Harland Sanders

Harland Sanders was born in 1890 on a farm in Henryville, Indiana. His father died when he was five, and with his mother working in a tomato cannery he was left to cook for his younger brother and sister. He left home at thirteen, painted horse carriages, worked as a farmhand, a streetcar conductor and a soldier in Cuba, laboured on the railways, studied law by correspondence and lost that career after a courtroom brawl with his own client, sold insurance and tyres.

In 1930, aged forty, he took over a Shell service station in Corbin, Kentucky, and began cooking for travellers in his own dining room. The chicken was good, and the café grew to 142 seats. In 1935 the governor made him an honorary Kentucky Colonel, a title he took to wearing with a white suit and goatee. In 1939 he worked out how to fry chicken in a pressure cooker in minutes instead of half an hour, and settled on a blend of eleven herbs and spices.

In 1952 he sold his first franchise to a friend in Salt Lake City. Then the new Interstate 75 was routed to bypass Corbin. The café's trade vanished and in 1956 he sold up at a loss. At 65, with a Social Security cheque of 105 dollars a month, he drove around the country cooking for restaurant owners, sleeping in the car, and asking a nickel for every chicken they sold using his recipe.

By 1964 there were 600 outlets and he sold the company for two million dollars, staying on as its public face. He died in 1980.