, Armour started a business employing out-of-work miners to construct sluices, which controlled the waters that flowed through the mined rivers. In only a few years, Armour had turned his business into a profitable enterprise, earning himself about $8,000 by the time he had turned 24.

With his sizable fortune in hand, Armour then moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, starting a wholesale grocery business. Armour formed business partnerships with Frederick Miles in the grain business in 1859. He worked with Miles for three years before he partnered with John Plankinton in the meatpacking industry, creating the company Plankinton, Armour & Company. Armour helped Plankinton start up "a new plant on the Menominee River so that the firm could handle government pork contracts." They experienced prompt success through the distribution of meats, produce, and grains to westward-moving settlers and fortune-seekers. It was also during this period when Armour married Malvina Belle Ogden in 1862. Armour demonstrated his uncanny ability as a young businessman by taking advantage of changing meat prices during and after the Civil War. According to biographer Deborah S. Ing, "the most important business coup of Armour's early career occurred near the end of the Civil War when he predicted heavy Confederate losses and thus the dropping of pork prices…he made contracts with buyers at $40 per barrel before prices plummeted to $18 when the war ended in a Union victory. This deal netted him a profit of $22 per barrel or a total of $1 million to $2 million." Armour's savvy decision elevated the status of Plankinton, Armour & Co., allowing the firm to expand into other cities.

Later with his brother, Herman, he again entered the grain business and built several meat packing plants in the Menomonee Valley. After individually prospering in three different regions, Philip, Herman and Joseph reconvened in 1867 to form the flagship Armour & Company in Chicago, which packed hogs exclusively for the first eight years of its existence. The company became the world's largest food processing and chemical manufacturing enterprise. It was the first company to produce canned meat and one of the first to employ an assembly line in its factories.

In the winter of 1879–1880, Armour traveled to Wyandotte County, Kansas, after becoming disturbed to hear that emancipated blacks from the deep South had arrived there unprepared for the midwestern winter. Armour returned to Chicago and raised funds for the stranded Exodusters, reporting, "I talked with a great many of them and was surprised at their intelligence. I asked them where they thought they were going. They said only North to escape persecution.... They had no idea that they were going to a land of plenty or idleness, but simply to a land of freedom." In all, Armour raised $1,200 from Chicago businesses ($200 from Armour and Company, $200 from the unrelated Armour, Dole & Co., $200 from Field, Leiter & Co., $100 from N.K. Fairbank & Co., and $50 each from ten others).

In order to get his meat products to market Armour followed the lead of rival Gustavus Swift when he established the Armour Refrigerator Line in 1883. Armour's endeavor became the largest private refrigerator car fleet in the U.S., which by 1900 listed over 12,000 units on its roster, all built in Armour's car plant. The General American Transportation Corporation would assume ownership of the line in 1932.

In the late 1880s, he was solicited by Peter Demens to invest in his Orange Belt Railway running across central Florida, and one of the depots was named in his honor. In 1900, while terminally ill he wintered in Southern California, probably due to his association with Demens, and his son Philip Jr. came to visit, caught pneumonia and suddenly died on January 29. The next winter Armour was too ill to travel to California, and he died in Chicago.

His meatpacking plants pioneered new principles of large-scale organization and refrigeration to the industry. Armour implemented the assembly line in order to speed up production, and he was one of the first to reduce the tremendous waste when slaughtering of hogs by refining and selling waste products. His biggest concern was ensuring that every part of the animal was made useful, "thus, out of meatpacking came auxiliary industries such as glue, fertilizer, margarine, lard, [and] gelatin." Armour famously declared that he made use of "everything but the squeal". By developing these profitable manufacturing innovations and expanding the reach of his company, Armour & Co. became one of the largest meatpacking firms in America by the 1890s. It earned an estimated $110 million in 1893 and established Armour's position as one of the great industrialists of the Gilded Age.

The company's reputation was tarnished further in 1898, when Major General Nelson A. Miles, Commanding General of the United States Army, claimed that the major meatpacking companies of Chicago—including Armour's—were sending chemically-treated meat to soldiers fighting in the Spanish–American War. An investigation followed, but no definite verdict was reached. Skeptics would claim that Armour simply bribed the panel while Armour would defend his innocence for the rest of his life. Even so, the damage was done. The evidence that was found provided fodder for the muckraking novel by Upton Sinclair entitled The Jungle, which was published in February 1906 and became a bestseller. Armour's reputation never recovered from the 1898–1899 scandal.