Oscar Hammerstein I
Cigar manufacturer and inventor turned theater impresario, whose cigar-machine patents funded the opera houses that made him famous; grandfather of Broadway's Oscar Hammerstein II.
Born 8 May 1846 in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland), Hammerstein emigrated to New York in 1864 and worked in a cigar factory before becoming a manufacturer himself. He founded the United States Tobacco Journal and, over his career, held more than eighty patents related to cigar manufacturing. His most significant invention added an air-suction mechanism to cigar-rolling equipment, patented in 1882; he continued refining rolling and finishing machinery through the 1880s, including a mechanism for applying gum to a cigar's cap patented in December 1888.
The fortune those patents built funded a second career. Hammerstein constructed a string of New York theaters, including the Harlem Opera House in 1888 and, in 1906, the Manhattan Opera House, which he built to compete directly with the Metropolitan Opera and staffed with singers of Metropolitan caliber. The rivalry ended in 1910, when the Metropolitan paid him 1.2 million dollars to leave New York opera production for a decade.
Hammerstein died on 1 August 1919 in Manhattan. He was the grandfather of Oscar Hammerstein II, the Broadway lyricist and bookwriter behind Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, by way of his son Willie Hammerstein. His cigar-machine patents belong to the same wave of American mechanization that Cuban factories like Por Larranaga experimented with, and mostly rejected, decades later.