John Jacob Astor IV

See also: Astor

Colonel John Jacob Astor IV (Rhinebeck, July 13rd 1864 - Atlantic Ocean, April 15th 1912), business man, inventor and American writer . He perishes at the time of the shipwreck of the Titanic.

Resulting from the prestigious family Astor, John Jacob Astor IV is born the July 13rd 1864 in Rhinebeck, in the state of New York. He is the son of William Backhouse Astor, Jr. and of Caroline Webster Schermerhorn. Its great-grandfather, John Jacob Astor, Sr., had emigrated of Germany and had made fortune with the the United States in the fur and the real estate, doing of Astor one of the richest families and most powerful of the country.

Astor attends the Saint Paul' S School of Concord, in the New Hampshire, then between with the university of Harvard. After having travelled during three years, he marries in 1891 Ava Lowle Willing, member of the good company of Philadelphia. It will give him two children: William Vincent (born in 1891) and Ava Muriel Alice (born in 1902).

He writes in 1894 a novel of science fiction, has Journey in Other Worlds , and also deposits several patents. In 1897, it builds the Astoria Hotel in New York, the Waldorf Hotel of his/her cousin, William Waldorf Astor, Sr. The two joined together hotels will form the complex known under the name of hotel Waldorf-Astoria. In 1898, it is useful as a Lieutenant-colonel at the time of the Guerre Spanish-American.

In 1909, colonel Astor divorces his Ava wife to marry, in 1911, the young person Madeleine Talmadge Force, eighteen years old. This marriage defrayed the chronicle, Madeleine being two years younger than the son of Astor. In order to let elutriate the things, they pass their honeymoon in Egypt. Madeleine falls pregnant and the couple decides to turn over to the the United States before the birth of their child. They then choose to travel on the Titanic and embark with Cherbourg the April 10th 1912.

Whereas Madeleine been able to go up on board a lifeboat (boat number 4), Astor perishes in the catastrophe. Its body was found shredded the April 22nd (it was seems it crushed by the fall of one of the chimneys, because there were soot traces on its body). It is buried in Trinity Church Cemetery with New York. His/her posthumous son, John Jacob VI, will be born the August 14th 1912. It bequeathed its fortune to its Madeleine widow, provided that she remarie not (she will however remariera herself twice).

According to the legend, Astor would have said at the time of the collision of the Titanic against the Iceberg: " I asked for an ice floe, but there it is too! " ( " I asked for ice, goal that' S ridiculous." ) It would have also request if it could accompany his wife in the boat because she were in a " situation délicate". That was refused to him.

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